COEUR d'ALENE — Snap!

Back to reality.

This weekend I find myself recovering from the four-day Cascadia Rising earthquake and tsunami disaster training involving federal, state and local officials, emergency responders and role players from throughout the Northwest and British Columbia.

The exercise simulated a 9.0-magnitude earthquake centered 95 miles west of Eugene, Ore., in the Cascadia Subduction Zone that resulted in a tsunami causing more than 10,000 deaths and 30,000 injuries on the West Coast from northern California to Canada.

While there was no damage or shaking in Idaho, our state and county played a pivotal role during the drill to help about 40,000 evacuees expected to arrive in Kootenai County seeking help and refuge.

Covering the event as it was unfolding each of the four days was educational, interesting and exhausting. If it had actually been taking place, I likely would have had to request relief as a reporter about halfway through.

When I told local organizers that I'd like to be included in all of the exercises, including setting up the emergency operations center (EOC) at the Kootenai County Sheriff's Office, the conference call involving local officials and businesses preparing for the evacuees, the medical needs shelters and Friday's grand finale airplane collision at the Coeur d'Alene Airport, I was met with open arms. Really, I was.

What I discovered is that the training wasn't far off from realities I've experienced as a reporter. At times, I had a hard time distinguishing if the role players were playing their parts exceptionally well or were dead serious when working with me as a member of the media. Maybe it was a little bit of both.

After being given access to the EOC on Wednesday to give you, our readers, a taste of what the communications control center of a disaster is really like, I was nicely asked to leave because of limited space in a confined room. And that only makes sense because I'd almost certainly be given the boot — if allowed in at all — in a real-life scenario.

At the plane crash, I nabbed Phil Cummings, the airport's operations manager, for a quote as I was seeking the cause of the crash.

Unclear if he was an actual role player in the exercise, I didn't care. I needed to cover my bases to get as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible. North Idaho needed to know!

Regardless of his involvement, Cummings played along and spilled to me what had happened. It was even more information than the Northern Lakes Fire District's Jim Lyon, the public information officer on scene, had at the time.

Lyon, as he would probably do in real life, interrupted my interview with Cummings to get the information himself. Afterward, Cummings resumed speaking with me.

The situation was among those during the exercises that was as real as it gets. And that helped all involved.

When I returned to The Press office from the medical needs shelter on Thursday, still playing the role, I explained to our editors that this story is much bigger than a single-reporter assignment.

Well aware of that, the editors had reporter Mary Malone on the broader-picture story of the events taking place in other areas throughout the region. Again, reality and training were intertwined.

By Friday, covering the earthquake and the ripple effect here had me shaken. As I rushed out the door in the morning to the plane crash exercise, I grabbed what I thought was a homemade pizza calzone from the freezer for my lunch.

When I got back to the office from the crash, frazzled as I would be in real life and prepared to digest the catastrophic events of the morning, I discovered I had a danish in my lunch bag instead.

Some things — whether during training or real life — never change.

Brian Walker covered the four-day Cascadia Rising earthquake and tsunami training exercises as if it was an actual event. In real life, he's a staff writer for the Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls Press.