Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

Today being the first Wednesday in February, the civil defense sirens went off for a test at 13:30 precisely (which was two minutes after Small Boy finally fell went down for his nap, natch, though he amazingly slept through them). Every town in Switzerland has civil defense sirens - even back in Small Village they were tested once a year. I wish I could describe the sound of these sirens - imagine somebody practicing scales on an out-of-tune metallic piano. They scale up, they scale down, they scale up, they scale down. The sirens sounded for about a minute. Ten minutes later, they sounded again. Ten minutes later, they sounded for the third and final time.

The Swiss take their civil defense seriously. In addition to the plethora of sirens, there is an extensive network of bunkers and private shelters - in fact, Switzerland passed a law in the 1960s requiring that there be space in a nuclear fallout shelter for every resident, though this has since fallen by the wayside.Residents are still encouraged to maintain a two-week supply of emergency food rations and the government even publishes a handy pamphlet on how best to do this. These days Switzerland is gradually adapting to the end of the Cold War and closing many of these bunkers or converting them to other uses, but they continue to test the sirens. In many areas the greatest perceived threat comes from a dam bursting: Switzerland, a country roughly half the size of the state of Maine, has 195 reservoirs with 217 dams. (Realistically, if one of the largest dams burst, the sounding of the sirens would almost surely come too late to be of any good.) Other threats could come from a nuclear accident (there are five operable reactors in Switzerland) or, more unlikely, a terrorist attack.

And if the unlikely happens, Switzerland will sound the alarm.

EDITED TO ADD: Seems I'm not the only one who blogged the alarms. We even used the same metaphore to describe the sound.