Civil Defense Drills

The Cold War was very much a reality during the Seventies, especially the early years. As part of preparation for nuclear holocaust, the sisters at the Catholic grammar school I attended had twice yearly "Civil Defense Drills." Now, we had these in public school as well; there you responded to the alarm by climbing under a table to protect you from falling debris. How effective this would be with an H-bomb is questionable, but they tried.

The nuns took a different approach. To them the biggest enemy was not falling debris from five floors above you, but shattered glass. At the sound of a special alarm, we all ran to the lockers in the rear of our classroom and grabbed a coat. Any coat. Then we marched into the hallway (they had a thing about marching at this school), and stood facing the wall with coats over our heads. The idea was that you would not be injured by flying glass when the windows imploded.

High school was a bit more rational, perhaps because the Catholic secondary school I attended had a solid science department. The brothers there reasoned that the major danger was not glass but nuclear fallout. Now, radiation can be blocked, at least partially by heavy material, or being underground. So with their drills we all descended onto the lower level of our building, which was at least partially underground.

When I went to college on Staten Island we had no drills. I guess they figured that nobody would waste a costly warhead on such a place.