Exactly. Chicago does the air raid siren on the first Tuesday of every month at 10:00am central time. This siren is different, because a tornado whipping through a major city is a very different type of danger.
Going to your basement in a house is a reasonable precaution; everyone in a skyscraper going to the basement of a building that might have significant damage blocking egress is quite another. The opportunity for many multiples of people being killed, injured, and made homeless due to a tornado in the middle of a multi-million population has been theory until recently, but we have seen that they are encroaching and even touching down within city limits now. Hence, the added security of a siren no one can ignore.
Our town in Maine used to sound the siren at the volunteer fire department every night at 9pm(?) signaling curfew for the kids. Now that I think back on it I only remember them doing that in the summer months. I’ll have to ask my siblings and friends what they remember.
I remember that well! The building where I worked at that time lost some windows during that storm, though I never heard the sirens down in the South Loop.
Has a tornado ever passed through on a Monday at noon? That’d cause some confusion.
A pulp mill I worked at tested their site evacuation alarm every Wednesday at 11:30. One fine Wednesday at 11:25, they had a chlorine dioxide gas leak. Surprisingly, only a couple people needed to go to hospital overnight.
