Helloooo everyoneee! My name is Vince. This is my first post and I have not seen a post about this yet so why not make one!
So, the main reason why I am making this post is to talk about the Great Shake Out drill that a lot of schools and places does every year.
Backstory. The drill is to prepare students, staff, and faculty in schools for incase there is a earthquake in the area they are in. As someone who lives in Nevada myself, we are one of the states that has the most earthquakes. Now, they are small earthquakes, but we have at least one every day. The drill prepares you for what to expect when there is an earthquake. It happens the same day, and same time every year.
Now, the drill takes place on October 19th at 10:19am every year. If your bell schedule conflicts with that (like my school), you can make adjustments. You can do it before that time if you are able to, or after. I am going to be a junior for the 23-24 SY. So my Freshmen year, we did it at 11:15, and last school year, we did it at 10:00. We were not able to complete the drill at the scheduled time due to our announcements happening at that time and its only 5 minutes before one of the lunches starts. Now this upcoming school year, with our recent schedule change, we will be able to complete it at the said time. Now back to the drill. So, there are over 480,000 participants, with a good majority of them being California and Nevada participants. This drill is required by the Clark County School District and the state of Nevada.
How the drill works
So, the drill consists with two parts. The first one being the announcement with the audio. This announcement can change depending on the area. At my school, they have someone come over the intercom saying “This is an earthquake drill, this is an earthquake drill.” and then they play the Great Shake Out sound that they get sent every year. The sound that is played explains what to do during an earthquake and plays sound SFX for like shaking and stuff falling.
Next part of this is the Evacuation. After the sound is played, you are told to evacuate. Now everyone does this differently than my district. People use their fire alarms to have them evacuate or they make an announcement. My district uses their evacuation announcement script which is “This is a drill, evacuate, evacuate, evacuate. This is a drill.”. If you click here, you will be able to download a video of what it looks like at my school. Like I’ve said before, each state, county, school district does it differently.
I have given a brief overview of what it is and if you are wondering more about it, and if you want to sign your school up for it, you can go to this website: Great Shake Out.
If you have any questions for me, my username on here is the same for all of my social medias.