The menace
Author: admin
Hiding from a real tornado was never fun and games; in the heartland, storm shelters are not a luxury item. Eight hundred tornadoes a year are reported in the United States, most south of Kansas in Oklahoma and Texas. Twisters cause an average of eighty deaths a year and 1,500 injuries.’ Releasing raw destructive power, the area receiving the brunt of their devastating energy is called ground zero. Here cattle and trees may be flung like matchsticks. Houses and even entire neighborhoods disappear.
When my family moved to the West Coast, another kind of shelter took the population by storm. The Cold War made Americans feel vulnerable to attack on our own soil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis fueled our national paranoia toward Communism and the threat it represented. We were told that the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs poised toward American cities. Living in a prime target city where U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were based made San Diego feel especially vulnerable. By 1961 my innocent daily walk to the elementary school became ominous. Pipes sticking out of the ground began to appear in front yards. By each a sign offered notice of a fallout shelter that would provide protection from chemicals and nuclear radiation. At school bomb drills replaced the more mundane earthquake drills. But the defense strategy was no different. We were to immediately take position under our desks—as if that would protect us from bombs or contamination. As an eleven-year-old, I discovered the world was becoming a menacing place.