Disaster Team Practices for the Real Thing

Ron Weinstock spent Thursday night pretending a magnitude 6.5 earthquake had hit Thousand Oaks.

In this scenario, the epicenter of the quake was the Sunset Hills neighborhood and the damage was devastating: 15 to 18 victims trapped in a partially collapsed building after a gas explosion. Some were dead, others seriously injured.

The pretense was just a training exercise for Weinstock, president of the Thousand Oaks Disaster Assistance Response Team, and 35 other volunteers. The group works with the sheriff’s and fire departments in the event of a real disaster. They are trained in search-and-rescue techniques, extracting victims, first aid and other emergency skills.

“We fill in the voids,” Weinstock said. “In the event of a catastrophe, emergency services are going to be completely overwhelmed. The more people who are trained, the more people are going to stay alive.”

To stage the earthquake, the group turned a former sheriff’s facility on Olsen Road into a debris-filled disaster scene, overturning furniture and burying mannequins in the rubble.

The mannequins were supplied by Optic Nerve, a Sun Valley-based special effects company. The corpses were all too real, he said.

“You can definitely tell they are dead,” Weinstock said. “The reason that we go to such extremes in trying to make this look real is that, unfortunately, the things the rescuers are going to see are at times going to be very unpleasant. We want people to be able to handle even the unpleasant parts.”

When the rescuers started picking their way through the rubble, they had no idea where the fake victims might be and what their “conditions” were. They were responsible for bringing the bodies outside and performing emergency medical services where needed.

The volunteers come from many professions. They must pass a three-month training course and participate in regular training exercises such as the one Thursday night.

DART, as the group is called, is only 3 years old but has plenty of disasters under its belt: the 1994 Northridge quake, the 1993 Malibu fires and the La Conchita mudslide.