Locals get into the act with massive earthquake drill

BARSTOW • While playing an earthquake survivor looking frantically for her daughter, Caitlin Carter summoned memories of a real quake.

The Barstow High School junior was one of 21 high school students and eight Barstow Community College students who played the part of earthquake victims in the Golden Guardian disaster exercise in Barstow Thursday. Carter remembered being at a friends house at age 10 when a massive rumbling sent dishes flying out of the cupboards.

“We all started freaking out, so it’s kind of just a rerun from that,” she said.

On Thursday, Carter was taking part in an exercise in which a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the southern portion of the San Andreas fault, destroying the Cajon Pass, and cutting off Barstow from the surrounding area.

In the scenario, City Hall and the Barstow Veterans Home of California suffered minor damages, while the Rimrock Villa Convalescent Hospital lost power and found that its backup generator was not working, said Barstow Police Department crime analyst Jennifer Riley, who acted as incident commander for the day.

But the center of the exercise was Barstow Community Hospital. In the scenario, the tremors collapsed part of the hospital, requiring patients to be evacuated. In the meantime, quake victims flooded the hospital from the surrounding community with a wide array of injuries. Unable to admit them all, staff set up makeshift clinics in tents outside the building to treat the injured.

The scenario included other twists. Two workers got trapped in an elevator, requiring the doors to be pried open to save them. Concerned family members threatened to storm the doors of the hospital, and the “patients” played by the students staged a mini-riot when the doctors did not appear to be acting quickly enough.

In a final twist, the hospital got word that the entire building was considered unsafe, and all the patients would need to be evacuated.

In a real-life scenario, the evacuees would have been taken to the Barstow Veterans Home of California or to mobile hospital units provided by the military, said John Rader, spokesman for both the hospital and the City of Barstow.

The city set up an emergency operations center in Riley’s office. Volunteers with the police department’s Citizens on Patrol program ran back and forth from the command post to the hospital and other facilities to relay messages and perform crowd control.

In the process, the city and hospital discovered where the snags would be in the event of a real disaster.

On the hospital side, Rader said they found a need to train employees more thoroughly on the national Hospital Incident Command System, a uniform series of emergency procedures. Communications were an issue all around.

Both the hospital and the city had issues with their satellite phones, and Riley discovered that the city’s handheld ham radios were not able to reach down the Cajon Pass to the county emergency operations center in San Bernardino.

Overall, however, both Riley and hospital leaders called the exercise a success. The city will take part in another large-scale disaster scenario in early December, where they will be evaluated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Rader said.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or asewell@desertdispatch.com