When students arrived on Monday, leaders read them a scenario. At 1:13 p.m., a magnitude 6.0 earthquake had struck Albany. It was a local crustal fault, the scenario explained, not the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Students at the training center had felt about 45 seconds of shaking and a couple of small aftershocks. The quake had damaged bridges in the area, and liquefaction along Interstate 5 meant no one could leave and no supplies could get in for about five days. The camp had no power and no running water. Radios were the main way to communicate.
Aid was going first to the most populated, highest-need areas. Fortunately, the scenario said, the students had come prepared to stay a week and knew how to survive without modern conveniences. They would spend the week building small housing structures and learning to be two weeks ready.
The story moved with the week. Kayla Thompson, who co-wrote it, described the beats: internet restored Tuesday morning; then a call to incident command from the local hospital, whose damaged emergency department could not keep up with patients. It requested three structures by 8 p.m. Thursday. Roads remained closed, but incident command had secured air assets to fly the units in. Then power returned, then roads, then “okay, we are now stable, the structures are built and we’re able to go home.”
On Tuesday night the program director raised the stakes for the builders. A coastal town had become an island in the scenario, reachable only by helicopter, and its clinic needed a shelter it could turn into a medical suite. A retirement center in central Oregon needed shelter for residents who could not tolerate extreme heat or cold. The first team to finish an 8x12 shelter would answer the call. “Can you keep yourself in the simulation, yes or no?” he asked. When a student asked what would happen to teams that fell behind, he turned it back on them: “How can you help everybody get there together?”
The scenario also set each village’s objectives. On day one, Levi Hopkins asked Builder Village C how many structures it would finish by Friday. The answer was a minimum of three. He asked the communications students the same question. “Prove that houses were made and construction happen[ed],” one said.
What the review said. The leadership review called the scenario “an afterthought.” The team wrote it late, introduced it on day one and rarely mentioned it again in whole-camp briefings. When communications students joined a scenario-writing meeting midweek, it became more fun and more present. But few activities tied back to it.
To keep a scenario alive:
Write it before camp, with a daily update for each morning brief.
Open the week with it, before check-in (see the article on running arrival day).
Ask every instructor to connect their session to it. The review gave an example: “Today we learn about fire extinguishers because your building from village A almost caught fire due to fuels ignition caused by downed powerlines in an earthquake aftershock.”
Give the camp one clear, measurable objective, such as a number of shelters by Friday.
Have communications students help write the daily updates and announce them.
Add recovery to the story. With an earthquake, the review suggested search and rescue, debris clearing, restoring essential services, seismic retrofits and purifying water.