The moment you stop preparing for the inevitable Mothra raid is the moment the inevitable Mothra raid starts preparing for you. So it's understandable when a school asks its students to participate in a fire preparedness drill, just in case they ever encounter the real thing. However, teaching them how to deal with a fire by setting their asses aflame would be ... somewhat less understandable. Here are five examples of what happens when people take the "pants on fire" approach to emergency preparedness.

5 Russian City Stages "Death Cloud" Drill; News Forgets the "Drill" Part

Ivan Tykhyi/iStock/Getty Images

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Siberia is the premier vacation spot for White Walkers and inattentive travelers who thought they booked a nice sunny trip to Iberia. It's also home to the industrial capital of Tyumen, which in 2013 was the site of an emergency response drill carried out by the Emergency Situations Ministry -- which is not from that George Orwell book, but an actual department of the Russian government.

Russian Federation

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The full name, which we are not making up:

Ministry of the Russian Federation for Affairs for Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters

The plan was to test the nationwide emergency notification system by announcing a fake chlorine leak at a waterworks plant. Of course, in order to prevent Tyumen's 3.6 million inhabitants from completely losing their respective shits, the Ministry notified local news outlets of their plans to conduct the drill in advance.

So How Did It Go Horribly Wrong?

Said local news outlets took one look at the report, saw the word "drill," and tossed it aside in favor of more exciting stories about bear orgies, or whatever makes the news in Russia. The national media was a bit more on the ball: They noticed right away when the Emergency Situations Ministry posted details of the "incident" on their website ... with precisely zero mentions that it was only a drill. The online report gave every indication that this was a legitimate event, including the revelation that 55 people had already been killed, and that an enormous murder cloud was now making its way toward Tyumen to usher in a citywide apocalypse.

Igor Pivovarov

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"Where are your bear orgies now, citizens of Tyumen?!"

Now, none of us here at Cracked are licensed medical experts (or even licensed drivers, for that matter), so we looked up what inhaling chlorine gas does to you, and it's not "makes your breath poolside fresh." Somewhere around the point where your own organs dissolve in your xenomorph-like acidic blood, we clicked away to watch puppies snuggle.