A mock emergency unfolded yesterday at Honolulu Community College involving a body and a suspicious 50-gallon drum.

But students in HCC's Emergency Response to Hazardous Materials course used real skills to handle it.

The crisis seemed grim enough. A lifeless HCC security officer was face-down on the ground in the courtyard next to the Building 5 cafeteria. Beside the body was a leaky drum that the security officer had been investigating moments earlier.

An HCC Chemical Safety Team had been called in. The area was cordoned off and bystanders hustled away. First responders in chemical protective blue and yellow "moon suits" waded into the danger zone to remove the body and mitigate any immediate public threat. The atmosphere was tense.

"Hey — leave the cart there, and drop the body, decom the body!" someone shouted through an electronic megaphone to suited team members handling the victim.

Through the commotion, team supervisor Erwin Soria tried to explain what was taking place:

"We got called on to respond to a chemical and biological spill, and there's also radiation," said Soria. "So, our entry team went in and assessed the area and came out. And then the backup team went in to do the spill cleanup."

For the public at large, the threat turned out to be nonexistent. For the "dead" crash dummy — too scrawny to be a security guard anyhow — it was all in a day's work. For the 17 responders on the scene, it was all just a test — and grades were being given.

The mock spill was the final exam for the Emergency Response to Hazardous Materials course offered to safety and fire students at HCC.

"The number one purpose of this is for the student credits," said Chulee Grove, professor and safety and health coordinator for HCC, and the course instructor. "And the number two is they all get a certificate that says they've met the OSHA requirements for those who work on hazardous waste sites."

Apart from a few minor glitches — someone forgot the broom, for example — Grove said the team did well.

The students worked effectively as a team, each member being responsible for a specific task.

Stan Espinosa, for instance, was in charge of directing the decontamination of the suited members at the end of the exercise. The process involved moving each member through a series of showers, rinses and scrubs designed to progressively remove more contaminants. Much of the cleansing is done over grating so that contaminants can drain into containers.

"The last thing they do is to wash their inner gloves and rinse them, and then they drop their contaminated masks, gloves and microphones into a bucket that's picked up by a company and decontaminated," said Espinosa, a vocational rehabilitation trainee who has already accepted a job as safety director for a commercial sealant company. He starts the first of January.

Marilynn Ito-Won is the counselor for the Occupational And Environmental Safety Management program at HCC.

"This course is an elective part of that program," said Ito-Won, who watched the mock spill from the sidelines.

Her job is to recommend the OESM program to students who have the aptitude, ability and interest to be a safety manager, environmental specialist, or hazardous material technician, among other things.

"The job opportunities are really vast," she said. "Insurance companies, hospitals, transportation companies, they all need safety officers."