10 am, Last Friday of the Month

Day 6 - AIR. Air Raid Siren, Los Angeles. We heard the sirens at 10:00 a.m. on the last Friday of every month

I'm participating in Fat Mum Slim's Photo A Day Challenge for May 2016.  Many of my friends have joined in. It's fun to see the photos that people come up with, based on the daily prompts. This is my third time participating. I'm trying to give ALL of my 2016 photos a Los Angeles Theme.

Today's prompt is "AIR." Many people are posting photos of clouds, things affected by the wind and such. I sat and thought about this for a long time. Air - Los Angeles. Naturally, the subject of smog came to mind. Nah! That's too negative and we don't really have smog anymore in Los Angeles! The next thing that I thought of was a neighborhood or street name with the word "air" in it. Bel Air. Airdrome Street. OK, but kind of obvious.

I went back into my memory and came up with AIR RAID SIRENS! Yes! My clever and observant husband, Mr. Larry told me that there was an air raid siren near our neighborhood on Redondo Boulevard just north of Washington Boulevard, Mid-City. I stopped by there yesterday after work and took a few snap shots. There were rain clouds in the sky, along with the requisite puffy white clouds. Perfect.

Rotating Siren #145, Los Angeles

After doing a bit of internet research on the air raid sirens of Los Angeles, I came across this very informative site called "Dennis' Air Raid Siren Page for the Los Angeles Area." Wow! Dennis really knows his stuff. There is a working list that details the location of each siren, along with the type of siren: rotating, bird house, wire spool and flattened birdhouse. Fascinating!

Types of Air Raid Sirens, photo courtesy of  Rick J. from Air Raid Siren Page

If you check out the "what's new?" page on the site, you'll see that many radio pieces have been broadcast and articles have been written about the air raid sirens of our fair city. Here's an interesting article that ran in the L.A. Times about the silencing of the sirens and our civil defense system. 

The sirens were turned off in 1986, but I so remember hearing that ominous siren wail at 10:00 a.m. on the last Friday of every month. It was a test to make sure the sirens worked, during the cold war era. When I was a school child, we were supposed to duck under our desks and cover our heads and especially our eyes. If there had been a nuclear attack, I wouldn't be here writing this blog-post today. Duck and cover would not have prevented us from becoming toast. Maybe one of those spiffy, underground bomb-shelters would have helped.

After all of that frightening and threatening information about the past, Have a Nice Weekend! (insert smiley face here).