I haven’t had a tornado drill in years. Years. It must have been 1986 when I last did one of those. Elementary school. The principal comes over the intercom and says “Teachers, we will be having a tornaod drill.” Off to the hallways where we huddle down…our heads against the wall. The most uncomfortable and undignified postion imaginable. We’d stay there for a good 5 minutes or longer. Enough time for the principal or TEMA or whoever could time it to see if we were doing it right. Thankfully we didn’t have to do it for real. We were in school when there were tornado watches. But they never resulted in us having to take cover.
Fire drills, on the other hand, are much funner than tornado drills. Walk outside in a straight line in an orderly fashion. Teachers were always concerned about doing it in an orderly manner. They’d always get onto us when the fire drill would ring.
In college we had firedrills during the most inconvenient times. 12:15AM when everyone was back in the dorms. A friend of mine hid under his bed so as to avoid having to go outside in the cold air. It was fairly inconvinent in college. You could expect a firedrill at least once a year during college. If not once a semester.
I remember one time we had a real fire alarm go off. I think it was due to the steam from the showers or something. Happened at 7AM in the morning. And everyone pretty much ignored it.
When the tornado hit downtown Nashville in April of 1998, I was working at Nortel in Metrocenter. We crowded into the stairways to wait out the storm. No damage. My car was still around. And I went home slightly early. The interstate system was backed up. It was something out of U2’s video for “Last Night on Earth.” People getting out of their cars and trying to call on their cell phones. I just wanted to get home to see if my family was ok and if my house was still standing. And it was, thankfully.