How would Kodiak respond to a major disaster in town? First responders, Kodiak police officers, hospital employees, city and borough officials and many more met Wednesday to run a simulated disaster to find out.

Chaos reigned at the Bayside Fire Station Training Center during Wednesday’s tabletop exercise funded with money from the Department of Homeland Security. But it was organized chaos, with a purpose.

At the start of the simulation that morning, the 33 participants, cast in the roles they have all agreed to assume in the case of a major emergency, were told of a massive imaginary explosion at Trident Seafoods. Updates to the simulation were handed out on green and orange pieces of paper and information written in big letters on large pieces of paper tacked up in the front of the room.

Theoretical firefighters trying to douse the blaze were sent to the hospital with skin irritation and breathing difficulties.

Quickly participants learned that the explosion was most likely a terrorist chemical weapons attack. An area of one-quarter mile, and then a mile, surrounding the blast had to be evacuated.

Almost 4,000 Kodiakans had to squeeze into three buildings outside of the menacing, but imaginary, chemical cloud. It was the team’s job to make them fit.

And then it got dirty. The fake explosion also knocked the city’s water services offline, leaving the simulated Kodiakans without potable water or even water for bathing and toilets, for most of the theoretical day.

The group was divided into command teams. They worked on everything from treating the wounded to getting the water running to housing and feeding evacuees.

The scenario even called for the theoretical arrival of national news media representatives who would likely not let the police roadblocks on Mill Bay Road heading into town from the airport stop them from reporting the story.

The mile-radius plume took out the group’s primary command center at the Kodiak Island Borough Building so they moved, in the simulation, to where they were sitting in real life — at the secondary command center in the Bayside Fire Station. KMXT and KVOK had to evacuate their stations, emergency messages had to go through the two Homer stations which broadcast over translators in Kodiak.

The room was crowded and loud. Participants, some dressed in orange reflective vests with the name of their work group stenciled across their backs and bellies, moved back and forth between tables. They asked for materials, work crews, backhoes, bottled water and money to buy what they needed.

It was a chance for the group of people Kodiak has entrusted with seeing them through a disaster to have a dry run, to at least in a simulation do what they will need to do if and when the unthinkable happens.

The emergency teams also had a chance to iron out kinks in the emergency plan, to offer advice on how to rearrange the 700-plus page book in a more manageable form or to request materials they may need at the command center.

Joe D’Elia director of the Kodiak public library was playing his role as head of public information. If power went out, he said, his staff might need other means to write up press releases. He thought it might be a good idea to have manual typewriters on hand.

Kevin Koechlein, a consultant on hand from Palmer to run the drill, acted as an observer at the meeting, passing out situation updates when appropriate. At certain points he would step in to give his advice gained from years of studying how to properly react to a disaster.

He said that the thing he always sees come out at tabletop exercises like this is people getting to know one another and reaching a better understanding of their respective jobs.

Once the ice is broken at a meeting like this, if a real emergency happens the team will already have “a comfort with asking each other to do something.”

He said he was amazed at how much experience was present in the room. Looking around, he saw “literally hundreds of years of knowledge.”

Mirror writer Andrew Wellner can be reached via e-mail at awellner@kodiakdailymirror.com.