Seven crushed cars are buried beneath huge slabs of concrete and the sound of chainsaws fills the air as firefighters cut through the rubble to reach a trapped casualty.
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Thankfully, the collapsed multi-storey car park that confronted dozens of emergency service workers in Hume on Monday was not the real thing.
The scene was staged at the Emergency Services Agency training centre as part of a disaster management exercise for specialist rescue workers from across Australia and New Zealand.
Crews on the ground worked to shore up the structure and make it safe to enter, before using listening devices and cameras to search for trapped people and cutting through the concrete to clear a path to the casualty.
At the same time, workers at Emergency Services Agency headquarters co-ordinated the response, with others stationed at Canberra Airport to receive the workers coming from interstate and overseas.
ACT Fire and Rescue chief officer Mark Brown said in such a situation, even the country's biggest cities would call on help from other jurisdictions.
He said up to 72 people from several jurisdictions could form a disaster management team, making it vital to train together and make sure everyone was on the same page.
"There is a common way of deploying teams, and there are international rules about how these teams work together," Mr Brown said.
"We expect that they’ll work together seamlessly, and that’s what we’re here to test."
ACT Fire and Rescue technical rescue officer Sam Evans said while it would be an "extremely uncommon event" if a large building did collapse in the capital, the consequences would be dire.
"This exactly replicates a major structural collapse in a multi-storey car park," Mr Evans said.
"It is a training environment and we’ve tried to make it as safe as possible, but there are significant hazards that are exactly what you would find at an actual collapse site."
While the likelihood of a major building collapse in Canberra is low, our emergency services workers could be catapulted into the thick of such a disaster elsewhere.
Mr Evans said 12 ACT Fire and Rescue workers were on an international deployment roster, and had previously been sent to New Zealand and Japan as part of the global relief efforts that followed major earthquakes in 2011.
NSW Fire and Rescue leading station officer Clay Allison, who was at Monday's exercise, is one worker who has travelled extensively as part of disaster management efforts.
Mr Allison said he had specialised in urban search and rescue for 25 of his 37 years as an emergency services worker, and had been deployed to disaster scenes including the Thredbo landslide and 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Mr Allison said his experience in those situations had taught him that training exercises were critical in making a real-life response seamless.
"It’s not our place to arrive in another country and then be dependent on that country to support us," he said.
"We need to know that our team can function and that we’re fully supportive of ourselves, so that the only thing that we need from another country that we’ve deployed to is transport and security.
"We take all our own accommodation, we treat our own water, we take our own food."
