This past weekend a series of emergency sirens sounded in downtown Richmond. When I say emergency sirens, I’m referring to the kind that are used for disaster warnings and toxic spills and tornadoes. What Cold War babies like myself would refer to as air raid sirens.
The first round probably lasted about three minutes followed by a fifteen minute pause before the second round went off. Between the two, I opened my laptop and did a few quick searches to see if anyone had any information on what was happening.
Since Virginia Commonwealth University has a set of these sirens, I checked their alert page first, as well as my VCU email, as they normally send out alerts whenever they use them. Neither proved useful, so I started to check local news sources and came up empty. I did find a number of people on Twitter from around the downtown area asking the same question but no one seemed to know what was happening.
The next morning John Murden posed the question on Church Hill People’s News which inspired some inquiries though thus far hasn’t yielded an answer. I contacted both the VCU Alert office as well as the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and have yet to get a response from either.
Update (12:27 pm): Mystery solved — Richmond Fire responded a few minutes ago that “it was the emergency siren for the MCV Campus you heard. As a result of a fire producing an inordinate amount of smoke in the West Hospital, staff thought it was necessary to activate the siren after noting significant smoke in the West Hospital. The root cause of the smoke was a leaf fire in a tunnel which funneled the smoke to many West Hospital floors. No injuries were reported.”
I’ve reached that unappealing age where personal lose is becoming a trend. My father succumbed to cancer about eighteen months ago and this weekend I received word that one of my oldest and closest friends had passed away. I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s Eve and this certainly isn’t going to inspire a reexamination of my take on the holiday. Ian was an interesting guy and Christmases in Asheville won’t be the same without him.
Eric Fischer’s maps provide an interesting look at the racial make-up of the greater Richmond area. Not only does this tend to support the idea that the I95 corridor created a physical barrier between neighborhoods, but more interestingly shows the expansion of the suburbs.
It would be interesting to see a map like this over time, constructed with the same data, to provide a snapshot of how the population has moved in and around the city. You can find an entire set with different cities on Fischer’s Flickr photostream.
