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Quake drill taken seriously; city ready for real thing By Myles Murphy Ashland Daily Tidings Emergency workers this morning are picking through the rubble of disaster plans, searching for methods and techniques which survived Tuesday's statewide earthquake drill. "We're still trying to resolve all the concerns," Ashland Fire & Rescue Director Keith Woodley said today. "I'm confident if we had an earthquake tomorrow, we'd do really well as a community." Emergency workers and government leaders across the state put local and regional emergency plans to the test Wednesday when the region was hit with an imaginary magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northern Oregon Coast. CERT team members Arnie Krigel (left) and Gary Moore triage paper patients. Ashland Daily Tidings/DENISE BARATTA "It registered at about 7.5 to 8.5 here," emergency spokesperson Tim Bewley said Wednesday from the hastily assembled Emergency Operations Center in the Ashland City Council Chambers on East Main Street. Reacting to messages of disaster scenarios received periodically throughout the day, officials from the city, Southern Oregon University and Ashland Community Hospital did their best to react to fake fires, floods and fallen buildings throughout the community. "There are so many events happening at once, people are isolated, spread out all over the place," Bewley said. "I'm impressed with how seriously all the staff is taking this, they're immersing themselves in it." Inside the emergency center, city department heads sat in a circle and brainstormed ways to handle the events as Public Works Director Paula Brown described flooding along Bear Creek after the collapse of the Emigrant Lake dam. "Quiet Village is flooded and you can't go down Nevada," Brown said. "We have to get people out of there." The quake hit at 10 a.m., causing the immediate collapse of the ACH emergency room entryway and parts of SOU's Greensprings dorm. By 10:20 a.m. leaking was reported at the Emigrant Lake dam and the power was out for the entire city. Interstate 5 was blocked at the south railroad crossing and the Emigrant dam collapsed by 10:30 a.m. The downtown business Nimbus caved in at about the same time, and officials had scattered reports of a fire in the area. Phone service was taken out shortly after that by one of the many landslides in the hills around Ashland. "We're keeping the water going and that's about it," Brown said. As that information sank in, Assistant Fire Chief Dave Hard burst into the room. "We have a burn victim at SOU in the chemistry building," Hard announced. And that was all in the first hour after the quake. "It went well, but one of the things we need to work out more smoothly is how communications at the EOC interfaces with (911) dispatch," Woodley said. "In a community-wide emergency, those lines will be quickly tied up and we have to make provisions for them to roll over to the Emergency Operations Center." Another problem was the EOC itself. Normally fine for a council meeting, the place was quickly overrun with all the people and equipment needed to coordinate emergency response. "It was really cramped, but all in all it was a good effort," Woodley said. On the positive side, operations were not hampered when telephone service failed. Local ham radio operators stepped up to keep communications going, even using a radio-type fax machine to send emergency documents to Eugene. "The hams did really well and that worked out good when we lost the telephones," Woodley said. Perhaps the most important resource in a city wide emergency is the Community Emergency Response Teams, according to Woodley. CERT members met at 10 a.m. at the Oak Knoll Golf Course, setting up a medical treatment area and sending small groups on foot through the neighborhood to assess the damage. Team members searched for sheets of paper explaining the extent of damage and injured people in certain areas. "It's kind of like an Easter egg hunt," AFR CERT trainer Trent Stoy said. "They look for damage, trapped people, see if there are safe places we can send people for shelter." For more on the test and other state emergency information, see the Web site www.osp.state.or.us/oem. LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -