Not So Surprising : Newspaper Spills Beans on Quake Drill

They sauntered out like schoolchildren on a fire drill.

But grade school was never quite like this.

Employees at the San Diego Gas & Electric Encina power plant began their morning with a “surprise” earthquake drill, complete with smoke bombs and bodies wearing what looked like leftover Halloween makeup lying around the grounds.

“Help me! Help me!” yelled a faux car accident victim decked out in a red-flecked work shirt and a fake eye.

The full-scale drill, intended to simulate the aftermath of an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale, was the first of its kind at either of the utility’s main plants, said Fred Vaughn, spokesman for the company.

Company officials had intended the drill to be a surprise, but employees were tipped off by an item in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper Thursday morning that even told the drill’s starting time.

The media had been invited to cover the secret drill, but were told not to tell anyone until after it was over. Company officials said they were upset that the news was leaked but that the effect on the drill was minimal.

“It would have been nicer if it had been a surprise,” said Jim Boland, emergency preparedness manager of SDG&E;, “but they didn’t know exactly what they were going to face, so it’s OK.”

The company instituted the program, one in a string of drills, in the wake of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake that left that city powerless for several days, Vaughn said.

“What we are trying to do is test the skills of our emergency response team,” Boland said as the plant’s team of medical aides went to work. “We want to know if they prioritize correctly, what do they do right and what do they miss.”

A group of 19 company employees acted out the role of a tour group struck by falling concrete, while plant employees tended to their injuries.

“I have a headache and nobody is giving me anything for it,” said Jeanette Stevens, who also suffered from a compound fracture of her tibia and a bruised right arm.

Other plant employees inspected the grounds, looking for damaged areas and reporting to a command center that coordinated the relief efforts and responded to other mock emergencies, such as salt water leaking into the plant.

“In the very beginning, so much information came in, and nobody in that room knew what was going to happen,” said Scott Furgerson, maintenance supervisor at the plant, whose job it was to head the command center and respond to more than 40 scripted events.

Included in the script was the death of the leader of the plant’s emergency response team.

“We killed him off on purpose,” Furgerson said. “We wanted to see how the rest of the fire brigade would react.”

The plant has never suffered damage from an earthquake, Furgerson said, but the drills will help prepare for what he sees as the inevitable disaster.

“I think we did really well, and I am very impressed,” Furgerson said. “We’re better off today than we were two weeks ago.”

But most conceded that you could only do so much with a drill.

“There probably would be a lot more commotion with more fire and smoke,” said Jim Sickler, an apprentice mechanic.

“The first thing I would expect to see is people worried about their families,” Furgerson said. “We didn’t see anything like that.”