LOS ANGELES — Southern Californians dropped to the ground, covered their heads and held onto the furniture Thursday for a mock “Big One” — an earthquake drill billed as the largest in U.S. history and aimed at testing everyone from state leaders to students who wore fake- blood makeup to portray victims.
Local television stations interrupted their regular programming to announce the drill and covered it as they would a major earthquake, though with continual reminders that the emergency wasn’t real. Firefighters with chain saws and shovels broke through facades searching for mock victims, wading in some instances through blinding clouds of manufactured smoke.
Sirens blared at Bishop Alemany High School, a San Fernando Valley campus badly damaged by a 1971 temblor and destroyed by the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Spanish teacher Fiorella Linares, who had been checking homework, ordered her approximately 20 students to “cover,” and they dived under desks and grabbed onto the legs of chairs.
Some of the teens giggled and joked. “I’m dying,” one shouted in mock horror.
“Don’t laugh,” Linares scolded. “You have to think about what if this really happened.”
The exercise was based on a hypothetical magnitude-7.8 temblor rupturing the southern San Andreas Fault — an event that scientists call the feared “Big One.” Such a quake would cause 1,800 deaths and $200 billion in damage, researchers estimate.
Local governments, emergency responders, schools, hospitals, churches, businesses and residents were taking part. Organizers said some 5 million people had signed up to participate.
“We’re trying to make it a communal event,” U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, who helped create the crisis scenario, said before the event.
The minimum participation calls for people to dive for safety.
Firefighters and other emergency responders are staging full-scale exercises complete with search-and-rescue missions and medical triaging of people posing as casualty victims.
Shortly before the fake quake, Alemany students lined up to receive makeup that would turn them into simulated quake victims. Fire Department workers applied fake blood, makeup and wax to create gruesome injuries.
Patricia Esguerra, 17, sported purple cheeks and a simulated gash on her forehead.
“It feels nasty, but it’s for a good cause, so I don’t mind,” said Esguerra, who lived through the devastating Northridge quake but remembers little about it.
The school’s football field was turned into a triage center, with students arriving with colored wristbands indicating the severity of their mock injuries.
“It’s exciting. It’s better to be prepared. At the same time, it’s nerve-racking,” said 17-year-old Emily Loren, whose head was bandaged and who had an IV attached to her arm. Firefighters took her from the area by stretcher.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived at the school in the late morning to survey the situation. He thanked the federal government for funding the drill and praised the various agencies that cooperated.
“The locals, the state and the federal government came together very quickly, unlike what we have seen at (Hurricane) Katrina, when it was going the other way,” Schwarzenegger said.
California is the most seismically active state in the Lower 48.
Earlier this year, the USGS calculated the state faces a 46 percent chance of being hit by a 7.5 or larger quake in the next 30 years, with the epicenter likely in Southern California.
