You may have noticed the unusual way in which millions of Southern Californians spent Thursday morning, before many used the rest of the week to flee wildfires.

At 10 a.m. they set off alarms, ducked under desks, headed for hospitals and did all the other things a population normally does when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes. It was practice for the "Big One," the San Andreas Fault quake everyone knows is inevitable, though hopefully not in their lifetime.

The Great Southern California ShakeOut (shakeout.org) was apparently one of the great mock disaster drills of all time. Lucky students were tagged with phony injuries, which emergency responders were supposed to triage. If Northeastern liberals had been better organized this fall, they would have concocted some similar run-through, to practice crowding highways to Canada in the event Sarah Palin had been elected vice president.

Give the Californians credit -- they're not counting on some namby-pamby quake in which a few tchotchkes fall off a shelf. Their model involved 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and $200 billion in potential damage from damaged buildings, crumbled highways, widespread fires and other devastation.

On the other hand, it might shut down Hollywood production of the next insipidly worshipful docudrama about some (pick one: athlete/musician/politician) who overcame (racism/disability/poverty) to gain (fortune/prizes/women). So, on balance, the earthquake is really a wash.

Some duck-and-cover controversy surrounded the ShakeOut.

This was different, however, from the criticism that arose during the Cold War, questioning the value of schoolchildren using the duck-and-cover if they see a giant mushroom cloud outside the windows about to turn them to toast. (Those 1950s-60s skeptics neglected to acknowledge that use of the duck-and-cover would prevent those children from bruising their knees and elbows in a mad dash for the door.)

The recent eruption in California involved a challenge to duck-and-cover by the notorious "Triangle of Life" movement. These folks contended that if you're under a desk or table in a big earthquake, you stand a good chance of getting crushed underneath. They claimed that people should just lie down next to a sturdy object, and if a building crumbles, large debris will hit the object and fall over a person. That's your triangle effect right there.

Hogwash, said emergency response officials in California. Unlike buildings in developing countries, U.S. structures meet safety standards that generally would prevent them from pancaking on top of tables and doorways and trapping people underneath.

A scientist from the U.S. Geological Survey Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project called the spread of the alternative offered to drop-and-cover an "Internet phenomenon" that should be ignored. However, if The Morning File were running the ShakeOut, it would have conducted tests to be sure. We might have put some members of the cast of "Beverly Hills 90210" under a table and some beside it, knocked down their building, and analyzed the result.

One of the joys of living in Western Pennsylvania is the minimal fear we have of perishing in earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis and the like. The lack of these Darwinian natural disasters is an oft-underlooked factor in the healthy size of our senior population, relative to other areas where grandma might have been here today and gone tomorrow, thanks to Mother Nature.

We're also much better off than decades ago by virtue of the steel industry's local disintegration. Once upon a smoky time, we might have been a useful target for a nuclear foe, in order to cripple the nation's productivity. Not likely now. What's left to aim their warheads at -- the American Eagle headquarters on the South Side, in order to attack teenage girls' fashion sensibilities? Fire away.

Still, there are a few things Western Pennsylvania might be wise to prepare for, following Southern California's example. It could benefit all of us down the road if the region's emergency management centers would coordinate mock exercises for the following:

• Late evening hours for Downtown restaurants and shops. There may be a day when sufficient people live in the Golden Triangle to make it bustle regularly after dark, instead of just for rare weekend nights. Would we be prepared for that eventuality, or would our societal infrastructure be unable to cope? Better practice to find out.

• Reform of the Pennsylvania Legislature. Authorities could designate a day on which we would see what life is like with half the number of lawmakers, and their perks similarly reduced. It would be nice for us to know if we could really survive.

• The Pitt Panthers basketball team advancing beyond the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. Everyone keeps saying it's going to happen someday, but seeing is believing.