What are your favorite stories from the End of the World drills? (Please remember the bounds of NNPI.) Did you ever have the locals react in humorous ways when they saw Navy guys running around with radiacs?
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
Seeing this story about the residents of Portland, England, getting all in a tizzy and losing their stiff upper lip in response to a nuclear disaster drill made me think back to the "End of the World" drills we do periodically in submarine homeports. I always enjoyed the difficulty in coming up with a believable scenario for this drill, since, as us nukes well know, an actual nuclear accident in port is vanishingly unlikely with a naval reactor. (One time, we just said "Screw it" and had an RO run out of the Reactor I & C space with a black box shouting "I did it! I figured out how to melt down the reactor!" as the method of initiating the drill.) My favorite EOTWAWKI drill story involved a JO whose wife was several days overdue to have a baby, and had tried everything (including, reportedly, driving over railroad tracks) to speed up the birth. We decided that he'd be the guy to go up in the helicopter as a drill monitor, figuring that would be the one sure way to get the labor kick started. Unfortunately, even that didn't work.
