RENO — Eight teams of mine rescue workers from Nevada engaged this week in a competition of skills they hope are never needed in real life.

“We train, train, train, hoping we never use it,” said Carlos Cuevas, a 16-year veteran of the Cortez gold mine 100 miles outside of Elko.

The Metal/Nonmetal National Mine Rescue Contest is this week at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, featuring a total of 40 teams from 16 states putting their life-saving abilities to the test. These teams are comprised of miners who volunteer for rescue duty at active mines and are being put through their paces to see how prepared they are for real disasters.

Eddie Lopez, the contest director who works for the U.S. Department of Labor in Dallas, explained that the contest has several elements. It starts with a technical competition, in which team members must make all the necessary equipment checks to ensure it is working properly for use in the mine. This includes self-contained breathing apparatus, gas-measuring instruments, communications devices and more. Then there is a first aid contest in which medics tackle real-life scenarios.

Finally, there is the simulated mine emergency, in which the team fully suits up and makes its way through a “mine” — a maze of large cloth sheets — where various disaster scenarios are posted with signs on the ground. Judges follow the teams, checking them for how quickly and accurately they complete all their tasks. They encounter everything from human victims to fires to gas leaks. At the end, the team with the fewest point deductions wins.

Chris Hood, 28 and a five-year worker and rescue team member at the Cortez mine, said competitions such as this are about more than bragging rights, which the Cortez team earned four years ago when it took first place in the overall category at this biannual event. It is about facing difficult challenges and learning new things in a setting where lives are not at risk, he added.

“I’d rather be surprised and put to the test here,” he said.

The surprise this year, according to Cuevas, was a tricky safety scenario in which the team had to think out of the box. The situation actually called for the team to pump fresh air over a fire — something they would never do in real life because of the risk of feeding the fire or igniting other gases.

“They try to make it extremely difficult to make people think, to make people make hard decisions,” Hood said.

Winners from the three-day event will be honored at an awards banquet at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino on Thursday evening. The event is hosted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration.