A warehouse fire that knocks out power to 12,000 Davis households. A magnitude 7 earthquake in the Bay Area that sends some 6,000 evacuees to Yolo County. A dorm fire that kills four students, injures 66 and leaves 450 without a place to sleep. And a chlorine gas leak, stemming from a train derailment at the Richards Boulevard overpass, that kills everyone in the immediate vicinity and forces roughly a third of the city to evacuate.

All in a single day.

“It felt like (the TV drama) 24 Hours,” said David Garrison, a UC Davis student affairs officer. “I was waiting for the nuclear explosion.”

Regional participants

The virtual catastrophes took place on the site of a former Catholic women’s college in Emmetsburg, Maryland, where 70 Yolo County-area police officers, firefighters, public works employees, public and environmental health specialists, dispatchers and others — Garrison among them — gathered for a four-day Integrated Emergency Management Course conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Participants represented nearly a dozen jurisdictions; besides UC Davis, trainees flew in from the cities of Davis, Woodland and West Sacramento; Yolo County government; Rumsey Rancheria; Davis Joint Unified School District; American Red Cross; and California Office of Emergency Services.

“The exercise created an extraordinary sense of realism and challenged all participants,” said John Meyer, vice chancellor for resource management and one of the 21 UC Davis representatives to participate in the course. “Most importantly, it highlighted many of the issues we must continue to address as part of our emergency planning efforts.”

FEMA picked up the costs as part of its national training programs.

“Ours was the only application accepted for a community course from FEMA Region 9 this year,” said UC Davis emergency manager Valerie Lucus. “It’s a real honor for us, and recognizes the hard work that UC Davis and the other jurisdictions have been doing in ongoing emergency preparedness over the last decade, as well as the effort that we put into submitting a compelling application.” District 9 includes California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii.

Classes and disaster exercises were tailored specifically for Yolo County, based on information from Lucus and her fellow emergency preparedness officials about the county’s chief vulnerabilities and training needs.

Instructors focused on major public policy issues in emergency preparation and recovery: community mass care/shelter issues; the role of public information in disasters; the national response framework, which provides a structure and mechanisms for coordinating federal support to state, local and tribal incident managers; the role of the California Emergency Management Agency; FEMA’s public assistance grant program; fire, law enforcement, emergency medical system and public works responses; stress reactions; and hazardous materials issues.

A key message: You can’t prepare enough.

The simulated disaster exercise capped the week. Working together as a single, hypothetical jurisdiction, the 70 Yolo County participants mobilized (virtually) to restore power, shelter Bay Area earthquake evacuees, fight the dorm fire, take injured students to area hospitals, find temporary housing for the others, identify the dead, contain the chlorine gas leak, evacuate a huge swath of Davis, recover from the train derailment, and keep the media and public informed.

Partnerships strengthened

“One of the most important outcomes of this exercise was an enhancement of our relationship to our municipal, state and federal partners in emergency management,” said Stan Nosek, vice chancellor, administration. “In a real disaster, emergency managers would be in multiple emergency operations centers linked by telecommunications. In Emmetsburg, we were collaborating side-by-side.”

FEMA instructors gave the Yolo community high marks: The class was among the first to complete an “incident action plan” (the plans identify specific, measurable objectives for disaster response and recovery) and the first to create a working emergency information Web site for media and the public within the eight-hour exercise.

More information: http://prepare.ucdavis.edu.

Barbara Brady is the director of communications for UC Davis’ Office of Administration.