Disaster drill almost too real

Disasters at the Airway Heights Corrections Center can be so-o-o confusing if you don’t know the drill.

If you’re a reporter and you arrive a few minutes late for a prison disaster drill, you’ll miss Public Information Officer Risa Klemme’s mock press conference about the mock plane crash at one of the prison’s warehouses.

The area will be sealed off because pesticide is leaking from the wreckage of the single-engine crop-duster.

Wait a minute, you say. Isn’t this all just pretend?

Yeah, but you don’t have a gas mask. So you’ll just have to go to Klemme’s office for a real briefing on the pretend briefing.

Confused? Wait till you find out that Wednesday was the third day of a four-day “joint operations academy” to test the prison staff’s ability to deal with disasters involving various public agencies and the public itself.

If you’d been there Tuesday, you could have seen a fired state worker and his girlfriend take the man’s former supervisor hostage. The girlfriend was a drug addict who wound up shooting her boyfriend and getting shot by the prison staff. Everyone lived.

OK. Water under the bridge. What’s going to happen next in this crop-duster crash drill?

“I don’t know,” Klemme says.

A public relations person who doesn’t have the answer: This does seem real.

“Hey, that wasn’t nice,” Klemme protests.

She hasn’t been told how the disaster scenario will play out because she’s one of the employees being tested. Since Tuesday, she’s been getting inquiries from people claiming to be reporters, wanting to know what’s going on at the prison.

Although Klemme has been on the job only about six months, she knows enough real reporters to know there was something bogus about the ones who called.

“I still have to respond to it as though it were real,” she says.

Suddenly, the phone rings. It’s Jamie Kennedy, of KCSS Radio in downtown Spokane.

“That’s one of my fakey calls,” Klemme confides after disposing of Kennedy. “It’s one of those ‘Is it real or is it Memorex?’ things.”

What was the call about, you ask, as though Kennedy hadn’t been talking so loudly you could hear every word.

Kennedy said she had gotten a tip that the Earth Liberation Front sabotaged the crop-duster to protest the spraying of pesticides on forests, Klemme says. Kennedy also insinuated that ELF protesters might be planning to picket the prison.

“If you were the real media, I wouldn’t tell you,” Klemme adds.

Hey, that wasn’t nice.

“You know what I mean,” she says.

Enter Jocelyn Hofe, the state Department of Corrections emergency response manager, and Lori Scamahorn, a seasoned public information officer from the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Hofe is in charge of the drill, and Scamahorn is here to help evaluate the Airway Heights staff.

Surely they can tell you what’s going to happen next.

Hofe closes the door with a conspiratorial glance over her shoulder to make sure Klemme, who has stepped out for a moment, doesn’t overhear.

Klemme returns with news that it is now safe for you and a late-arriving television cameraman to visit the crash site without gas masks.

Surveying the soap box derby-style aircraft, fashioned from a corrugated pipe, the disappointed cameraman grumps that one of his competitors was notified soon enough to arrive while there were still dead and mangled bodies.

His pique seems real. TV people absolutely hate to be scooped on a disaster drill.

“You get stuck with the hand you’re dealt,” Klemme shrugs, shouldering the blame even though she wasn’t in charge of invitations.