Simulation pedagogies, while offering powerful potential benefits to students, often have difficulty in combining two desirable outcomes: experiencing the consequential stakes associated with true crisis situations, on the one hand, with the direct relatability associated with more "realistic" hands-on scenarios, on the other. In this respect, we believe many faculty members may have an unrecognized resource readily available to them: their own university. At our university, we led a collaborative effort between the Department of Political Science, the University Honors Program, and the Department of Public Safety to construct a simulation exercise for use in a class on political ethics based on the same tabletop exercise the university's own administrative leadership used to prepare for a major earthquake scenario. The professor and the Assistant Chief of Public Safety worked together to reconfigure the earthquake scenario simulation with "ethical land mines" (potential harm to students or rescue workers, concealment of relevant information from the public, etc.) designed to illustrate course concepts and problems. In this article, we describe the exercise we constructed from preparation to enactment to post-exercise analysis. In conclusion, we offer suggestions as to additional potential opportunities for collaboration on simulation exercises with universitiy administrative offices.