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 "I froze," said Hart, who leads the school district of 650
students in the small community north of Oklahoma City. Several of
the district's buildings were damaged in the July quake as ceiling
tiles shattered and walls cracked.
School district officials are now planning their first earthquake
drills, Hart said. They are not alone.
On Thursday the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)and other
government agencies are organizing the "Great ShakeOut" earthquake
drill, a series of events across the United States aimed at
preparing people to survive damaging seismic activity.
About 3 million people are signed up to participate across 14
central states that include Oklahoma, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois
and for the first time, Texas, up from 2.76 million a year ago,
organizers said. Nationwide, nearly 19 million people are registered
for the drills, FEMA said.
 While common in California and other states where quakes are
frequent, such drills are still relatively new in the central United
States. But they are gaining in popularity as earthquake activity
surges in both frequency and intensity.
"In Oklahoma when you have a natural disaster like a tornado you are
trained to get underground," Hart said. "In an earthquake you don't
want to get underground. What do you do?"
The ShakeOut (http://www.shakeout.org/) drills are targeted at
everyone from business owners to first responders such as firemen
and paramedics, but most of the drills are being held at public
schools.
In Thursday's drills, the slogan is 'drop, cover and hold on." At
the first rumblings, people should drop to the floor, take cover
under sturdy furniture or against an interior wall, and hold on
until the shaking stops, emergency management experts recommend.
"The scientific community can't predict an earthquake. The only
thing we can do is really push preparedness," said Jim Wilkinson,
executive director of the Central United States Earthquake
Consortium, which is helping coordinate drills.
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People in Oklahoma, which had a magnitude 4.5 quake Saturday near
the north-central Oklahoma town of Cushing, are particularly in need
of the training, officials said. The Oct. 10 quake rattled homes for
hundreds of miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Some quakes, including some of those in Oklahoma, are thought to be
induced by the injection of wastewater associated with oil and gas
work into deep disposal wells, while others are considered a natural
shifting along fault lines that run deep below the earth's surface.
Noticeable quakes, above magnitude 3.0, now strike Oklahoma at an
average rate of roughly two per day, compared with two or so per
year before 2009.
"You don't know where or when it will happen. Everyone needs to know
how to respond," said Brian Blake, program coordinator for the
earthquake consortium.
(Reporting by Carey Gillam in Kansas City, Mo.; Editing by David
Bailey and Eric Walsh)
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