Lessons From the Mexican Quake : Veteran California Rescuer Shocked by Devastation

Fourteen years ago, Mike Minore worked on a rescue squad at Olive View Hospital after the Sylmar earthquake, but nothing he encountered then, he said this week, would have prepared him for the gruesome devastation he saw in Mexico City.

Minore, a Los Angeles County Fire Department captain, joined 19 other firefighters and rescue personnel--six from Los Angeles County, six from Orange County and eight from Sacramento--on a weeklong rescue operation after the Sept. 19 earthquake struck the Mexican capital. The team, put together by the state’s Office of Emergency Services in Sacramento, returned last week.

Worse Than Expected

“It was worse than I really expected,” Minore, 42, a heavy rescue specialist, said. “I worked on Olive View after the Sylmar quake, tunneling through the wreckage. There was a lot of wreckage, especially on the bottom floors and basement. But you think about our earthquake here and realize we had a few buildings down. There, we saw hundreds of major buildings down. Hospitals, hotels. The Mexican government raised its estimate of the death toll to 10,000, but other people believe it will go as high as 20,000 dead.”

The California rescue team was assigned to work areas where Mexican authorities thought they might still find survivors. The Los Angeles squad’s first assignment was a building where a policeman had been reported to be buried alive.

“They said it would take them eight to 12 hours to get him out,” Minore said. “They were using hacksaws. We had our power tools and we got him out in 58 minutes. But he wasn’t alive. He was decapitated.”

The hospital areas, according to Minore, were grisly sites.

“The two hospitals we worked on, General Hospital and Juarez Hospital, where they found the babies alive, were both compressed into literally a pile of rubble,” Minore said. “They were both filled to capacity and they just pancaked down. Juarez was a 12-story building, General, a seven-story. And they were just rubble.

“We were working with a Venezuelan team and a Mexican team,” he continued. “They wanted us to try to enlarge the holes. This particular area was very gruesome. We actually had to take buckets of body fluid out so we weren’t sloshing in it. All these people (in the hospital building) were just crushed down.”

Searching the Rubble

Minore said that one day, while they were tunneling under some rubble at the Juarez Hospital, the Los Angeles firefighters ran into a team from another country tunneling in from the side. None of them had found anyone alive.

“At one point, the president (Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid) appeared at the hospital to survey the scene,” Minore said. “He observed how slow the handwork is, and he ordered everyone off the building. He wanted to use heavy equipment to speed up the rescue. He felt we should move more rapidly. He was afraid of the spread of disease.

“But you have to go in that mess by hand, going in small areas, tunneling into them. That’s the only way you’re going to get people out. He let us go back to work, but the chances of finding anybody alive were getting slim. The fences around the hospital were lined with people hoping to get their families out, dead or alive. They didn’t want them being ripped apart by heavy equipment.”

To their dismay, the Southern California firefighters were unable to locate anyone alive during their week of work. But the Los Angeles County and Orange County teams did not arrive until Sept. 27--a fact that bothered them all, Minore said. “The Sacramento guys went earlier, but unfortunately we were a week late,” Minore said. “The sooner you get there the better chance you have of rescuing people. A great deal of it was international politics that prevented us from getting there earlier.

“Once we did get there we were somewhat frustrated,” he said. “You didn’t just walk in and say, ‘OK, we’re the boys from California. We’re here to help.’ They were more or less under martial law, and even when you got to the scene, you’d go to different gates to get clearance to get in. We were operating also under the authority of the American Embassy. Most of our orders came through the embassy and through the Mexico City Fire Department.”

The Californians came home Oct. 2. “Every one of us would have stayed longer if they’d needed us,” Minore said. “But we didn’t want to stay if we were going to be on standby. . . . We left all of our equipment there, gave it to the fire department. It was pretty well expected that what you took there you’d leave. We had power saws, large bolt cutters, pry bars, cutting torches. Things like that, donated by the Office of Emergency Services. We took two pallets of equipment. They were huge and had to be forklifted on and off the plane.”

Minore, a lifelong La Crescenta resident, has been working in the emergency services field for 21 years. He spent eight years with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a rescue specialist before joining the county Fire Department 13 years ago.

‘Hundreds of Rescues’

He has been involved in mountain rescues, mine disasters, airplane and helicopter rescue work and underwater rescues, as well as earthquake rescue. “I’ve done hundreds of rescues,” Minore said. “Recovered hundreds of dead bodies. But we’ve never had anything like Mexico City.”

Minore said that the California firefighters and rescue personnel believed that one of the problems with the Mexico City rescue operation was the lack of a central control to oversee all the efforts and to organize the rescue workers.

“There was no real central command post that could coordinate all the resources with priority collapses,” said Minore. “They had nothing like we have. We have an incident command system here. As needed, we can expand the system on the basis of the size of the emergency. And we coordinate with all the other emergency service agencies. The only thing we saw were mini-command posts at the sites, with the military in command.

