Seattle Seafirst Banking On Quake Preparedness With Puget Sound Destined For Major Jolt, Company Wants Its Employees To Be Ready

The office was turned upside down: People were screaming, children were dead and blood flowed from the victims of a devastating earthquake.

Dani Folsom had been impaled by a metal shaft, but her reaction may have seemed a little out of the ordinary.

“I think it’s great!” said Folsom, a contract negotiator for Seafirst bank who was participating in the mock earthquake staged by the Red Cross.

In a basement storeroom reconfigured to look like a devastated office, several Seafirst employees received training recently from the Red Cross on how to conduct a rescue effort.

The realism was stark. Financial officer Jim Dockstader gushed blood from the stump of a severed arm. Customer-service employee Colleen Lane had a broken arm and a dead child.

The fake blood and terrified moans - along with one drill performed in the dark to simulate a power outage - give employees a better idea of what a real earthquake is like.

“We’d been preparing all week, building up confidence, and we all felt really good we could do it,” said loan closer Nancy Lambert. “If I walked up to somebody bleeding, I’d know what to do.”

Preparedness has taken on added importance over the past decade, as geologic research has changed the scope of disaster that Puget Sound companies might expect.

Previously, it was predicted that the magnitude 7.1 quake of 1949 was about the worst the region could expect, and that the “Big One” was only a California concern.

But scientists have since discovered pre-pioneer upheavals, landslides and tsunami waves on the Washington coast and around Seattle, plus a major fault running right under the city. It’s now believed that Western Washington could be hit by an earthquake of magnitude 9 or 9.5 - close to the biggest on record - every few centuries, plus a 7.1 quake every century, and a 6.5 temblor every 35 years.

Seafirst has taken the situation seriously, spending $250,000 to bolt furniture to walls, buy rescue equipment and train employees in first aid and search and rescue.

Bringing the bank branches back on-line in the hours after such a disaster is the idea behind the training, said Gennie Thompson, contingency planning officer.

“You can’t recover a local economy unless the banks are functioning,” Thompson said.

Bank of America, the California-based parent of Seafirst, had 43 branches shut down by the Northridge earthquake of 1994 near Los Angeles. Within two days, all but 16 were open and 90 percent of the bank’s automated-teller machines were operating, said spokeswoman Shannon Jones.

Safeco Insurance also takes earthquake preparedness seriously, especially after one of its branch offices in Los Angeles was knocked out during the Northridge quake, spokeswoman Pat Hillis said.

The company has initiated a training program, stocked its offices with food, water and equipment, and spent several million dollars retrofitting its buildings.