Quake Safe’s Mission Is Earthquake Preparedness for L.A. : Ferne Halgren Battles the Odds in a Bid to Aid Private Schools Ready Themselves for Disaster

If there is no other legacy to the pain and suffering in Mexico City, I hope it will be a legacy to us to take earthquake preparedness seriously and do something. But people really don’t want to talk about earthquake safety. It’s really been a black sheep issue.

--Ferne Halgren, executive director of Quake Safe, an earthquake education organization in West Los Angeles.

Three weeks before Mexico City’s 8.1 earthquake struck on Sept. 19, Ferne Halgren returned from Japan, determined to keep talking about earthquake preparedness--to anyone who would listen.

“Earthquake preparedness is a hard sell here, but in Japan they’re serious about it,” said Halgren, who has been trying to do something about getting Angelenos ready for the big quake since the Sylmar temblor 14 years ago.

During the Sylmar earthquake, Halgren fainted.

Shaking and Falling

“I felt I wouldn’t have reacted that way if I had been better prepared,” she said, explaining that she lived in the Hollywood Hills then and looked out her window to see houses shaking and transformers falling down the hill. “I’ve been seriously preparing ever since.”

Not only did Ferne Halgren read and gather every bit of earthquake material and books she could find, she attended conferences and seminars, talked with geologists and seismic engineers and local and state officials about earthquake safety.

She and her lawyer husband, Jack Halgren, daughter, Jessica, 16, and son, Justin, 12, have secured possessions, shelves, cabinets and the water heater in their home in West Los Angeles, eliminated other earthquake hazards inside and out, and put together an earthquake closet, complete with food, water, blankets, clothing and sturdy shoes, portable lights and radios, extra pairs of eyeglasses, medications, first aid kit and more. The Halgrens just finished having their house bolted to its foundation.

In the years that have passed since the Sylmar quake, Ferne Halgren has become a specialist on the subject of earthquake safety and now runs the nonprofit Quake Safe corporation, dedicated to educating the public about earthquake preparedness.

Halgren is a member of the state Seismic Safety Commission education committee, of the Governor’s Task Force for Earthquake Preparedness and of the Los Angeles City/County Earthquake Advisory Committee. She is also currently working with members of the Junior League of Los Angeles in establishing an earthquake safety program in neighborhoods, similar to Neighborhood Watch.

But her latest effort, under the auspices of Quake Safe, is to start a resource center and library for School Earthquake Preparedness.

“In Japan, they have made earthquake safety a national priority,” said Halgren, who went to Japan on a 10-day tour with several Los Angeles city and county government officials, but paid her own way for the trip.

“Japan is on the same seismic cycle we are. They had the equivalent of an 8.3 in 1854 and they’re gearing up for the next one.

“The Japanese have all kinds of sophisticated pamphlets, booklets for earthquake preparedness,” Halgren said during an interview in her Quake Safe office on Pico Boulevard and Overland Avenue.

Japanese Preparations

She picked up several instructional earthquake safety booklets that she had brought back from Japan. Although they were written in Japanese, the accompanying drawings would be understandable to anyone.

One booklet showed how to make slings and/or covers for knee bandages from ordinary panty hose. Another showed pictures of items to buy to equip a house with an earthquake kit. A third featured photos of fire stations stocked with supplies for a disaster, food, blankets, flashlights, etc. “Every fire station is stocked like that,” Halgren said.

“Schoolchildren in the communities expected to be hardest hit all have hard hats that they wear to and from school (so they always have them available),” she continued. “Can you see the kids here doing that?”

Japanese officials, Halgren said, have committed the government to earthquake safety and have financed extensive programs throughout the country.

“Entire communities train throughout the year for disaster preparedness,” Halgren said. “We watched an earthquake drill . . . where 5,000 people participated. They all had specific duties, wore uniforms and hard hats. It was really impressive. They do these drills regularly. Everybody is a part of it. You have a whole community actively involved and taking part in the drill.”

By Japanese standards, Halgren said, Californians are light-years behind in earthquake preparedness. “And people here just don’t want to talk about it. Earthquakes aren’t trendy. But I pray that the devastation in Mexico will wake up people, that Mexico City will be the gun that makes us duck.

“Usually when you talk with people (about earthquake preparedness), you get two reactions,” Halgren added. “They say, ‘We’ve been through this before, so what’s the point?’ or ‘We’re going to fall into the sea anyway, so why worry?’ There’s so much denial.”

Halgren, who got her tax-exempt status for Quake Safe in March, 1984, decided to concentrate her latest efforts on schools, mostly the private schools in the Los Angeles area.

“I figured the schools need me more than the general public,” she said. “I am now focusing on the schools, but when I have time, I still talk to senior citizens groups, civic organizations. But I really want to get the information out to the schools. I’m going to concentrate on the mothers, the parents, the PTAs. You can’t expect an overworked school principal to become an overnight earthquake planner.”

