Quake Drill Tests Response by Officials

Leaders in Ventura County went underground Monday to test their emergency skills during a drill that staged an 8.0-magnitude earthquake, with imaginary collapsing buildings, cracked freeway bridges and a leaking dam.

The drill, played out in a bunker-like room in the basement of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, was designed to improve communication among county leaders in case of a real disaster.

Participants staffed phones like volunteers at a telethon, passing instructions to emergency workers. But soon, the phone lines went down and the workers were forced to communicate with cities via ham radio.

“It just kind of became more real and, for awhile, you forgot you were working on an exercise,” County Supervisor Maggie Kildee said. “You really thought you were working to solve problems.”

The drill began at 9 a.m. with an announcement that scientists were predicting a major earthquake during the next 72 hours on the San Andreas Fault near Gorman.

Then, while participants were alerting cities and urging a voluntary evacuation of the Fillmore-Piru area, the temblor hit at 10:40 a.m.

Phone lines into the emergency operations center went dead and officials had to rely on amateur radio operators.

A major worry, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Diaz said, was that the dams at Pyramid Lake, Lake Castaic and Lake Piru would break and send a wall of water into the Santa Clara River valley, flooding Piru, Fillmore and Santa Paula.

But the drill ended at 11:30 a.m. with only a leak in the dam at Lake Piru. Officials then critiqued the exercise, shut down the control room and went to lunch.

“The real point was to get everybody together,” Diaz said. “A lot of people don’t realize when something like this happens, they’re going to be involved.”