As it turns out, Portland International Raceway doesn’t have wireless internet, or if it does, I wouldn’t know, since it started pouring rain as soon as the TOPOFF exercise started, and there was no way I was going to haul out my laptop.

The organizers of the terror drill—er, “major exercise”—provided one rain canopy that reporters huddled under, but as soon as a brief press conference started with representatives from FEMA and the Portland Office of Emergency Management, we had to stand in the rain. Sob, I know.

Oh the horror! THE HORRORRRRRRR!!!

At approximately 9:06 am, a pretend bomb exploded on a pretend Max train traveling across the pretend Steel Bridge. It pretend damaged cars and pretend blew debris and victims onto the bridge and into the Willamette River.

What really happened: Last week, the Department of Homeland Security towed a bus to Yakima, where the exploded a bomb on board. They marked where the debris landed, then trucked the whole thing to PIR, which is standing in for the Steel Bridge. A flash bomb was ignited on the bus in order to give something for the TV news cameras to catch.

A few minutes later, a parade of “victims,” covered in space blankets to stay dry and warm, walked out to the scene and took their positions. Then, for a seemingly endless amount of minutes (like, 10), not much happened. The reporters watching the scene, who were kept fenced off about 300 yards from the action, began wondering if we should be troubled by the seeming lack of urgency.

About 14 minutes after the bomb exploded, fire trucks began pulling up. At first, they kept their distance, also troubling, since, in a real life disaster, those few minutes could mean the difference between life and death for some victims. Later, we learned that the firefighters carry monitors that can detect hazardous materials in the air, and that the first responders detected radiological contamination and pulled back to suit up.

From there, it was a lot of, well, just what you’d expect. We were told that the Portland bomb squad was on the scene looking for other explosives, and that the air was being tested for fallout. The 200 victims were either being triaged, “dry decontaminated,” and/or taken to the hospital.

The terror drill is designed to test emergency responses and teach agencies valuable lessons about the effectiveness of their systems. Here’s the valuable lesson that I’ve learned: Emergency response is kinda boring. At least from a football field away.

I’m now off to OHSU, where the “victims” will be “wet decontaminated,” which I imagine means they’ll be hosed off. It’s hard to believe, though, that they could get any wetter than they were in the field, which quickly became soaked under the Portland deluge.