STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Jeff Emerick’s fractured femur didn’t start with the airline crash.

It actually started 3 and a half hours earlier when Rich LaBoute dragged a knife through his jeans and ripped the jeans open with his hands.

LaBoute plastered a lump on Emerick’s thigh with a “mud” made of cornstarch, Vaseline and cocoa powder. Then he took a sponge, dotting the “injury” with a “road rash” made of melted lipstick.

He added some more mud to Emerick’s head, before slicing through it with a plastic knife to open up the wound. Then he slabbed a little transmission grease on and dripped a mixture of baby oil and red food coloring over Emerick’s eye to resemble blood streaming down his face.

“You got hit hard,” quipped LaBoute. “You look like a prize fighter.”

Emerick was the first of more than 40 adults and children who went under LaBoute’s knife and silly putty Saturday as part of an emergency disaster drill at Friedman Memorial Airport.

An incoming plane from Salt Lake City was set to crash at the airport, testing local firefighters and hospital personnel with mass casualties, said Bellevue Fire Chief Greg Beaver, who orchestrated the drill.

Beaver brought in LaBoute, a moulage from Emmett, Idaho, to create realistic wounds.

LaBoute, a first responder himself, learned his makeup skills during a class taught by Homeland Security at Gowen Field in Boise 12 years ago. Thirty people took the class, he said. He’s the only one still applying it.

Since, he has provided the makeup for all kinds of drills, including a granary explosion where he “buried” half a saw blade in a man’s abdomen and a terrorist scenario where he “implanted” nails in people’s heads.

“They teach you stuff but you’ve got to keep developing your own techniques because they don’t teach you everything,” he said, as he began pulling bruise powder and chicken bones out of his non-doctor’s bag.

“I got good enough that the training director for Homeland Security called me one Halloween and said, ‘My wife and I are going to a Halloween party and we really need you to do makeup for us.’ ”

Bree Parrish was in need of a broken right forearm and a “penetrating object to the forehead.”

LaBoute fished a spoon out of his bag with a flat plate that he tried to tape to Parrish’s forehead. But it was too heavy to stay so he resorted to a nail, covering the plate with the mud, which resembled refried beans.

Ilene Woodland’s make-believe hip and pelvic injury brought out the Picasso in him.

“I learned what a lot of these injuries look like by riding in an ambulance for awhile. I go to hospitals and they’re always telling me, ‘Hey, look at this!’” LaBoute said.

Penny Leopold’s broken nose, augmented by blackening under both eyes, got a thumbs up from her husband Norm when she emailed him the picture via phone. But a broken nose didn’t go over so well with elementary school student Nadia Alvarado.

“It’s kind of scary!” she said.

LaBoute brushed an abdomen with rosy red bruise powder signifying internal injuries.

“We’ve got chicken soup if you think you want to throw up for the rescuers,” LaBoute said. “This is an acting job—a lot of it.”

When the last victim had been made up, they were ferried to the make-believe fuselage—a school bus with wings made of snowplow blades.

A scrap metal similar to the material on a plane was set on fire, and someone called 911.

St. Luke’s ambulance was first to show two minutes after the alarm, followed by the airport’s firefighting truck.

Plane crash victims as they watched the fire truck hose down the runway near the plane, dousing a few of the victims as they lay on the ground.

“I’m going to need time and a half for this!” said one of the victims, an airport employee who gamely continued laying there even as icy cold winds raked her wet clothes.

“When I came here 16 years ago in November we had a drill like this and it was snowing then,” noted Beaver.

As other firefighting units showed up, some firefighters concentrated on putting out the fire while others triaged the patients. One confused passenger grabbed a firefighter, asking him to find a dog that had not been on the plane.

Two victims were flown by Life Flight out of Boise to St. Luke’s Wood River. Several more were shuttled by ambulance to the airport manager’s office.

And an hour after the accident had been reported, all the victims wiped off their injuries with butter knives and Handi Wipes and thanked their rescuers over burgers.

“Hopefully, we will never have a big event like this,” said Beaver. “But we have to prepare for it.”