Adjusting to the alarms

August 8, 2006 - 10:16 PM by Sarah

Promising new blogger David Lisbona of Haifa posts a sound file of an air-raid siren, and explains the psychology of the “to take shelter or not to take shelter” question:

We are in the 28th day of the war and Haifa (where my beloved Irit and I live) has experienced air raid siren alarms for most of the last 24 days. I have written before about the air raid siren experience but it’s time to write again. These alarms (and the occasional rocket explosions we hear) are the way in which we personally are experiencing this war. There have been a few days that have been completely quiet, on other days we have had 8-9 alarms a day.

First of all, to get a feeling of what a real-life air raid siren sounds like, click on http://www.airraidsirens.com/mp3/uvfrsd10.mp3 . I don’t recommend doing it near someone anxious or someone who’s been in a war – Irit’s daughter (who lives in Tel Aviv) turned as white as a sheet when she heard it, even though I told her it was just me. Israelis have a lot of fear.

When we hear the air-raid siren at home, Irit and I rush down to the shelter we have in the basement with our dog Sushi. . . . The alarm is supposed to give us up to 1 minute warning and we stay in the shelter for a few minutes after the alarm stops.

The alarms are a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, they do give warning although there have also been many cases of false alarms. Everybody who has taken refuge in a shelter has escaped injury even when there has been a direct hit. One couple were in a protective space (with concrete walls) when a Katyusha rocket hit and completely destroyed their home -apart from shock they were OK. There have been tragic cases where people were in a shelter, heard a rocket explosion, left the shelter to see where the rocket landed and were caught outside, and killed by a second rocket attack a few minutes later. So every sensible person with common sense takes shelter when they hear an alarm. That does not include those macho Israelis who think it’s cissy or pointless to take shelter. They will say (and they have a point) that -on average- only 2 Israelis have been killed by 120 rockets each day over the small whole of northern Israel so the absolute risk isn’t that great. Some people are fatalistic and say that if a rocket has their name written on it, then it will find them shelter or no shelter.

Fatalism or not, the alarms do have one major downside – they are in themselves very scary. Imagine if you heard a certain , very definitive loud noise several times a day bearing the message “Look, mate, you may die in a minute or so if you don’t take shelter”. One elderly lady already died from cardiac arrest on her way to the shelter. It’s not surprising that some people prefer denial. The residents of Kiryat Shmona , an Israeli town of 20,000 people only 10 km from the Lebanese border who have suffered the worst Katyusha shelling by far in the last 10 days have only had alarms since the last few days. Before that they had no warning -residents there are supposed to stay in shelters 24 hours a day. But you can go crazy having to sit around all day in a confined space and probably more and more people have been going out for a breather. The army used to say that they couldn’t provide warnings for the short-range Katyushas (like those that hit Kiryat Shmona) but now they do, and the locals are hearing 20-30 alarms a day as well as the deafening explosions when the rockets hit the ground or a house and the incessant artillery barrages from Israeli guns. God knows what this is doing to their sanity.

In Haifa, where the situation is much much easier, we are getting used to the alarms. Human beings are remarkably adaptive and somehow we are accepting these alarms as part of our current daily lives.