Listen to my profile of Hanley’s work and learn more about L.A.s civil defense towers below: As a self-described siren hunter, he’s spent years finding and mapping L.A.’s old civil defense sirens and taking photos of them. One man who’s fascinated with these old sirens is Dennis Hanley. (The original image is no longer available, please contact KCRW if you need access to the original image.) Dennis Hanley calls himself the “siren hunter.” He’s spent years finding and documenting L.A.’s Cold War-era civil defense sirens. Since then, the sirens have been ignored and allowed to deteriorate. had been turned into a prairie of nuclear ash.) That last test of L.A.’s civil defense sirens was in the 1980s. (Of course no one knows what people were supposed to do after L.A. If people heard the sirens blare, they were supposed to seek shelter until after the atomic bombs had fallen. They don’t work now, but during the era when World War III looked like it could break out at anytime, the sirens were supposed to warn people about an impending nuclear attack. During the height of the Cold War there were more than 250 civil defense siren towers, which, when activated, were supposed to alert people about a coming Russian attack so they could find shelter. He promised to take a tough line against Palestinians and pledged to ramp up settlement construction on lands Palestinians seek for their future state.Ībout 60 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem this year, according to a tally by The Associated Press.I’ve always had an abiding interest in the history and culture of the Cold War, that nearly fifty-year span of the 20th Century when the United States and Soviet Union vied for global power and threatened each other, and the world ,with nuclear obliteration. It’s also chilling to learn how each country busily made plans to try to survive an atomic holocaust by creating civil defense programs, building bomb shelters and developing warning systems and evacuation plans for major cities.Īrtifacts of that chapter of Cold War history can be still be found in neighborhoods across Los Angeles in the forms of long-neglected civil defense sirens sitting atop now rusty towers. It comes less than two months after Israel‘s far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new hard-line government took office. A day after the raid, a Palestinian shot and killed seven people outside a synagogue in east Jerusalem. The death toll from the raid surpassed that of an Israeli attack last month in the city of Jenin, further north, where 10 Palestinians were killed. A large home was turned into rubble and furniture from the destroyed home was scattered among mounds of debris. In the scenes from the Old City of Nablus, shops were riddled with bullets, parked cars were damaged and blood stained the cement ruins. Thousands of people packed the streets, chanting in support of Hamas. On Thursday, Palestinian territories observed a general strike in protest against the raid and bodies were paraded through crowds on stretchers for funerals. He said the moment will haunt him forever. His colleague who helped him extract the bullet from a 61-year-old man’s heart said they realised he was his father after removing the bullet and seeing his face. In one emotional scene, an overwhelmed medic pronounced a person dead, only to notice the lifeless patient was his father. Among those wounded, some 82 were hit by live ammunition. Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus (AFP via Getty Images)Īmong the dead in Nablus were elderly men aged 72, 66 and 61, and a 16-year-old boy, according to health officials.
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