Firefighters Drill for Disaster : Emergency: Handling of mock collision of train, fuel tanker is given immediacy by real-life crash just hours before.

Eerily realistic screams rang through the morning haze. Bodies were strewn about the railroad tracks near the blue and white Metrolink train. Firefighters scrambled to provide emergency help.

All the elements of a real train disaster were present Thursday at El Toro Marine Corps Air Base in an emergency drill that was given extra tension by a real fatality just hours earlier along the tracks 10 miles to the south.

“The irony and timing of the two events is just incredible,” said Sarah Catz of Laguna Beach, a member of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority who attended the drill. “The silver lining to this is that hopefully it makes people aware that you can’t mess with trains.”

The drill simulated the aftermath of a fiery explosion caused by a Metrolink train crashing into a tanker truck carrying a load of jet fuel.

Emergency crews spent six months preparing for the mock disaster, which was a test of timing and communication among the firefighters who were first at the scene, the ambulance crews who arrived to transport the “victims” and six area hospitals that would treat the influx of patients.

Afterward, the emergency teams won plaudits from Orange County Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Whitaker, the drill commander.

“I’d say it went very well,” said Whitaker, a 20-year firefighter from Laguna Niguel. “We got 105 patients off the train, screened and en route to treatment within 60 minutes. In my experience, that’s pretty quick.”

This year’s drill emphasized what Whitaker called the “transportation function,” an element of disaster response that has bogged down emergency teams in the past. The updated plan calls for transporting all the most severely injured victims immediately to ambulances instead of first huddling everyone into an on-site treatment area, Whitaker said.

“Now we bypass that one step and take those patients directly to an ambulance and stabilize them there,” Whitaker said. “We think that alleviates what used to be an area of bottleneck for us.”

The drill is the largest undertaken by the Fire Department each year. Taking part were a 88 firefighters, 15 ambulances, four battalion chiefs and a group of college students and Explorer Scouts acting as victims.

The key term in Thursday’s drill was “triage,” a French word roughly meaning “to sort,” said Fire Department Capt. Dan Young. Triage is the work of the first crews on the scene who immediately determine each victim’s condition and then mark them with color-coded badges that let the next member of the team know who needs immediate help, Young said.

The triage process sorts out fatalities and the walking wounded who need no immediate treatment, and quickly finds “the guy in the middle who if you do the right thing in the first 15 minutes can save a life,” Young said.

Most often, the victim doing the screaming is not the one who most needs attention, Young said.

“Experienced emergency people quickly learn that the real screamers are a lower priority,” Young said. “Screaming takes a lot of strength. It’s the real quiet person who is not breathing you look for. That’s the one who needs help.”