Chrissy Williams
“Downtown Los Angeles was hit very hard,” he told the group. “Most of the high rise buildings have collapsed…”
Pierce staff members wore bright red and yellow vests as they digested this information and decided what they would do in the event of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, when the destruction of L.A. could be a reality.
California is anticipating an earthquake of this scale in the near future. Because of this, the Great Southern California Shakeout – the largest earthquake drill in history – was created, and took place Nov. 13.
The Shakeout was designed by Dr. Lucy Jones, a seismologist since 1983 with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
In light of a USGS release in April that said, “California has more than a 99% chance of having a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake within the next 30 years,” the drill is timely.
All of the Los Angeles Unified School District was involved, but participation was up to the discretion of Southern California colleges. Pierce was originally not going to participate but decided to on a mostly managerial level.
The University of California, Los Angeles was the largest university to take part in the drill, evacuating more than 68,000 students, faculty and staff.
At Pierce, two chemistry classes were evacuated, but it was mostly just management who participated.
“At 10 o’clock this morning we were hit with a major earthquake of a magnitude of 7.8,” Paul Nieman, director of plant facilities, told the group of administration who would meet first in the event of a real emergency. It would be this group who decided if the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) would be activated.
For the sake of the Shakeout, the EOC was activated and convened in the business building at 11 a.m.
Nieman gave the same announcement to the EOC but added more information.
“We experienced a major aftershock at 10:30, which was a 7.0. The entire campus, except for this building, which is on a generator, does not have any electrical power. There is damage to the campus center and, due to the aftershock, there is also damage to many other buildings. We currently have an unknown number of injuries and casualties.
After alerting the group about the simulated earthquake, the room split up into six smaller groups: finance, logistics, management, operations, planning and public information.
As the simulation progressed, nine sham phone calls were received.
“If you take a phone call and it is a brand new incident and it will get a brand new number. An incident can have more than one number, though. You could have six calls about the same incident, so it still would be incident 1, call 1, call 2, call 3, call 4-and they will start to get logged on the charts you see around the room. “
Each group was supposed to respond with their appropriate response on flowcharts hung on the wall by their station.
The first phone call came in at 11:16 a.m. and said, “There is substantial damage to the campus center and students, faculty and staff have been injured. Some of these injuries appear to be very serious. Please send some help.”
At 11:30 the second call informed the group that “the equestrian barns have collapsed. There are no apparent injuries; however, the horses are very spooked and some may have sustained injuries.”
Another buzz at 11:35 reported that “two fires have started. One in the campus center and one in the cafeteria. The fires are not that large at the moment, but there is a lot of natural gas used in the cafeteria and I am worried about a possible explosion.”
The other six buzzes reported potential disaster-triggered events such as the establishment of a “tent city” on the soccer field, flooding, grid-locked roads, backed up sewers and a report that the water pressure had gone out and that “nothing is working!”
The EOC ended their drill abruptly at 12:30 p.m. without reassembling, collaborating or debriefing about the event. None of the groups communicated what they did in response to the mock phone calls, and it appeared as if some never used their designated flowcharts.
Some staff did not think the drill adequately represented what would happen in an actual emergency situation.
After the drill was over, Beth Benne, R.N., director of the Student Health Center, said, “In a 7.8 earthquake I’d have a hell of a lot more than five injuries and it took me two and a half hours to hear about those… It’s just not realistic.
Some chemistry students who were evacuated felt the same.
Mariam Abzelside, 19, said, “Everybody took their time to get their stuff and leave, and I don’t think we should walk this far when there was a closer field in front of the class.” When asked what she would do in the event of an actual earthquake, she said, “I’d leave my stuff and run!”
Staff members gathered Nov.13 for the Great Southern California ShakeOut drill. Schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District and many Southern California colleges participated for future earthquake preparation. ()