RUN FOR THE MOLEHILLS!

[mirium]

City bus drivers will participate in the statewide tornado drill on Thursday, April 23. The National Weather Service will issue a mock tornado sometime in the afternoon.

I can just see it, careening about going "ner, ner, ner!"

(I love typos. It usually says 'mock tornado drill.')

[csikt]

Bahahahahahaha

[jaglady]

Now admittedly I've never been to Chicago, but where exactly is everybody going to go if one of those things rips through the city? And what time of the day would they do it? Because if it's rush hour, well, somebody tell me how they're going to get more people into the subways or ground floors (Does Chicago have subways?)

Ah yes. Bureaucracy in action.

[mirium]

I'm not in Chicago anymore -- the work project that's sucking up my time for a while also included migrating a few hundred miles north to Wisconsin for the foreseeable future. Which is fine with me, I like Wisconsin -- Land of Excellent Cheese. And bratwurst, and beer... I'm gaining weight just breathing the air here.

They don't have tornado drills in Chicago, probably for the reasons you suggest. If they did have a tornado there, everyone would congregate on the ground floors and basements, as far away from big glass windows as possible -- same as anywhere else. Assuming there were enough Wisconsinites present to advise them, and there might well be; lots of folks go to the Big City. Or they'd go into the subways (it's called the "El" for elevated, but the Red Line and Blue Line are underground in the Loop), and quite a few bodies can fit there in an emergency (or rush hour) -- certainly in the thousands. Most tornado drills are held midday, around 10 am or 1 pm; actual tornadoes, of course, follow their own schedules. I suspect that if a tornado ever did rip through Chicago, there would be several miles of serious mayhem and carnage, then the tall buildings would disrupt it enough to make it fall apart.

Where I am, the bus driver would look for a solid building with lobby that isn't all glass, probably an apartment building; or perhaps a good sized dip in the ground -- there are a lot of them here, it's hilly country. Or a private home, if the bus wasn't too crowded; it's the kind of place where the homeowner would probably welcome everyone into their basement, and quite possibly serve coffee and cookies while they waited it out. They're into fully furnished basements in these parts.

(The cheese really is excellent here -- the cheap no-name brands are better than most of the high-priced ones anywhere else.)