* Illustration: Jim Stoten * At 9:04 on a cold fall morning, Sharie Sanderlin stands in the Portland, Oregon, drizzle, cheerfully awaiting the attack. When it hits, precisely on schedule at 9:06, she and some 275 other victims will speed-walk to their positions amid carefully strewn debris in the blast zone: a blown-apart bus, metal shards, smashed cars. The volunteer wounded are just as dramatically impressive, thanks to fake blood and makeup. Spreading a garbage bag on the wet ground, Sanderlin, a 51-year-old mother of four from nearby Vancouver, Washington, sits with one leg outstretched and checks to make sure her T-shirt isn'tobscuring the bloody laceration on her chest. "It's show time," she says.
The scene is supposed to simulate the effects of a "radiological dispersal device" — a dirty bomb. It's the highlight of Topoff 4, the largest emergency-preparedness drill in US history. Following an elaborate (and mostly classified) script, law enforcement agencies have spent the past few weeks tracking and chasing a fictional supply of cesium-137 stolen from a foreign country and divvied up among terrorist cells in North America. This led to the attack on Portland, as well as incidents in Phoenix and Guam, where similar mock events are under way.
The volunteers for Portland's exercise gathered at 4:30 am in a park north of downtown. "I can't wait to get moulaged," Sanderlin says, using the term for injury-simulating makeup. "Don't you think I need a little more blood on my pants," she giggles as the makeup artist goes to work.
Victims are given an identity, symptoms, and vital signs, all printed on a card worn throughout the day. Over scrambled eggs and coffee, a group of twentysomethings have a good laugh over one of them being assigned "watery and bloody feces." One woman wants to see a stranger's gaping cranial wound.
Sanderlin says she lucked out in this weird injury sweepstakes. Her card reads "Patient is semiconscious and wheezing with each breath. Chest is bleeding profusely through each penetrating wound." As bomb time nears, she practices a few labored breaths.
A little before 9 am, the victims make their way through ground zero to stake out a spot where they will sit or lie injured after the big blast. The props were created by actually blowing up a bus and a lineup of cars at a site somewhere in eastern Washington. Officials tagged and mapped the locations of the debris and then shipped the entire disaster scene to Portland, where it was reassembled for today's event and the mock investigation to follow.
Hanging out of the bus and flung across the ground are blood-stained dummies — the deceased. Pointing to a stray limb and a toddler-sized corpse, Sanderlin says, "It's a lot more sobering once you're out here."
As the police cars and fire trucks arrive, the volunteers — as instructed — begin screaming. They watch as rescuers don hazmat suits, walk bomb-sniffing dogs around a distant perimeter, and clumsily erect decontamination tents. "Why won't you help us?" one actor yells. "Don't let us die!" pleads another. Rescuers finally begin carting the most severely injured from the scene.
As the morning wears on, heavy rain washes away the blood of untended wounds. Sanderlin is eventually loaded into an ambulance and taken to Legacy Emanuel Hospital. That afternoon, she learns that she is among the 147 victims who died. She and the other deceased are photographed, then led over to a makeshift morgue.
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