The Great ShakeOut

The intent is to hijack imagination to save lives.

For those readers of Honestly Lay Bare in Southern California - apologies up front.

You have just (or SHOULD have just) lived through the details of the following post.

For the rest of you, welcome to the biggest public emergency drill in United States history.

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At exactly 10am in the morning on Thursday 13th November, about 5 million people in Southern California dropped to the ground.

They took cover under a sturdy peice of furniture and held on as they listened to radio stations and school p.a. systems playing a sound track of rumbling and crashing along with a man's voice declaring:

"If this were the magnitude 7.8 earthquake we're practising for today, you would be experiencing sudden and intense back-and-forth motions of up to 6 ft. per second. The floor or the ground would jerk sideways out from under you. Look around and imagine."

Normally large scale disaster drills - which happen weekly across the United States - are designed for professional rescuers, emergency managers and politicans.

Not for the people that are likely to become instant victims.

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This drill, too, was originally scheduled as an exercise for only emergency officials.

That exercise - called Golden Guardian - was to involve 5,000 officials from the local police to the United States military, all pretending they are responding to a major quake along the San Andreas Fault.

In this case, though, California decided to invite the people too.

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Why was it considered necessary - primarily because we nearly always do the wrong thing exactly at the wrong time in disasters such as a major earthquake (standing under door frames is no longer advisable!).

The intent of the ShakeOut drill was to hijack the imagination.

The southern section of the San Andreas Fault hasn't moved in about 300 years. It should move every 150 years - so California is overude for a major quake. But most Southern Californians cannot readily imagine a quake of that scale.

So the purpose of populist drills like this is to save lives.

As things stand now, were the ShakeOut had been a real earthquake, about 1,800 people would die and 53,000 would be seriously hurt.

Damages would reach an estimated US$213 billion and most people in the impacted region would be without electricity and clean water for weeks or months.