False alarm in Jerusalem

January 15, 2009 - 9:59 AM by David

Can someone get these other girls behind me to stop crying?

Until Day 19 of Operation Cast Lead, those of us living in the Jerusalem area had been immune to Hamas rocket attack. While we’ve been supporting our brethren in the South – and let’s not forget Katyushot are still landing in the North on occasion – we central folks haven’t had to worry about running for cover when a warning siren suddenly goes off.

Until yesterday, that is.

Just before 1 pm, that high-low frequency, nuclear-bomb-coming-in siren went off around Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Even level-headed people might have been jolted upright with a moment’s panic going through their system – Kassams and Grads fired from Gaza can’t reach here, can they?

I initially thought the noise emanated from actual ambulance or police car sirens and surmised there must be a major accident somewhere, or a regular, old fashioned terror attack/suicide bombing that we all too frequently encountered in the earlier part of the decade.

I walked out onto my porch in Ma’aleh Adumim, and realized that it was a warning siren, and could see pupils in the playground of the junior high school in my view’s range running into the building.

Ah, an excercise. Good deal, I thought, Let’s keep everyone on their toes, remembering the nuclear bomb drills we used to participate in the US growing up in Colds War era. Still, just to be sure, I turned on the 1 pm news on the radio.

Turns out it wasn’t a planned drill, but an alarm malfunction that caused the sirens to go off. Evidently Magen David Adom and the Jerusalem Municipality hotline received hundreds of calls from panicked citizens, but my eight-year-old son wasn’t one of them. When he returned home from school later in the day, he recounted his ‘alarming’ experience.

“I was just about to go into the bathroom, and we all had to hurry back to our class and then go into the big bomb shelter next to the school’s library. The kids were running around and really excited, and some thought it was a real attack. But I knew it wasn’t because I saw that the teachers were calm,” he recounted. “When we were waiting inside the shelter, some of the girls were crying. They’re so emotional.”

So, at least he got an astute life’s lesson out of his false alarm experience, which will hopefully provide some guidance when he starts dating.

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