Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [68]
Most of the drills were slight variations of each other and depending which drill was called, you would go to a specified location and wait for instructions.
For a Flood Drill most people would go to their work areas and be on standby to make sandbags.
Fire Drill involved pulling out all of the fire hoses and hosing down the building.
Earthquake Drill was a no brainer; check your local gas feed, know where the water and power feeds are, get under your desk and wait for instructions.
Power Outage Drill was a pain in the ass. Each area had to turn off everything in their area and then wait until instructed to turn everything back on. For us, this one was the worst, because most of our equipment was electronic and had settings that were stored in memory. Shutting them off for ten to fifteen minutes would wipe them out and we would need to reset everything when we next went to work. As an added bonus, the security system, lights and sensors would be down in the event of an outage, so every male staff member had to spread out along the fence of the property and form a human perimeter all the way around the property. You would have to be within, say, 100 yards from the next guy or at least be able to see him. If you encountered an intruder, you had to make it known and get others to respond to your location.
Blow Drill was to recover and bring back runaway staff. This drill mainly involved Security. The security guards would try and figure out when the person blew, from where and how. Then Qualification staff would go through the person’s folders and find out if the person had confessed to any recent crimes or was in any kind of trouble. Security would go through the person’s personnel file and try to find out where their closest relatives lived to provide locations to check for the person. Recent mail and phone logs would be checked to see who that person had last spoken to. Teams of people would go to bus and train stations, airports and local hotels to look for the person. This drill would remain in full effect until the person was located and brought back to the base.
Intruder Drills and Protest Drills were very similar. All staff were to go inside, close the blinds and windows and wait there until the drill was over. No travel between buildings was allowed. Wherever you were when the drill started, that was where you had to stay. No exceptions.
If it was an Intruder Drill, when the intruder had been apprehended, the drill would be called off and crew could go back to normal activities.
If it was a Protest Drill, once the protest was over, the staff would be alerted when they were free to go about their business again.
We practiced most of these things weekly. The entire time I was at the base over a fifteen year period I think there were two trashcan fires and two floods. There must have been twenty protest drills and only a few intruder drills. The undisputed chart topper was the Blow Drill. You could go a full year or so without any of the other drills yet have thirty or more Blow Drills. Sometimes you would have back-to-back Blow Drills. Someone would blow and a Blow Drill would go into effect, which meant the security personnel were under the gun to find the person who had blown and were not watching everybody else as closely. This turned out to be a great time for someone else to blow. One time, someone who went out to check a train station for someone that had blown, got on a train themselves and was never seen again! It took two days before anyone had even reported him as gone because his superiors thought he was still on the Blow Drill! Soon there were only so many people that could be on the Blow Drill as too many people were blowing. Preventative measures were taken to prevent blows in the first place. Musters were held four times a day instead of three. Every