WHITE HALL — Thousands of people in and around the Pine Bluff Arsenal spent the better part of Wednesday preparing for an event they hope they’ll never have to see in real life.
   
The event, an annual exercise of the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, involved a mock explosion that resulted in four injuries, including exposure to the nerve agent VX.
   
In the scenario a forklift is operating in an igloo containing VX-filled land mines. When the battery in the forklift explodes, it sends the forklift, which is holding one drum containing land mines, crashing into the igloo door and causes three land mines to leak the deadly agent. VX is thick and doesn’t evaporate quickly, so it likely won’t produce a plume, but it can kill those who encounter it.
   
Sirens signaling an accident went off at 8:47 a.m. and the arsenal went into lockdown.
   
Within five minutes 40 employees at the arsenal’s Emergency Operations Center began calling officials nearby to discuss whether residents should evacuate or seek shelter in place. The employees were tracking wind patterns and communicating with those near the scene of the mock accident about the status of the patients.
   
“You have to have your people prepared in case anything does happen,” said Army spokesman Dick Sloan, who escorted members of the media through the arsenal during the exercise. For the first time since 9/11, the arsenal allowed newsmen into the arsenal during the exercise.
   
Security was so tight that despite prior arrangements, it took several phone calls and 20 minutes for the media van to get into the arsenal and another several minutes to gain entry to the operations center.
   
At the clinic for the workers playing injured, emergency medical technicians, nurses and doctors discussed the patients they would be treating. One had an eye injury, another had an object stuck in his neck that would likely result in a spine injury. All had been exposed to the nerve agent in the scenario.
   
The injured first had to be showered and sponged off in a white tent outside the clinic. Actual showers were skipped because of the cold weather Wednesday.
   
Inside the small clinic, charts recapped the symptoms that exposure to each agent will cause. The chart for such nerve agents as VX listed sudden loss of consciousness and convulsions under “large exposure.”
   
About 150 evaluators from across the country monitored the exercise and will have a preliminary report Monday on performance and the improvements needed, Sloan said. The report will be available to the public about 45 to 60 days after that.
   
Wednesday’s exercise cost millions of dollars and involved thousands from across the region and country, Sloan said.
   
Besides arsenal personnel, the exercise involved personnel from Jefferson Regional Medical Center, the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services, and Jefferson, Grant, Saline, Pulaski, Lonoke, Prairie, Arkansas, Lincoln, Cleveland and Dallas counties.
   
The arsenal, one of eight sites where the nation stores its chemical weapons, holds about 12 percent of the United States’ chemical-weapons stockpile. Incineration of the chemical weapons, which began March 29, is on hold until May because of an incinerator maintenance project.