Air Raid Sirens Tested In Xiamen

[joshuawbb]

Just thought I'd share something interesting.

Was quite startled before class today at Xiamen University when loud civil defence sirens started blaring at 2:40pm, lasting over half an hour. Apparently the city was performing a civil defence drill today, though not many people knew about it - my girlfriend's colleague received a notification message from China Mobile, but she must have been lucky. None of the campus security I asked knew why the sirens were sounding, and I also asked teachers and Chinese students who didn't know either.

The sirens played for just over half an hour - from what I could hear, the rising and falling "air raid" siren played for about 30 minutes, and then the continuous high-pitch "all clear" was sounded, lasting 3 minutes. The sirens were played in waves - initially sirens were only sounding in the university area as I called my girlfriend who works 30 minutes away, and she couldn't hear anything. After the sirens finished in Xiamen University, my girlfriend sent me a message to say that sirens had started near where she works.

I found this article (http://news.163.com/10/0506/17/6612BDLT00014AEE.html) which states that these are yearly exercises. Evidently though, not many people knew about today it since people I saw were either ignoring it completely or standing outside, confused. You'd think that if they were going to hold a full-city emergency drill, they'd create a full-city action plan. It seems today's drill took a lot of people by surprise - just like a real emergency would - so what does it say about Xiamen's emergency planning when most people today either carried on with their daily life or stood perplexed? There are quite a lot of underground civil defence shelters in Xiamen from what I can see anyway (there's one under my apartment block), which were built when tensions were high with Taiwan, but I wonder if residents are drilled on how to use them (not that they would need to nowadays though).

Just thought I'd share this. I was going to class at the time and our teacher casually told us to ignore them as nothing. Sitting in class with sirens blaring outside was pretty surreal.

I hear these have happened before in Beijing and Shanghai. Did anyone here experience them?

[anonymoose]

Yeah, they happen yearly in Shanghai, although as far as I remember, it only lasts a few minutes.

[jbradfor]

In the mid-west (of USA), we tend to have weekly tests of the tornado sirens. Lasts only about 30 seconds, though.

[liuzhou]

Yes. Totally normal. About once a year here.

[vellocet]

Around here, they only blow them on the anniversary of the Mukden incident, to remind people about what the Japanese did.

[chrix]

In Germany they used to do this about once a week too, I don't know if they still do, probably not, I think it might have been a relic from the Cold War...

[Lu]

In Holland, the sirens are tested every first Monday of the month, at noon exactly. But that's just testing the sirens, it's not an emergency drill.

[Hofmann]

If anyone did that where I am, people would freak out and think we're going to get nuked.

[anonymoose]

If anyone did that where I am, people would freak out and think we're going to get nuked.

Would be a good April Fool's Day prank then.