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Disaster drill | page 1, 2
I was looking forward to experiencing the firefighter's carry firsthand. He scowled. "Help me out here," he said. "That's my line," I replied, but I got up, because he seemed to be in a bad mood and I couldn't blame him. He was spending his morning wearing heavy rubber clothing and a gas mask in record-high 80-degree heat in order to rescue a bunch of drooling fakers in Scottish war paint. My firefighter deposited me with the rest of the trauma victims at the base of the convention hall steps. Ten minutes later, someone pointed to a box on the steps labeled "BOMB." We wondered what would prompt a terrorist to write BOMB on the box that contained his bomb. The same thing, we supposed, that would lead him to bomb a pharmaceutical convention.
Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday.
We were herded away from the bomb box to the other side of the building, where we sat in the sun for half an hour, chatting, dying and messing up our "Braveheart" makeup with sunscreen. Eventually a firefighter came over with a hose and commenced to wet us down, as though we were fans at an outdoor rock concert -- or peonies. He explained that he was decontaminating us. If this had been an actual gas attack, they would have cut our clothes off, turned the hoses up high and really blasted us, and then they would have scrubbed us and put us into some sort of special suit and rushed us to the emergency room. "Jesus Christ," said a disgruntled victim/actor named Marta, who was visiting from Spain, where the disaster drills are "great, just great." "If they want to practice, why don't they do it? Come and get real, people!" A newsman came over to film the firefighter moistening the sarin. He was wearing brightly patterned cotton trousers and a tie-dye shirt. "Someone ought to cut his clothes off," said a woman beside me. Her fake blood had come loose from her skin and hung in strands off her chin, waving gently in the breeze. Forty-five minutes later, we were herded into a fire department van and driven to a nearby hospital. No clothes cutting, no ambulance ride. Although the hospital had known about the drill for weeks, no one was waiting for us. "It's 11:30," said the emergency room woman who finally came out to the parking lot. "Someone called at 10:30 and said you'd be here in 10 minutes. We gave up on you." She looked at the lot of us, slumped and heat-stricken in the van. We were all sweating heavily, anxious and combative, regardless of what it said on our symptom badges. "Well, shoot," she said. Someone from hospital public relations showed up with a camera to document Summit Hospital's pivotal role in the Oakland Domestic Preparedness program. One of my fellow victims, a woman who organizes safety drills in her neighborhood and is something of a regular at these events, obediently dropped to the ground and commenced retching and spasming. Marta rolled her eyes up into her head, which wasn't on her symptom badge.
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