Screaming Mini Traditional Cache
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You are looking for a camo pill bottle . I wanted to bring people here to see the last of Niagara Air Raid Sirens. While trying to find something that best describes them and some history behind this one I found the following little which might be of some interest.
Standing memory of the Cold War; Kernahan Park's air-raid siren recalls fears of nuclear attack:
By Samantha Craggs
The StandardThursday, January 31, 2008
It sits atop a rusting 18-metre-high pole, looking like nothing more than scrap metal. But 50 years ago, it would have warned St. Catharines residents of a missile attack.
The forgotten siren at Kernahan Park is hidden by mature trees now, left there not for historic purposes, but because it is the only one in Niagara that hasn't been torn down.
But John Kirby can look up at the relic and understand its significance.
"They did have a place at the time and they were important to the community," said Kirby, an emergency measures manager in Niagara from 1967 to 1996. "But they outlived their purpose, and thank God they did.
The yellow siren, perched on a platform that used to rotate, is a relic from the Cold War era. If Canada had been targeted with nuclear missiles, the sirens would have sounded.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when democratic countries were involved in a tense standoff with Communist bloc nations, war was considered a certainty by some. Schools held regular drills. Bomb shelters were dug under local homes.
About a dozen sirens were located around the city, connected to a national grid operated by the federal government. Their alarming wail was loud enough to fill St. Catharines, Kirby said.
Neither the Soviet Union nor its Communist allies ever did attack, but everyone alive then knew the siren's sound, Kirby said.
The government conducted regular tests of the sirens. Families were encouraged to hold their own emergency drills: hiding under tables, scurrying to basements or proceeding to their homemade fallout shelters.
Arden Phair, curator of the St. Catharines Museum, remembers the fear. His school held weekly drills during which the students stood facing their lockers with their hands clasped around their necks. Families stocked supplies in their bunkers. A local radio station regularly recited emergency instructions.
"This was always in the back of your mind," Phair said. "These were genuine threats out there. When your school is doing drills in classrooms, it's a genuine fear."
The St. Catharines Museum has a dismantled siren from Grapeview Drive in its collection. The fate of the others, Phair said, is unknown. But he and Kirby believe the Kernahan Park tower is the only one still standing in Niagara.
The sirens were erected in the late 1950s and dotted the landscape, Kirby said. In addition to testing, they would sound because of minor technical glitches, sometimes in the middle of the night. They wailed for hours until a federal employee arrived to fix the problem.
"People who lived next door to them at 3 a.m. weren't too happy," said Kirby, a board member with the St. Catharines Museum.
The sirens were functional into the 1970s. The drills were finished, but the fear was not. The alarms were deactivated and dismantled in the 1980s.
The Kernahan Park siren is "the relic of them all," Kirby said.
The remaining siren has only nostalgia value now.
"We have new technologies that far outweigh servicing something as big and bulky as that," Kirby said. "By modern communication standards, they're antiquated and of no value now. But at the time, we were glad we had them."
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