Southern California stages biggest U.S. quake drill
(Recasts with start of drill; adds details and quotes)
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Southern Californians simultaneously dropped to the floor and huddled under tables and desks for two minutes of imagined seismic turmoil on Thursday in the biggest U.S. earthquake drill.
The Great Southern California ShakeOut was organized by scientists and emergency officials as part of a campaign to prepare the state's 22 million inhabitants for a catastrophic quake that experts say is inevitable and long overdue.
The drill is based on the premise of a magnitude 7.8 quake striking the southern portion of the famed San Andreas Fault, a subterranean chasm between two massive plates of the Earth's crust that extends hundreds of miles (km) across the state.
The hypothetical quake, similar in strength to the devastating tremor that hit China in May, also is the basis for this year's annual Golden Guardian exercise -- a days-long disaster simulation for emergency-response agencies statewide.
"This helps us hone our skills," said Patricia Aidem, a spokeswoman for Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in suburban Los Angeles, whose trauma center is taking part in the larger mass-casualty drill.
"We live in earthquake country, so being prepared to help the public is just an amazing advantage for the community."
Teaching people quake survival skills also "means fewer patients for us," she added.
"It's addressing what everybody who lives here knows we should be concerned with and that is the 'big one' on the San Andreas," said Kenneth Hudnut, an earthquake expert with the U.S. Geological Survey.
MILLIONS REGISTER
Well over 5 million people signed up to take part in the ShakeOut drill and organizers said they assumed many more would join in without registering.
At precisely 10 a.m. PST (1800 GMT), people in classrooms, offices and homes throughout the region were asked to perform the "drop, cover and hold-on" exercise for two minutes.
In a variation of the "duck and cover" nuclear drills of the Cold War era, participants were instructed to hit the floor and crawl under a sturdy piece of furniture, folding their arms over their heads and necks until the shaking stops.
They were guided by a public service message sent in advance to participating businesses, schools and other institutions and played over the airwaves by various radio and TV stations.
The detailed quake scenario for the ShakeOut was devised by a team of geophysicists and engineers and marks the most comprehensive effort to forecast the consequences of the next "big one" to shake Southern California.
The quake they envisioned would kill 1,800 people, injure 50,000 and leave at least 250,000 homeless.
It would topple 1,500 buildings, badly damage another 300,000 and sever highways, power lines, pipelines, railroads, communications networks and aqueducts. Property losses of over $200 billion were projected.
The quake also would ignite about 1,600 fires, some turning into blazes that engulf hundreds of city blocks, leading to tens of billions of dollars in additional losses.
Experts predicted the biggest long-term economic disruption would come from damage to the region's water distribution system, so extensive in some areas that homes and businesses will go without water for months.
A rupture of the San Andreas Fault in Northern California caused the massive 8.3-magnitude quake that laid waste to San Francisco in 1906.
Nothing of that magnitude has struck south of the San Gabriel Mountains, near Los Angeles, in 300 years. The average interval between such quakes in that region is 150 years.
The biggest Southern California temblor in recent years, the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake in 1994, killed 57 people and caused about $40 billion in damage. (Editing by Dan Whitcomb and John O'Callaghan)