Halgren also has been trying to raise money for Quake Safe and for a library to be used by schools interested in setting up preparedness plans for an earthquake. But she hasn’t found many donors.

“I’ve put in about $10,000 of my own money,” Halgren said. “I literally put the household budget money into paying the rent on this little office. I was working out of my home. Now, my accountant says we’re in danger of losing the nonprofit status from the IRS unless I can get other donations by December.”

Workshops Offered

Through her Resource Center for School Earthquake Preparedness, Halgren will offer two upcoming workshops, Oct. 17 and Nov. 7, from 1 to 4 p.m. in the Community Room of the California Federal building at 10680 W. Pico Blvd., where her office is located.

Workshops are open to school administrators, faculty, staff and parents and are $25 per workshop. The first will deal with reducing nonstructural hazards in the classroom; the second with crisis-induced emotional trauma of an earthquake.

(For reservations, call (213) 559-5176 on Tuesdays or Thursdays between 1 and 3 p.m.)

In February, 1984, Halgren put on her first conference aimed at administrators in the county’s private schools and drew “270 administrators, who represented 170,000 children,” she said. “Do you realize there are 210,000 children in private schools in Los Angeles? And 670,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District?”

School Administrator

Laura Walker, assistant to the headmaster of Berkeley Hall School on Swall Drive, was among those private school administrators who attended Halgren’s earlier earthquake preparedness seminar.

Walker already knew Halgren, and had contacted her about an earthquake safety program for Berkeley Hall, a Christian Scientist school.

“I started in the spring of ’83 (organizing an earthquake preparedness program), and I was so bewildered I didn’t know where to begin. It was like reinventing the wheel every time I called somewhere,” Walker said. “But it’s been wonderful working with Ferne. She’s performing an invaluable service for the community.”

Walker said Berkeley Hall now has “enough supplies for 250 people for eight hours. We’re still working on blankets, because we have a storage problem here. But we have five-gallon tubs of water all over the place and sealed plastic containers of food, graham crackers, peanut butter, apple juice.

“We have first-aid kits and boxes of Kotex that can be used for bandages, flashlights, things placed in different rooms all around the campus.”

Regular School Drills

Children at Berkeley Hall, which includes 2-year-olds to ninth-graders, have earthquake drills every other month, Walker said.

Walker explained that in the vicinity of Berkeley Hall, there are three other private schools--Curtis, Mirman and Stephen S. Wise--and she has been working with the earthquake preparedness coordinators at each. “We’re exchanging ideas, seeing what we can do to help each other,” she said. “But the one thing that worries me is communication. I’m even more worried since we saw what happened in Mexico.

“Last spring, I called General Telephone and asked them what kind of an emergency plan we could put together for communications in an earthquake and they told me to just assume your telephone lines are down . . . ,” Walker said. “You’d think they could advise us of something we could all use. CBs or ham radios or they could develop a community system. Maybe there is no answer.”

Antonia Hall, director of the lower school at Marlborough School for girls in Los Angeles (grades 7 though 12) and joint chairwoman of the earthquake preparedness committee, hopes to have solved the communications problem in case of a disastrous earthquake such as Mexico City’s.

“We have a sister school set up in Arizona, the Orme School in a small community, Mayer, Ariz.,” she said. “We have access here to a ham radio--a neighbor of the headmaster has one--and we can be in touch with them. The ham radios were the only things that worked in Mexico.”

Hall has worked closely with Ferne Halgren for three years setting up Marlborough’s earthquake safety program. Halgren’s daughter is among the 480 students there.

Hall said that Marlborough has a three-day supply of drinking water in plastic bottles, prewrapped energy bars for food, individual thermal blankets, as well as portable lighting and first-aid materials. The school also has frequent drills, both fire and earthquake, and everyone has a specific assignment.

Hall said that Marlborough has invested “quite a bit of money in our program. Right now, we’re getting our windows coated (with a film that keeps the windows from imploding into the buildings). We have a lot of glass. It’s costly, but I think we must be somewhat ahead of some of the other schools. As horrific as Mexico was, at least we can use the tragedy to learn.”

Cost Is a Factor

Unfortunately for many schools, cost is a big factor in putting together an ambitious earthquake preparedness plan.

“We started two years ago with the planning,” said Durrell Maughan, coordinator of outdoor education and emergency services for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Every school designs an emergency plan and we have a procedure book of what to do, and we’re drafting an emergency handbook right now. But we tell each principal that the school has to be prepared to be on its own for 72 hours. If an 8.3 hit Los Angeles, there would be no assistance for 72 hours. Because we’re so mobile and spread out here, people would be cut off.”