ALICE drill

I have been in the U.S. many times before, which also means that my cultural shocks are quite limited since I know the culture and such, but I had the biggest culture shock so far on my exchange today. We had an ALICE drill. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.

Now almost everyone knows that the U.S. unfortunately often experience terrible school attacks and shootings, so therefore we had a drill to teach us what we should do if an armed intruder entered our school. School shootings and such felt like a different world when I lived in small Denmark, but here it is a gruesome reality that you need to have in the back of your head almost everyday. And that is a big shock for me and a huge difference, my teacher was literally telling us that if we did not do the things correctly then we would probably not survive.

So the drill started off slow, the announcer said that the drill was started and that 2 armed "intruders" had entered the building through the C and B hallways. My class was in the B hallway so we could not evacuate. Our teacher ran towards the door and locked it, and before I even reacted the entire class was barricading the doors and windows with chairs and tables. About 10 minutes later the "intruder" walked past our classroom, and even though it was a drill, the guy was still dressed up in black clothes and a mask and he carried a plastic machine gun. That was quite frightening.

After the drill each class got evaluation and an estimation of which one of us that would have the best chance of surviving. My class did well, except we did not arm ourselves with scissors or other "weapons" (basically anything in the class you could use to hurt the intruder) in case he got in. They said the school did well and they estimated only 43 people would have been killed by the intruders.

This may sound like something that is quite unreal and would never happen, but the fact is that so far this year our school have already suffered from a bomb threat where they also found suspicious bags, so this is the reality here. I just had a crazy day because of that, and that really shocked me and made me see things from a different angle.

If you want to read further about the ALICE drill or the bomb threat at my school then I have found two articles talking about them:

ALICE drill:

http://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/alice-training/

Bomb threat:

http://www.upvnews.com/news/article.ashx?article=16260