WASILLA -- The casual observer might have seen the myriad ambulances and fire trucks parked along Trunk Spur just past fire station 5-1 Saturday morning and thought some something terrible had gone down.
But the disaster scene there lacked a disaster.
A dozen disoriented people with open wounds jumped, crawled or stumbled from the emergency exit of a school bus.
Three more lay on the ground beside the road. Most were bloody, some with protruding bones. Others were bruised. One vomited pink goo.
Upon closer inspection, the bruises turned out to be face paint and the blood corn syrup.
The vomit came from a bag concealed under a sweatshirt. The "victims" were volunteer actors, each with an assigned role in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Department of Emergency Services' mass casualty drill.
Bea Adler, emergency management program coordinator, said the department had been planning the drill since February. After all the trucks were assembled, the drill started at 9:30 a.m. and ran through a lunchtime after-action discussion.
The scenario: A bus full of tourists collided with a van, the driver of which Alaska State Troopers had been chasing. Turns out the driver was a terrorist and he had a chemical weapon.
But the firefighters and medics on scene didn't know most of that.
Part of the drill was to see how long it took them to size up the scene and back away from the mysterious white powder covering many of the actors, Adler said.
"Do not come into contact with the victims," came an early order over the emergency radio.
More radio traffic later identified the powder as anthrax.
Medics suited up in head-to-toe Tyvek suits. They were the only ones allowed in the "hot zone" near the bus.
Over the course of an hour the victims were scrubbed clean in a blue, three-stage decontamination tent.
Then they waited in patient gowns next to a barbed-wire fence surrounding a nearby cow pasture.
The most seriously wounded went to the nearby Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.
Marian Lear and Teresa Gool were two of the first discharged from the exercise. Gool had a bloody head wound.
The pair hadn't gone through the decontamination process -- they had been scripted to run to the hospital, fed up with how long it took medics to treat them.
Lear said they weren't a part of any borough organization; they'd come out "just because we thought it'd be fun."
Both agreed it had been enjoyable and enlightening.
After the exercise, as firefighters tore down the decontamination tent, Johnny Murdock, emergency services' training coordinator, in charge of the scenario, said that overall he was pleased.
He had prepared a handful of prompts to pass to incident commander James Steele if things were lagging behind. But Steele didn't need them.
Murdock and Adler noted that both the borough's large, white command truck and the decontamination tents had been deployed for the first time in an exercise.
Emergency services learned a lot about both how to set up the tents and what equipment it needs to put in the command van as it is fully outfitted in the coming months.
Still, Murdock said two things quickly became apparent.
First, the borough needs triple the number of Tyvek suits it has, and in more varied sizes. Multiple responders tore through their too-small suits.
Second, victims put through the decontamination process should be given blankets immediately.
With all the water sprayed on them, two "victims" got hypothermic during the decontamination process, Murdock said, despite summertime sunshine and temperatures near 60 degrees.
But, Murdock said, and Adler agreed, this is why the borough has drills -- to spot these problems and fix them before they're responding to a real disaster.
"We're much more prepared than we were five hours ago," Murdock said.
Find reporter Andrew Wellner online at adn.com/contact/awellner or call him at 352-6710.
