What was it?

Saturday morning at 5:30 I was awoken from my slumbers by a loud siren from I know not where. It went on and on so I called the NPD. An officer told me he had already received one report of the siren and they were sending a cruiser out to check on things.

The first thing I thought upon awakening was that it was a siren to alert residents that the island had been breached by the Atlantic Ocean. Not that things had gone haywire at the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, but that I was possibly about to be swept into the river, which is at the end of the street.

I don't think there is such a siren; but I realized I don't know what sirens there are to alert citizens of imminent disaster. Check that, I know there's one for a "problem" at the nuke plant, but I don't know what it sounds like. I only know the horn that goes off at 12:30 p.m. every day in Newbury and that also alerts to a fire.

I called NPD later in the day to find out what the siren was but the dispatcher claimed no knowledge of to what I was referring.

It was possibly a car alarm; but from my Boston experiences of many years, those don't usually go on for 16 minutes and this siren would be loud and then less so, giving the impression of a revolving mechanism.

We don't hear a lot of car alarms out here - in fact, I don't believe I've ever heard one go off in the 3+ years I've lived here. We've had an explosion, fires, floods - and I've got to tell you, there wasn't this much action in my immediate vicinity in the entire 20 years I lived in Boston.

But apparently the situation out here is lurking in my subconscious, no matter how much I might try to slough it off as potential over reacting.