If disaster strikes.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Six children on a fifth-floor balcony screamed for rescue as four Oregon National Guard soldiers entered the switch-backing stairwell of a typical high-rise building. In the darkness of the unfamiliar space - the building's lights were out - they encountered unexpected barriers. A third-floor door was locked. As they climbed up the steps, water poured down, simulating a broken pipe.

"Where are the Army men now?" asked

9-year-old Matthew Pilling, who joined a Eugene fire captain's children in serving as mock victims for this rescue drill.

"They're coming," assured 19-year-old Micah Smith, the daughter of Capt. Brian Smith, even as the soldiers burst through the dripping balcony door in their combat fatigues.

The mock earthquake scenario in the Eugene Fire Department training structure was not typical of the way National Guard members spend their two weeks of annual summer training. Nor was the place they slept last week. Their green canvas tent was pitched beside two Army Humvees at "Camp Pasture," the rural Elmira backyard of their medic unit commander, Sgt. 1st Class Bruce Cutshall.

Cutshall is a 20-year veteran of the Eugene Fire Department, but that's not what prompted him and other Oregon Guard leaders to push for the unorthodox training this year.

Cutshall was among more than 2,100 Oregon citizen soldiers who volunteered to deploy to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many said they were frustrated by their inability to do more to help people in the devastated city - in part because of poor coordination with local civilian agencies.

In response, Cutshall and other firefighters arranged for training sessions with such Oregon emergency workers. After a joint exercise with a Portland-area fire department earlier this summer, Cutshall teamed up with the Oregon Department of Forestry, Lane County Fire District 1 and the Eugene Fire Department to provide a week of joint training here.

Spc. Charles Rose of Aurora said the exercises were useful - particularly the search and rescue activities that were part of Wednesday night's mock earthquake response.

"Usually, we train separately from civilian agencies," he said. "It's valuable to see what their capabilities are - and for them to see what the military's capable of."

Soldiers typically have been valued in such circumstances for "making sure it's safe as far as nobody shooting at" people doing rescue work, Rose said. But some disasters - "Katrina is an obvious example" - stretch local police, fire and rescue workers so thin that soldiers also could help more directly, he said.

Lt. Derek Grafton, a search technician for the Eugene Fire Department, said the earthquake drill was conceived as a way to practice for just such a scenario, when overwhelming demands would leave a fire department "very much maxed out."

And the drill accurately simulated some of the problems National Guard soldiers could face if asked to lend such assistance, Cutshall said.

"Especially after an earthquake, you have no idea what you're going to find inside a building," he said. "It could be anything from broken water mains and open gas lines to frightened animals and scared people."

Spc. Dustin Cavette of Salem also noted that some of the techniques demonstrated by Eugene firefighters could be valuable for soldiers in urban warfare situations such as Iraq.

"Basically, they're searching blind," he said of another part of Wednesday's earthquake drill, in which two soldiers joined two firefighters in walking through a dark, rubble-strewn house seeking buried mannequins representing quake "survivors."

Pvt. Kahlil Haamid of Portland agreed, praising the safety and effectiveness of the firefighters' technique of sweeping obscured rooms in a line, an arm's width apart.

Pfc. Joshua Meng of Sandy, who was among the soldiers deployed to New Orleans, called this week's training - which also included mock mountain and vehicle extrication rescues - "extremely useful if I am ever in a natural disaster again."

"Interagency cooperation is something we should practice regularly," he said.

Despite Camp Pasture's bucolic setting along the banks of the Long Tom River, the four Guardsmen enjoyed a more exciting week than their counterparts who opted for more conventional training earlier this summer at the Oregon National Guard headquarters near the Portland Airport.

They spent most of their time unloading and taking inventory of container boxes full of equipment returned from Afghanistan this spring with the Oregon Guard's latest Middle East deployment.

The four also most likely enjoyed tastier chow: Members of the Veneta Church of Christ cooked lunches and dinners each day, and Eugene firefighters hosted a barbecue after Wednesday's drill.