Approximately 15,000 attendees at a two-day JAMFEST concert at HP Pavilion in San Jose are in a literal "race with death" to be treated for a deadly, highly contagious pneumonic plague.

That was the crux of a statewide disaster simulation Wednesday morning called the Golden Guardians. The Palo Alto scenario was that bioterrorists had released airborne pneumonic-plague bacteria sometime during the JAMFEST concert Nov. 13 and 14 using large canisters resembling welding tanks.

Police and medical officials taking part in the one-day exercise said they practiced using every method at their disposal to warn the public of the deadly threat of infection.

Volunteers from throughout Palo Alto took part by role-playing everything from nosy reporters and hysterical mothers in search of their children to City Council candidates in search of publicity for their political campaigns.

At an emergency-volunteer base at Cubberley Community Center, volunteers offered their help.

"I saw that a half hour ago there was a 7.7 earthquake in Chile, so it could happen at any moment," Jan Brooks, who played the role of an engineer from Cisco looking to offer help at the emergency-volunteer center set up at Cubberley.

The purpose of the exercise was to test how well agencies and the public would communicate with one another in a disaster.

"The importance of this exercise is that in disasters you end up with many people who want to volunteer. It's important to have coordination, as evidenced by the frustration with the recent bird rescue," Bruce Heister, a Palo Alto Neighborhood Disaster Activities (PANDA) volunteer from the Downtown North Neighborhood Association, said.

The full scope of the emergency was revealed at a midday press conference at City Hall when Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson and volunteer Paul Gilman, posing as a physician from Stanford Medical Center, outlined the severe danger people faced.

Untreated pneumonic plague could be fatal in more than 80 percent of the cases, Gilman said. Even if treated within the first few days, the survival rate would be 95 percent -- meaning 5 percent of concert-goers would have died.

In addition, those at the concert could easily have infected others before even knowing they were sick, Gilman said.

Gilman said after the conference that he didn't know the true statistics. But Red Cross officials at the press conference said Gilman's estimate that one person could infect five to eight other persons was close to accurate.

At a medical and triage center at Mitchell Park, blue M&Ms were supplied as "antibiotics" against the disease to volunteers pretending to be victims.

Some problems with the system were immediately apparent: There was no signage to direct people to the emergency volunteer center and the medical center at Mitchell Park, volunteers said at an afternoon debriefing.

"Medicine" that was intended to be given to volunteers as prophylaxis before they ventured out among the public did not show up for two hours. And some wireless-radio volunteers stationed at the Mitchell Park medical center did not know the address of the volunteer center when radioed for directions.

City Disaster Services Manager Barbara Cimino said the new city-wide emergency-alert system performed well and the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the police station performed extremely well.

But Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson, who was the EOC director for the drill, said a conference call that was supposed to include all agencies througout the county only had three participating agencies.

The concept of having the medicine centers, called "pods," may also need to be reevaluated, she said.

In a real emergency, Mitchell Park could easily have been overrun with people seeking medicine, and it was clear to responders that more staff would be needed to handle the expected 1,100 people per hour who would come to the medical center for treatment.

The center also lacked a quarantine area to hold people who have symptoms of the plague, they said.

Filling out forms also needs streamlining, both for volunteers and at the medical center, volunteers said. Some volunteers also had no idea whether the classes of medication they were giving patients were related to medications patients said they are allergic to.

Former Palo Alto Mayor Vic Ojakian, participating as a volunteer, told key city administrators that the morning exercise revealed the need to "do more coordination and communication" among responders to the emergency.

"That's the key piece -- communication," Ojakian said.

Councilman Jack Morton agreed and cited an instance in which council members showed up at an emergency center and the person in charge "didn't know what to do with us, and we didn't know what to do with him."

But for all that went wrong, many said the greatest success was the level of cooperation between different departments -- and with the public.

Fire Chief Nick Marinaro said that people from all departments were more comfortable in their roles than in the past.

This year was the first time the emergency volunteer center was entirely run by volunteers and participants said it worked well.

Six neighborhoods in the Palo Alto Neighborhood Association (PAN) -- Crescent Park, Adobe Meadow, Midtown, Barron Park, Meadow Park and Green Meadow,and Channing House and California Avenue business district -- held their own drills, taking instructions provided by the Emergency Operations Center and utilizing block captains to identify anyone who was ill or might have gone to the concert.

Stanford radio statio KZSU also effectively streamed information online, association representatives said.

"The purpose of doing this is learning -- and we cannot learn and improve if we don't make mistakes," City Manager Frank Benest said.

Chief Johnson said an after-action report will be prepared and posted on the city's Web site. A debrief will be presented to the City Council on Dec. 10.

The annual drill has been conducted by the State of California Governor's Office of Homeland Security since 2004.