Disaster City: Inside the World's Largest Search-and-Rescue Training Facility
The best way to prepare for catastrophe? Head to the place where they engineer it. March 28, 2009: 4 p.m. Down here it smells like fresh wood. Sawed lumber and shop class. It’s the smell of things being built. The scent is misleading. It’s the mind playing tricks. For Kelly, it’s the opposite of creation. She’s in a hole, 12 feet underground, supine in a rubble tomb. Five seconds ago she was in a building, looking out at another blue-sky day. With a grave convulsion, the ground broke and the building died on itself, and now she is trapped. That’s how disaster works—one moment it’s today and all the days that came before it, and the very next moment the future becomes unrecognizable. She can’t see the dust, but she can feel it in her lungs. She could be alone, jailed for hours, days, her cries getting lost in the rubble. A sudden,...