Dozens of cars were underwater after the collapse of the dock at the Bainbridge Island Ferry Terminal.

Much of downtown, from Blackbird Bakery to the Winslow Mall, had gone up in flames.

Landslides had pushed waterfront homes, and the people inside, into the water.

The morgue at Town & Country was maxed out.

Now, someone was on the telephone from Walt’s, someone saying the grocery store had been looted in the hours that followed a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that had rocked Puget Sound.

“I’m going to lock the doors and leave,” said the caller.

It was just before 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, roughly 26 hours after the killer quake.

The disembodied voice on the other end of the phone call to Bainbridge Island’s Emergency Operation Center wasn’t someone from Walt’s calling, though.

In reality, it was Bainbridge Island Fire Department Assistant Chief Luke Carpenter.

Carpenter was the controller/evaluator for the local part of Evergreen Quake 2012, a region-wide earthquake drill, and was calling the city’s Emergency Operation Center, or EOC, with new incidents for a volunteer crew of city employees and others to handle in the aftermath of the federal disaster.

Tuesday’s command-and-control exercise was the first time the EOC had been activated since the fire department took over emergency preparedness from the city about a year ago.

The fire department has been helping to train city staff since the start of the year, and this week’s drill was the culminating event for the stand-up of the EOC at fire department headquarters on Madison Avenue.

“Everybody’s got to step up to the plate. Everybody’s got to think outside the box,” Carpenter explained.

The drill picked up 24 hours after the earthquake, at the “D+24 Hour” mark, and roughly a dozen city employees and other government workers made their way through competing requests for help, ranging from a woman trapped in her garage, to people seeking shelter, to another caller who wanted the Agate Pass Bridge inspected after a rumor went around that it could be reopened (EOC workers had previously been told the bridge was out).

“These folks walked into an operating EOC,” Carpenter said.

“We are working our way through a list of issues. We have fuel shortages, we have mudslides, we have people missing, people trapped,” Carpenter said.

At one end of the EOC, Interim City Manager Morgan Smith was taking part in a conference call with other city and county officials from across Kitsap as phones continued to ring throughout the center with other emergency reports.

“We just had a mudslide reported on Gertie Johnson Road and people saw bodies in the water,” Carpenter noted. “You get the whole gamut of bad news.”

The deputy mayor had been in an hour earlier to sign a proclamation of an emergency.

After the conference call ended, Smith stood up and called for a status briefing from others in the room.

The city’s sewage treatment plant was still operating on generator power and wasn’t pumping. Police would work for 12 hours at a stretch, day and night. Public works crews would work a similar shift during daylight hours. And firefighters had knocked down the blaze in downtown Winslow. An underwater search with volunteer divers was planned at the ferry dock.

Smith said they would establish a voluntary curfew, from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., but added they wouldn’t devote scarce resources to enforce it.

“We do want folks to stay inside; power is going to be out for a while. There are a lot of road and building hazards out there,” she said. “Everyone is best off in their own houses.”

Smith set out the priorities: search-and-rescue operations and setting up shelters for the survivors.

The toll so far; nine fatalities and 70 minor injuries.

The scenario had just gotten worse a few moments earlier, after Carpenter, posing as “Dr. Luke,” called to report 14 injured people had been triaged at the Virginia Mason clinic in Winslow, including four with serious head injuries from a building collapse, and they all needed an airlift to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

“These folks need to get to Harborview as quickly as possible,” “Dr. Luke” Carpenter said.

There was also a fire reported at the Best Western hotel on High School Road. Across the street, survivors of the earthquake were gathering in the Safeway parking lot.

“People are starting to get a little cranky, so we’ve actually requested more police,” Carpenter said.

“It’s been two hours without a latte,” he joked. “Things can happen. Ugly things can happen.”

Seriously, however, Carpenter said the exercise would not mimic the real impacts of a massive quake, as the number of incidents and the severity of some would likely be much more.

“This is pretty tame,” he said.

Still, planning for the drill took into account the location of fault lines and earthquake-susceptible areas on the island.

Emergency planners also had specific response functions they wanted to test.

More than 20 cities, seven counties, several tribes and state and federal agencies participated in the exercise, and the fake quake spanned the counties of Kitsap, King, Mason, Pierce, Skagit, Snohomish and Thurston counties.

Tuesday’s test on Bainbridge Island was limited to the command-and-control aspects of the EOC, Carpenter said.

“There are no boots on the ground,” he said.

As the drill began to wrap up shortly before noon, Carpenter said he was pleased with how the EOC staff had worked during the drill.

“They’ve accomplished their objectives in getting this place up and running,” Carpenter said.

“And in my opinion, they’ve done a great job,” he said.