Three power outages within one week found UC Davis officials especially prepared. The outages occurred within days of an emergency drill involving a mock campuswide electrical blackout. The real outages on April 12, April 15 and Tuesday left portions of campus without power for periods of up to five hours-disrupting classes, labs, offices and, in the first case, veterinary surgeries. While inconvenient, the outages were relatively routine and easily repaired by campus electricians. Critical activities, such as the animal operations at the Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital, resumed with the help of back-up generators. The pretend blackout on April 8, on the other hand, presented campus officials with a disaster on a scale never seen here before. In the scenario, an electrical transformer exploded--possibly the work of a terrorist group. The explosion and resulting fire cloaked nearby Interstate 80 in smoke and caused a campuswide power outage. A chain reaction of crises ensued--freeway traffic collisions, people trapped in campus elevators, buildings flooding, telephone communications disrupted, animal surgeries interrupted and people sickened by toxic fumes. To most of the campus, there were no visible signs of this mock disaster. Campus life went on just as usual. But to about 50 people gathered in a back room of the campus police department, the emergency seemed very real--growing worse with every update. "It was tense, particularly early on," said campus Police Chief Calvin Handy. The drill marked the first time the campus had activated an "emergency operations center," said Ev Profita, campus emergency planner. Where typical campus emergencies usually involve one department, such as the fire or police department, a large-scale emergency would require coordination by a cross-campus team of officials, Profita said. The emergency drill involved participants from the police and fire departments, as well as the Office of Administration, Facilities Services, Student Services, Office of Planning and Budget, and Public Communications. Goals of the exercise, Profita said, were to test the emergency operations center, evaluate communications and examine the campus ability to deal with a damaged electrical utility system. While it sometimes looked like "organized chaos" inside the operations center, Profita said, participants rose to the occasion. "I think it went very well," she said. Handy, UC Davis' designated emergency director, said the campus has come far in disaster preparedness over the past year when few people outside the police and fire departments had training in handling emergencies. Drill participants exceeded expectations, he said. "I think we really did a good job with it. There were things we have to work on, but we have a really good idea of where we are now and the work we have to do." The campus Emergency Preparedness Policy Group met last week to review lessons from the drill. Among those lessons, Handy said, was a need to address backup power supplies. Louie Slayton, a Facilities Services superintendent who helped design the drill, said that in most outages power can be rerouted from other parts of the campus electrical system. But if a transformer had caused a campuswide blackout like one in the drill, Slayton estimated, it would take 16 hours to fully restore power. Researchers need to determine if their work would be harmed by a long-term power outage and whether they need backup power supplies, Slayton said. The campus plans to hold emergency drills at least once a year. Some of them will be "field" exercises with mock victims. Such preparations are critical to saving lives and property in real emergencies, said Handy, who went through the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Oakland Hills fire while working at UC Berkeley before becoming chief here in 1993. "I think it makes all the difference in the world," he said.