Several people were seriously injured today when an earthquake maimed multiple people inside of a warehouse, caused a gas leak that erupted in flames, and crashed a car into a utility pole, which also incapacitated a lineman working up on the pole. Fortunately, first responders from the Arcata Fire District and workers with PG&E were there before the calamities even occurred, allowing them to save multiple lives and avert a worse disaster. 

“Just take it easy now,” one nurse, a man named “Chad” with a gigantic, sleek handlebar mustache, told an unresponsive man, bleeding from the head, that firefighters wheeled on a rolling chair out of a building. “We’re going to get you to an ambulance.”

Even more fortunately — especially for that guy — the whole thing was fake.

Dozens of PG&E and Arcata Fire employees descended on the former Sun Valley tulip farm in the Arcata Bottoms this morning to practice responding to a natural disaster. PG&E employees played the hapless victims. Chad’s mustache was a floppy stick-on.

It’s important for PG&E and fire departments to practice working with one another before a real catastrophe, PG&E’s Emergency Management Specialist Mike Levasseur told the Outpost. He coordinates these training exercises up and down the state, making sure everyone knows how to work with one another so everything goes smoothly when they are inevitably forced to.

“The adage is,” he said, “the day of an incident is not a good first time to be shaking hands.”