A tsunami siren will wail in Diamond Point and up to 30 students in Port Angeles will be taken to Olympic Medical Center today — but don’t worry, it’s just a drill.
The Clallam County Emergency Management Division, in partnership with about 40 local government agencies and organizations, will hold a countywide earthquake and tsunami drill today from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The Diamond Point siren will signal the beginning of the drill.
The siren will sound again when the drill is over.
The premise of the drill is that an 8.0 earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, located off the northwest Pacific Coast, triggers a tsunami that causes widespread damage to infrastructure and cripples the ability of emergency crews to respond.
Though law enforcement, medical, fire, and tribal agencies from around the county will participate, most of the visible action will take place in Port Angeles and Sequim, with a table-top exercise in Forks.
In Port Angeles, 30 mock victims, made up of Port Angeles High School and Peninsula College students, will be painted with fake blood to simulate injuries.
The Peninsula College gym will serve as a “point of distribution site” for the “victims,” where the Clallam County Medical Reserve Corps will simulate providing them with inoculations.
After which, the “victims” will be driven in two Clallam Transit buses to either a shelter at the Elks Club in Sequim — managed by the Olympic Peninsula Chapter of the American Red Cross — or to Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles.
Hospital staff will simulate processing the “victims” either for treatment or for airlift to a Seattle area hospital.
The extent of the injury each “victim” is supposed to have will determine if the person is taken to the Red Cross shelter or OMC.
