They’re Just Testing : Firefighters Stage Earthquake Rescues

If you happened by Studio City’s Weddington Park or a pharmaceutical laboratory in Northridge on Friday morning and saw firefighters frantically working on what looked like dozens of seriously injured people, there was no need to worry.

What you were seeing was the Los Angeles Fire Department preparing for the worst--a major earthquake in the San Fernando Valley.

Nearly 300 Valley firefighters took part in the drill, the first of three that will be carried out in the next three months throughout Los Angeles to test the city’s preparedness for the disastrous effects of an earthquake, said Inspector Ed Reed of the department’s public information office.

“The reality is that Los Angeles is ripe for a big quake, and we just want to make sure we can get all our players in place when that time comes,” Reed said at the exercise’s command post at Station 88 in Sherman Oaks.

Two mock disasters were staged to test the emergency response of paramedics and hospital personnel. One was a chemical spill at Riker Laboratories in the 19900 block of Nordhoff Street in Northridge. The other was the collapse of a building at Riverton Avenue and Acama Street in Studio City. At both locations, 25 volunteers, mainly nurses, pretended to need immediate treatment for serious injuries.

But Friday’s operation was more of a test of the Fire Department’s communication system than a performance drill for individual firefighters, Reed said.

Throughout the two-hour exercise, which began at 9 a.m., commanders at more than 40 fire stations in the Valley called the command post to report damage in their areas, such as broken water mains, severed electrical lines, collapsed buildings and fires, Reed said.

Radio System Inadequate

Once the reports were filed, fire officials at the command post--going on the assumption that the department’s central dispatch headquarters downtown had been knocked out--had to determine which problems called for immediate attention and which could wait.

“We have to make sure we don’t spread ourselves too thin,” Reed said. He said the department’s radio system proved to be inadequate to deal with the effects of a major earthquake.