A woman, her face a ghostly white and her clothing covered in blood, screams hysterically.

As she hyperventilates, she cradles what remains of her right arm — after being hit by sharp debris during an earthquake, it has been reduced to a bloody stump.

Outdoors, a group of people in neon vests and hard hats call out for a man named Joe as they spread out in a line covering the expanse of the parking lot and search under trucks and rubble.

To their right, others are using the practice of cribbing to rescue a person trapped under fallen debris.

This was the scene during the Issaquah Community Emergency Response Team’s disaster simulation, held at the city of Issaquah Public Works building on Saturday.

The all-day exercise, which was the eighth of nine CERT classes, portrayed the destruction that could ensue after “the big one” — the massive earthquake for which the Northwest is due — hits. CERT class members acted out what they would do in such a situation, putting their seven weeks of acquired knowledge to the test outside of the classroom.

At different stations, team members practiced putting out a small fire, using cribbing to lift up a piece of heavy material and rescue a dummy trapped underneath, communicating with radios, searching for an elderly dementia patient outdoors, searching for victims inside an earthquake-ravaged building and doing medical triage.

Saturday’s drill brought together not only the current CERT class members, but also graduates of the CERT program who came back to help as team leaders and refresh their own disaster skills.

“If you come back next year as a team leader, you learn 10 times more,” said CERT volunteer Jeremy Grady, who has professional experience in law enforcement and search and rescue.

Meeting weekly for two months (for a total of 24 hours) and using a FEMA-based curriculum, CERT classes cover fire safety, preparing for terrorist attacks and a wide variety of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tornadoes, medical triage, incident command, disaster psychology, and search and rescue.

Grady said that the more residents there are spread throughout the area who are familiar with the CERT fundamentals, the better-prepared the entire city can be in the event of a natural disaster. After all, it’s not likely that all CERT class alumni would be in the same place when the earthquake occurs.

“If the earthquake hits when I’m in Fred Meyer, I’m going to grab five to 10 people [nearest to me] and form a CERT team,” he said. “There are 600 volunteers we have in this city — that’s huge. If we can use 24-hour trained CERT members to find a dementia patient, that frees up a trained search and rescue [expert]to find someone with a broken leg in technical backcountry.”

In the event of an earthquake, volcano or other disaster, CERT alumni are not expected to report for duty and go rescue Issaquah residents unless they want to. Grady said that even if a CERT member just uses their skills to help themselves and their own family members, it is still benefits the community because it makes for fewer people first responders need to worry about.

“The general concept is to be able to take care of yourself and then your family and then your neighbors. We want you to be able to do something,” Grady said. “Everyone should learn it, but you don’t have to learn it at some massive, epic level.”

Jennifer Caldwell Ciarvella took the CERT class last year and came back on Saturday as a volunteer, where she found herself tasked with acting out the part of a severely-injured earthquake victim. Before the drill began, Ciarvella was painted with blood-red makeup and given a false stump arm to wear under her sleeve to make the experience all the more realistic for CERT members.

“I walked in expecting to be a team leader and instead lost a hand,” Ciarvella joked.

In spite of the horrific scene, CERT members had to keep a cool head and locate all of the victims inside the building. They spoke to the survivors to determine what their injuries were, and tagged them with ribbons accordingly — red for life-threatening injuries, yellow for injuries not requiring immediate attention and green for walking wounded.

The most difficult part came after tagging victims. Although the victims were screaming, crying and in need of comfort, it was necessary to walk away from those with lighter injuries in order to find other people who were in need.

“The screaming was disconcerting — I wasn’t prepared for it,” CERT class member Lisa Salazar said. “The hardest part was walking away from someone screaming.”

“We increase the realism as much as possible to give you that experience,” Grady said.

Ciarvella said that she was surprised by the variety of responses people gave her, but said that having such a graphic scene was a great way to get people ready for the emotionally-harrowing experience of a natural disaster.

“When emotions get so high like that, unless you have drills, you won’t be prepared,” she said.

Grady himself got into CERT after being caught off-guard with a tiny baby at home in the two-week power outage of the 2006 Hannukah Eve Windstorm. Soon after, Grady enrolled in the Issaquah CERT class, and went on to make a secondary career for himself out of emergency response.

“I wanted more and more experience to be able to look out for my family,” he said.

The point, he said, is not to live each day in fear of the mega-quake or of Mount Rainier erupting, but to make sure that if this does happen, you are ready.

“We’re preparing in case that happens, because the risk of not preparing is not one we want to take,” Grady said.

Fall CERT classes run weekly from Sept. 20 to Nov. 8.

CERT volunteer Jennifer Caldwell Ciarvella, right, who last year completed the CERT course, played the part of a woman who lost her hand during a major earthquake. Nicole Jennings/staff photo

Even when confronted with realistic and sometimes grotesque-looking injuries, CERT students had to keep a cool head and figure out how best to help the victims. Nicole Jennings/staff photo

The class practiced lining up and doing outdoor search and rescue to find a dementia patient who became lost after the earthquake. Nicole Jennings/staff photo

Makeup was used to make the actors look as though they really were bruised and bleeding, so as to make the experience all the more genuine for the class. Nicole Jennings/staff photo

Part of the medical triage process included knowing when to sit and comfort a victim with more emotional than physical pain, and when to make the difficult decision to leave the person’s side to search for and aid people with more serious injuries. Nicole Jennings/staff photo

Class members practiced carrying victims on makeshift stretchers. Nicole Jennings/staff photo