No one may have felt the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck just south of Reno on Thursday, but to some people it was very real.

“To us this is not a drill,” Sparks Fire Captain Bob Laylon said. “These are real-life exercises.”

Six members of the Sparks Fire Department were among more than 2,000 local, state and federal personnel participating in Vigilant Guard ’08, an emergency preparedness and response exercise sponsored by the National Guard. Thursday was the first day of the three-day exercise, which will run around the clock – just like rescue and clean-up efforts in the event of a real disaster.

During the course of the exercise, buildings will collapse, hazardous materials will spill and there will be extensive death and injuries. Personnel will work on triage, mobile hospital setup, ground and air evacuations and damage assessment.

Under a hot sun on the dusty grounds of the Regional Training Facility in north Reno, Laylon said the 72 hours of exercises provide a tremendous opportunity for teams to practice skills they work on all year long. The Vigilant Guard is being funded with $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Training like this doesn’t come around very often,” Laylon said. “We don’t have the money or resources to put on a drill of this magnitude on the city level.”

In building the rubble pile, local contractors used pieces of concrete vaults and recently demolished structures, such as the former Nevada Inn, the loading dock adjacent to the Freight House and a motel from the future site of the downtown Reno baseball stadium.

To make the drill as realistic as possible, mannequins have been buried in the carefully constructed rubble pile and rescue workers must assess what it takes to get them out. The Sparks Fire team brought its heavy rescue truck, equipped with all kinds of apparatus for rescuing people from fallen buildings. Sometimes this requires the use of jackhammers or concrete breakers, Laylon said, and sometimes it takes heavy-duty airbags or pneumatic lifts to delicately move chunks of collapsed structures weighing thousands of pounds.

“The potential of someone getting hurt is very real,” Laylon said. “We will work on proper shoring because if you move one thing, another could move. Those pieces of concrete weigh several tons. It’s going to be a challenge.”

Steve Frady, of the Reno Fire Department, detailed the scenario for the media Thursday afternoon: A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the area near Mt. Rose Highway at 6 a.m. Seismologists from the University of Nevada, Reno predict such an earthquake lead to death and damage estimated at $11 billion.

The exercise began with the Reno Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue Team (USAR) as the first responder sifting through the rubble of a collapsed college dormitory with dummy victims trapped inside. The Reno team then calls for help from the Nevada National Guard’s 92nd Civil Support Team from Las Vegas and other National Guard Civil Support teams.

On Friday, a 5.0-magnitude “aftershock” is scheduled to hit Incline Village, with the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District sent to sift through the rubble of another collapsed college dormitory. Six members of the Reno USAR team will fly by helicopter to assist.

After sifting through rubble at the Reno facility through the end of Saturday, rescue teams will move on to hazardous materials exercises using railroad cars and the fire training tower.

Frady said this is the first time a drill of this size and scale has been conducted in northern Nevada.

“This is going to be a test not just of skills but of decision making,” he said.