By Adam Foxman
The Ventura County Star
VENTURA COUNTY, Calif. — Thousands of people crawled under their desks around Ventura County Thursday morning during a statewide earthquake drill organizers billed as the largest ever.
A total of 6.9 million people in California, including 99,100 in Ventura County, registered to take part in the Great California Shake Out, according to the event’s Web site.
Locals who signed up for the quake-preparedness event included more than 81,600 people in schools, more than 4,300 in businesses, nearly 4,300 from government agencies and more than 2,700 in medical facilities.
The main component of the drill was a statewide exercise at 10:15 a.m. in which people were asked to “drop, cover and hold on.”
“It’s the single most important earthquake exercise they can do,” said Deborah O’Malia, a spokeswoman for the Oxnard Fire Department. “If you don’t practice it, it’s not second nature to you, and as Californians, we need it to be second nature.”
In a real earthquake, people should remember to stay under cover until they are positive it is safe to come out, and then make sure they are accounted for so rescuers don’t put themselves in danger searching for them, O’Malia said.
Large earthquakes in Southern California’s recent history reinforced the importance of the simple drill, said Dale Carnathan, a program administrator for the Ventura County sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services.
In many cases over the past few decades, those seriously injured or killed in earthquakes were not the ones who stayed put, Carnathan said. “They were the ones who tried to run out of the building.”
Participants in the Great Shake Out were also encouraged to practice emergency-response plans. Unlike last year’s drill, however, this year’s event was not coordinated with a statewide exercise for first responders.
Some local emergency personnel still took the opportunity to hone their skills. An hour before the statewide drill, the Thousand Oaks Disaster Assistance Response Team practiced triaging earthquake victims at California Lutheran University.
Seventeen students from a class on the prevention and care of athletic injuries, some wearing bandages and fake blood, acted out injuries for the volunteer rescuers to evaluate.
The drill was repeated throughout the state as school children dove under tables in Los Angeles and sirens sounded in San Francisco.
Medical personnel triaged mock victims at the University of Southern California Health Sciences Campus, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department practiced an evacuation of its headquarters and transfer of command to battalion chiefs using their vehicle radios as the primary means of radio dispatch.
Organizers said the Shake Out was the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history. The first drill, held last year, focused on Southern California and drew 5.5 million participants.
The drill came just two days before the 20th anniversary of the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta quake that struck the San Francisco Bay region in 1989, killing 63 people.
Art student Lisa Allen, who grew up in upstate New York, said she was 4 at that time.
“I don’t really realize the threat of earthquakes,” Allen, 24, said just before the drill. “It’s definitely good to practice. I don’t really know what to do in an earthquake.”
That’s precisely the problem organizers of the ShakeOut said they were trying to address.
Many parts of California shake every day, but it’s been more than 15 years since millions of Californians experienced something like the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused 72 deaths, injured thousands and caused $25 billion in damage to the Los Angeles region.
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