Pete Moye’
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California will have its fourth annual statewide earthquake drill, The Great California ShakeOut on Oct. 20 at 10:20 a.m.

Throughout California, there will be 185, and counting, registered colleges and universities participating in the event, which includes Cerritos College.

Other earthquake drills have been held in the past at Cerritos College, but this will be the first year that Cerritos College will hold an earthquake drill in association with The Great California Shakeout.

Stephen Johnson, vice president of student services and assistant superintendent, gave insight on how Cerritos College will participate and what is expected on that day.

“The college will be participating in The Great California ShakeOut. For ease of remembering, it is on 10/20 at 10:20 a.m., in other words, Oct. 20 at 10:20 in the morning. The college is going to be doing a number of drills to practice what we need to do in the event of an actual emergency including an earthquake,” Johnson explained.

“We do the evacuation drill every year, but we’ve had interest in participating with The Great California ShakeOut in the past, and so this year we’ve decided to initiate doing the drill with the ShakeOut.

“The biggest part of the drill will be that everyone at 10:20 a.m. will be asked to drop, cover and hold on. So wherever you are, you’re asked at that time to drop cover and hold and that’s for thirty seconds or so. The fire alarms will then go off to indicate that it’s time to evacuate the buildings. Everyone will then evacuate according to our evacuation procedures.

“In addition to that, there will be exercises on dealing with hazardous material. The risks, or concerns, that come up often in earthquakes are natural gas leaks. So we will practice having a natural gas leak, it won’t be real of course, and our response team will go out and respond to that.

“We’ll also have a drill to practice setting up a triage area. A triage area is where individuals who have been injured either go, or is taken to, and they’re identified by their degree of their injury and they are tended to by first responders or other care personnel on-site until additional services can be delivered.

“And then finally we’ll also have drills using our evacuchairs. We’re one of the few places where our multistory buildings have evacuchairs, so if an individual is on an upper floor at a time that we have asked people not to use the elevators, they will be able to use the evacuchair and an operator will be sent to them. In this case, operators will be sent to people who have been set up ahead of time to go through the practice drill of actually using the evacuchair to go down one or two flights of stairs to get to the ground floor and out of the building,” added Johnson.

Johnson also explained how in the past, the campus was able to complete the evacuation process under 25 minutes. This year, though, the process might take a bit longer since additional practice drills will be added to procedure. This includes reporting to the assembly area and from there, reporting to the Emergency Operation Center. The police department will also participate in the drill.

“In this area of the country, what we get concerned about the most is earthquakes,” Johnson said.

The ShakeOut movement believes that it is better to be safe than sorry.

“We believe that California can become much more prepared for earthquakes and be ready to recover more quickly. The Shakeout has been created to help people and organizations get better prepared for major earthquakes, and practice how to be protected when they happen,” reads on their website.

Statewide, there are 8.1 million participants registered for the drill, and the numbers keep rising. Last year’s ShakeOut only had 7.9 million registered participants. Participants for the event are registered on the ShakeOut website through individuals and family members, schools, clubs, businesses, organizations, etc. Officially, the ShakeOut drill is expected to last for 60 seconds, during that time everyone registered is expected to stop what they’re doing and drop, cover, and roll as if an earthquake is happening.

Mirella Garcia, English major, explained that she wasn’t prepared in the past when earthquakes occurred.

“I’ve been in a couple of earthquakes in the past and I wasn’t prepared. I just stay calm and tried to figure it out as it happens,” Garcia said.

“I figured an earthquake drill would happen soon since many earthquakes have been happening lately and since it’s getting really hot. They assume that when it’s hot, the big ones happen.

“I think this will be very helpful for the people in California because a lot of people would know what to do, since a lot of people say they know what to do in case an earthquake hits, but when it actually happens some people overreact and things get chaotic.”

Other ShakeOuts are scheduled to happen on Oct. 20 in places such as Guam, Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho and Nevada.

California currently stands with the highest number of registered participants, as each of the other regions participating have not reached one million participants. This might be due to the fact that California has higher chances of earthquakes than any of the other regions participating.

The first Shakeout ever held in California took place in 2008.

This years event motto is “shake out, don’t freak out.”