Two early morning explosions at Caltrain stations in San Jose and Mountain View release toxic nerve gas. Hospitals brace for the worst.
The victims -- some on foot, some injured and on gurneys -- have to be decontaminated before they can be treated.
For a few hours Wednesday morning, nine Santa Clara County hospitals pretended this scenario was real.
In a drill called ''Operation Spray & Wash,'' coordinated by the county public health department, hospitals set up shower tents in their parking lots and scrubbed down volunteers posing as terror victims.
''We can probably treat 50 to 100 people per hour in this area,'' said Victor Benlice, a nurse who directs the emergency department at Regional Medical Center of San Jose.
He was one of the scrubbers who worked in bright-green hazardous material suits and hoods, sweating as the morning warmed. ''Let me tell you, it's hot,'' Benlice said. ''Man, is it hot!''
He added, ''Eighty or 90 percent of contamination is usually on the clothes, so stripping the patient is of the utmost importance.''
Twenty-eight volunteers posed as patients at Regional, including Boy Scouts and staff members who came in on their day off.
The 204-bed hospital went into lockdown, closing off many of its 33 doors and monitoring the remaining entrances ''so contaminated people don't walk in willy-nilly,'' Benlice said.
Although not all the fake victims went through the showers, they all went to the emergency room, where they were registered and seen by doctors.
However, real patients were given priority, and their care was not affected, Benlice said.
Meanwhile, the county's command center near Valley Medical Center passed on media reports that said the toll was growing, with thousands of people contaminated and 500 dead.
Regional spokeswoman Victoria Emmons said the hospital also kept an eye on weather conditions, trying to guess which way the plumes of gas would spread and how this might affect the number of patients streaming in.
''A good exercise really makes you think of what you might need that you don't have,'' she said.
It wasn't the first time the public health department has practiced what to do in a terrorist attack, said spokeswoman Teresa Chagoya.
But in previous drills, emergency workers went to the scenes of simulated attacks, she said. This is the first time hospitals have been involved to such an extent, with nine of the county's 13 hospitals, from Gilroy to Palo Alto, participating.
She said one of the goals was to test communication between the hospitals and the county's command center. The results will be evaluated over the next few weeks, Chagoya said, ''so we can learn from the drill where we can improve.''
Distributed by the Associated Press
