Drill Team : Elementary Students and Teachers Practice for Quake

Teacher Luis Lopez was reading “Charlotte’s Web” to his students Tuesday when the emergency bell sounded.

“Drop!” Lopez ordered the fifth-graders, who immediately crouched under their desks, holding the backs of their necks with one hand and clutching the desk legs with the other.

A routine day at Victory Boulevard Elementary School in North Hollywood was interrupted by a scenario involving the aftermath of a 7.8 earthquake. Freeways had buckled, emergency services could not reach the school for 12 hours, and five children were injured.

About 15 miles from the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Victory was one of many schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District that held practice earthquake drills Tuesday in an exercise to prevent panic should a real one hit, said Principal Charles B. Webb. The school also holds smaller earthquake drills once a month, he said.

“We believe in that old adage of practice makes perfect. We want children to respond automatically,” Webb said. “When we do [the drills] continuously, kids feel in control. They know what to do so they don’t feel powerless.”

At Victory, teachers led their 1,700 students to the courtyard, where the children passed the time playing games, coloring books, reading and talking.

But Ricardo Rodriguez, 10, stayed in the classroom bungalow to play an injured student. The role was a natural because his right arm has been in a cast and sling since he fell a week ago and fractured it.

“I’ll come rescue you,” Lopez assured Ricardo as the students filed out.

Lopez left his 27 students under the supervision of a teaching assistant and joined a search and rescue team of teachers who looked for injured people in the bungalows.

Soon, two teachers with a stretcher came for Ricardo, who was trapped under a desk with a broken ankle and a head injury. A smiling Ricardo relaxed on the stretcher.

“Oh man, what did you eat this morning?” teaching assistant Juan Espino complained good-naturedly as he struggled to lift the boy.

The rescuers placed Ricardo on a table in an outdoor lunch area and placed a note on his chest detailing his injuries. One rescuer wrapped gauze around Ricardo’s head and placed an ice bag on it.

Just when things seemed under control, Assistant Principal Christine Flannery began yelling “aftershock!”

“Get your heads down. Quiet down. You need to listen,” Lopez told his students.

After the drill, the children marched back to class, where Lopez and his students talked about the emergency drill.

“If it really happens, people will be scared, including myself,” Lopez said. “It is important to take this training seriously. It could happen, so you guys need to understand the importance of doing this correctly.”

The school’s most recent brush with a real emergency came two years ago during the Bank of America shootout, which occurred just blocks away.

“This place was a madhouse. There were helicopters and cops all over the place. It was very intense,” remembered Lopez, who was a teaching assistant at Victory then.

But the school handled the crisis in an orderly fashion by locking down for 14 hours, Webb said. Worried parents lined up for more than a block, waiting to be reunited with their kids.

“We want the school to be able to manage any emergency, whether it is faced with an earthquake, a fire or civil unrest, or a campus intruder,” said Pete Anderson, the LAUSD director of emergency services. “The way to do that is to have a plan and to practice that plan.”

During the quake drill, students at Victory acted as “runners” who relayed information from parents searching for their kids. In a real crisis, parents would have to show identification to pick up their children.

Teachers searching for the injured carried small radios to communicate with the school’s “command center.” A makeshift morgue was also set up in a classroom for casualties.

“I was a little bit scared,” said Maribel Sandoval, 9, of North Hollywood. “When we do it, it’s like we’re doing it for real.”

Ricardo enjoyed his role of injured boy.

“It was fun looking injured and wearing bandages,” said the North Hollywood resident. “If one day it happens for real, you know what to do.”