Cast of millions helps Calif. prepare for the 'Big One'

State's ability to respond to disaster tested

LOS ANGELES - Southern Californians dropped to the ground, covered their heads, and held on to the furniture yesterday for a mock "Big One" - an earthquake drill billed as the largest in US history and aimed at testing everyone from state leaders to students who wore fake blood to play victims.

Local television stations interrupted their regular programming to announce the drill and covered it as they would a major earthquake, though with continual reminders that the emergency wasn't real. Firefighters with chain saws and shovels broke through facades searching for mock victims, wading in some instances through blinding clouds of manufactured smoke.

Sirens blared at Bishop Alemany High School, a San Fernando Valley campus badly damaged by a 1971 temblor and destroyed by an earthquake in 1994.

Spanish teacher Fiorella Linares, who had been checking homework, ordered her students to "cover," and they dove under desks and grabbed onto the legs of chairs.

Some of the teens giggled and joked. "I'm dying," one shouted in mock horror.

"Don't laugh," Linares scolded. "You have to think about what if this really happened."

The exercise was based on a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 temblor rupturing the southern San Andreas Fault - an event that scientists call the feared "Big One." Such a quake would cause 1,800 deaths and $200 billion in damage, researchers estimate.

Local governments, emergency responders, schools, hospitals, churches, businesses, and residents took part yesterday. Organizers said some 5 million people had signed up to participate.

"We're trying to make it a communal event," US Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, who helped create the crisis scenario, said before the event.

Minimal participation called for people to dive for safety. Firefighters and other emergency responders staged full-scale exercises complete with search-and-rescue missions and medical triaging of people posing as casualty victims.

Shortly before the drill, students at Bishop Alemany lined up to receive makeup that would turn them into simulated quake victims. Fire Department workers applied fake blood, makeup, and wax to create gruesome injuries.

Patricia Esguerra, 17, sported purple cheeks and a simulated gash on her forehead.

"It feels nasty but it's for a good cause so I don't mind," said Esguerra, who lived through the devastating 1994 quake but remembers little about it.

The school's football field was turned into a triage center, with students arriving with different colored wristbands indicating the severity of their mock injuries.

"It's exciting. It's better to be prepared. At the same time, it's nerve-racking," said 17-year-old Emily Loren, whose head was bandaged and who had an IV attached to her arm. Firefighters took her from the area by stretcher.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived at the school in the late morning to survey the situation. He thanked the federal government for funding the drill and praised the various agencies that cooperated.

"The locals, the state, and the federal government came together very quickly, unlike what we have seen at [Hurricane] Katrina, when it was going the other way," Schwarzenegger said.

California is the most seismically active state in the Lower 48.

This year, the USGS calculated the state faces a 46 percent chance of being hit by a 7.5 or larger quake in the next 30 years with the epicenter probably in Southern California.

Yesterday's mock quake was in a section of the San Andreas that has not popped in more than three centuries and scientists fear stress buildup could unleash a big quake in the near future.

Under the scenario, the southern San Andreas suddenly awakens near the Mexican border, sending shock waves marching toward Los Angeles and eventually stopping in the high desert. The 200-mile rupture would leave a path of destruction. Shaking would last three minutes.

Despite the known seismic risks, California has never been as organized as Japan, which holds an annual drill to mark the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, a magnitude 8.3 temblor in Tokyo that killed more than 140,000 people.

Interest in the statewide exercise was initially low, Jones said, but peaked after California was jolted by a moderate earthquake this summer.

Though a far cry from the "Big One," the July magnitude 5.4 temblor centered in the hills east of Los Angeles was the strongest to rattle a populated area of Southern California since the 1994 earthquake. After the shaking stopped, 400 new people signed up for the drill, Jones said.

If such a quake like the one in the drill were to hit, scientists say, sections of freeways would collapse, water and gas pipes would burst, and certain high-rise buildings and older structures would fall.