“If we had an earthquake here in L. A. County, many jurisdictions would be involved,” he added. “That’s just part of the advanced planning. We would set up a board of strategy and each department would have its own incident command system. We would set up a master command post to coordinate efforts and resources. We also have one huge advantage, our communication systems are much more advanced. And there are backup systems. They just didn’t have any. Without a doubt we would not have the disorganization that’s taking place there.”

Lacks Fire Protection

In addition to its lack of emergency preparedness, Mexico City also is sadly lacking in adequate fire protection, according to Minore.

“It’s just incredible,” Minore said. “In the Mexico City federal district there are 18 million people. But they only have seven fire stations. The central fire station has almost 100 people on duty, but they don’t have enough equipment to take all 100 out at a time. In all of the (Mexico City) district, they only have 300 firemen on duty at any one time.

“Here, we have resources, equipment, and organization. Los Angeles City has more than 100 stations; we (Los Angeles County Fire Department) have 129 stations and about 2,400 personnel. One-third of those are on duty at any one time. We serve about 15 million people in the county.”

Minore pointed out, too, that Mexico City also has a geological problem--the city was built on an ancient lake bed. “The Jell-O that it was built on started everything rocking,” he said. “Aside from what happened in the earthquakes, the place is sinking. At the presidential palace, the ends (of the building) are sinking. Across from the palace, the cathedral is sinking, streets and sidewalks are sinking. They actually pump concrete in under them.

“The outskirts of the city fared better because they’re built on more solid ground, not on a lake,” he said. “That’s one of the major things we have going for us here. We’re built on bedrock. You combine that with our resources, our organizational preparedness and we’re in better shape. If the big one is to hit us, I don’t believe anybody would be without assistance for more than a couple of days. People need to have extra water and food, to take precautions. Know how to turn off the gas. They won’t be able to call 911. But eventually people will come to get them.”

Mexico City also does not have the strict building codes that California has, Minore said. “In some cases the buildings fell over to the side. You could see they’re just post-and-beam construction. Start with a slab, two posts up and a beam across. Not much steel. And their steel is very substandard compared with ours. The concrete there is very sandy, not as hard as what we use.

“Another problem they’re going to have is with all those buildings that are so damaged, they must come down,” Minore said. “They’re planning to blow up a lot of them, and that’s going to cause a resonance that can cause other buildings to come down. We were in one place where there were three business towers, 22 stories each. During the earthquake, one went completely over and there were floors standing in another one that fell on top of a school bus with 30 kids in it.

“The tower next to it didn’t go down, but it is sitting (leaning) over seven feet. Since the second earthquake, it’s moved another four inches and is gradually falling over.”

The Los Angeles team, said Minore, was told of an apartment house that did not collapse during the earthquake and all the residents got out safely. “Hours later,” he said. “They went back in, and the whole building collapsed.

Minore said he was impressed with the ingenuity of the people in the Mexican capital. “The common people didn’t have anything. No resources like we have. The first day the city ran out of flashlights. And the street people were so ingenious. They made them out of plastic tubing, plastic cups like little ice cream cups, tinfoil, wire, batteries, a nail and a light bulb.”

The Californians stayed at the Maria Isabel Sheraton Hotel across the street from the American Embassy, and remained in constant contact with the Embassy and Mexico City Fire Department on their portable radios.

“They put us on the 10th floor,” Minore said. “The 11th floor had been evacuated and on our floor there was plaster gone everywhere. At one place you could see all the way to the first floor. There were a couple of aftershocks, too, while we were there.”

Before he left Mexico City, Minore had a couple of free hours, so he took a taxi to a suburb where an aunt and two cousins live to check on them. “They were OK,” he said, smiling. “But that part of the city is a little more modern. I was surprised that the central city is as old and dilapidated as it is. Perez (Firefighter specialist Robert Perez) has family there too. And they were fine.”

Los Angeles County firefighters who volunteered for the Mexico City duty were: Minore, Perez, Capt. Amado Guzman, Capt. Don Pierpont, Firefighter Jim Knight and Senior Equipment Operator Dick Andrade.

Orange County’s crew included Orange County Fire Chief Don Nicoles, Capt. Steve Shomber, Engineers Richard Finnerty, Joe Stillwell and Robert Castillo and Firefighter Robert Dowis.

‘A Real Education’

“It was a real education for us,” Minore said. “Although we didn’t personally rescue anyone, I think we played an important role as ambassadors of the U.S., more importantly of California and the American people. To show the people that we had the desire to assist them. Numerous people came up to us on the streets, thanking us, hugging us. Some had tears in their eyes. We did, too, more than once.

“It was all sad,” Minore continued. “All the loss of life, all the families being separated, not knowing where their loved ones are. The city is full of orphans, little kids too young to even know their names, thousands of them. The dead bodies are gruesome and horrible. But they’re dead and there’s nothing you can do for them. I feel sorry for those who remain, the street people, those left behind. Especially with the conditions people live in down there. The people are so poor. Now they have no houses, no jobs, some no families. And the Mexican economy is so torn up, the government can’t even pay the interest on its loans. So the people have no hopes that the government is going to help them. The government isn’t going to give them jobs or welfare.”