It’s a scary situation.

Part of the building at Commodore Options School has collapsed due to an earthquake. Many students are injured and need immediate medical attention in the art room.

Teachers and support staff race around in the dark with flashlights to try and locate everyone. Those with minor injuries who can walk are taken to a designated first aid area. Others who are worse off and cannot be moved must wait for medics to arrive. One injured teacher is taken away under protest.

“I’m not going!” she shouts. “I need to stay!”

Some students cry out for help. Others scream in pain.

One student tries her best to keep another one conscious.

“Are you still here?” she said. “Tell me you’re still here! Emily, wake up!”

Support staff tried to open up auxiliary doors to shine more light on the room and provide an entrance for medics, but Luke Carpenter, Bainbridge Island Fire Department’s assistant chief of operations, told them the doors are inaccessible and slams them shut.

“Aftershock!” one staff member jokes.

It’s a brief, light-hearted moment in a deadly serious drill that took place Wednesday at Commodore, which was one of several locations in Kitsap County selected to do a full-scale mock disaster.

Its part of “Kitsap Rumble 2010,” an event run by the Kitsap Department of Emergency Management to test and evaluate police, fire, medical centers, schools and county government on how they would respond to an earthquake.

In this scenario, an 8.2-magnitude earthquake has struck the Puget Sound area, with widespread damage affecting infrastructure, communications, transportation and emergency response.

On the island, both the Agate Pass Bridge and the ferry terminal have been severely damaged, with a makeshift emergency operations center set up at City Hall to handle communications with local police and fire departments.

BIPD Commander Sue Shultz said the goal for City Hall is to see how different departments react when they have to come together in an emergency situation and are isolated from the mainland.

“We all know in an emergency it may not be the chief of police or the fire chief that you go to for response efforts,” she said. “It may be the IT department that has to make decisions and get things set up as a unified group.”

Carpenter said the drill helps test the schools and the fire department’s ability to respond to a disaster.

“Everybody gets to play,” he said, pointing out two KCDEM controller evaluators. “But it’s only an effective learning tool if we sit down and look at the stuff that went right and stuff that went wrong. So we’ll sit down and say here’s what worked and what needs to be improved on.”

Commodore Principal Catherine Camp is looking forward to the KCDEM’s assessment and the feedback from her own staff. They’ve run mocks before, but it’s the first time they’ve done it on a large scale and with the involvement of the fire department.

Both sides have been planning the drill since June and have gone so far as to have students act “injured,” complete with makeup that accentuated their injuries, so firefighters and medics can deal with the variety of injuries that may happen in a disaster. Medics even took the injured to Virginia Mason Winslow, where selected parents could come and find their injured child.

“That’s why I was so willing to participate in this,” Camp said. “It means we’re going to be better prepared.

“There will be staff that come back and say ‘this worked right’ or ‘this didn’t work right,’” she continued. “But that’s why we drill. So we learn in this scenario where our work is rather than debriefing after an actual incident.”