Schools Jolted Into Preparing for Next Quake

Fifteen years after the Sylmar earthquake shattered parts of the northwest San Fernando Valley and took 65 lives, Valley schools are intensifying preparations for the next strong quake, which scientists say is inevitable.

It was on Feb. 9, 1971, that the frightening earthquake, which registered 6.5 on the Richter scale and was centered just north of Sylmar, shook the Los Angeles area, doing widespread damage to buildings and freeways in the Valley.

Preparations by schools for the next quake have accelerated in the past six years, partly because of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which stimulated federal studies of potential natural disasters.

San Fernando Valley-area schools, in some cases spurred by staff members’ memories of the Sylmar disaster, are in the forefront of preparations for Earthquake Preparedness Week. The event is a disaster rehearsal first held by the Los Angeles city government in 1982 on the anniversary of the Sylmar quake. Now a statewide event, this year it will be held in April on the anniversary of the great earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906.

Ongoing Program

As part of an ongoing earthquake preparedness program, Los Angeles Unified School District officials have asked school principals to develop plans to shelter and care for their students--and perhaps homeless refugees from the neighborhoods around them--for at least three days after a destructive quake.

In response, school administrators have devised plans that range from providing meals for stranded students to creating makeshift morgues; from stockpiling crowbars to implementing identification procedures to ensure that children are released only to their parents or a trusted adult.

Although the school district provides general guidelines and minimum requirements, “different schools come up with different plans,” said Peter J. Anderson, field coordinator for the student auxiliary services branch, who oversees earthquake preparations at Valley schools.

“The details of the plans are up to the principals. We don’t expect a little elementary school to have four search-and-rescue teams set up, but a big high school is going to need them.”

Tension Is Growing

In line with the unanimity of scientists’ warnings for some years that tension is growing in the San Andreas Fault, he said, the school district has told principals that a major quake “is going to happen” sometime in the next 50 years--perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not for years.

“Awareness has been growing for the past three or four years,” Anderson said, “as the scientific community has put more emphasis on it, and the Mexico City quake punctuated that.”

The quake in Mexico City killed at least 7,000 people last Sept. 19.

“When it comes, the principals are going to find themselves running a shelter full of children,” he said. “And there’s the large population of children bused into the Valley, maybe 10,000, who probably won’t be able to get back over the hills and may possibly be here for days.”

In addition, he said, principals have been warned that “they may be running a shelter for the community around them, because the schools will probably remain standing. No school constructed to the standards of the Field Act has ever collapsed in a quake.”

Passed After 1933 Quake

The Field Act, a state law passed in the wake of widespread destruction during the Long Beach earthquake of 1933 and updated several times since, set earthquake-resistance standards for construction of public elementary and secondary schools.

The school district is in the third year of a five-year plan to train principals and other administrators to handle the problems that the quake will bring, he said.

“This year we’re stressing how to handle the handicapped, and how children are to be released and to whom. Next year the emphasis is going to be on shelter management.”

Among other preparations, the district has identified 23 schools that would have to be evacuated if the San Fernando Dam--which was damaged in the 1971 temblor but did not give way--again threatened to collapse. Also, four schools have been identified that would have to be evacuated if the Encino Dam threatened to break and pour floodwaters over Ventura Boulevard.

The principals of these schools, in particular, have been told to pay attention to a district directive to all principals to prepare evacuation plans, “and identify the precise site they would take the children to--a parking lot, a park, wherever, so long as it’s high ground where floodwaters could not reach them.”

Drills Repeated

Several times a year, students go through drills in which they are supposed to drop beneath their desks at the one-word command “drop” by a teacher, an emergency response adapted from the nuclear weapons drills of the 1950s. In Mexico City, Anderson observed, some school children who took cover under classroom tables survived the collapse of their school buildings.

Schools have stockpiled enough food to last from two days to a week, he said. At some schools, parents were asked to have their children bring in canned goods and other imperishable foods that will be saved for the pupil’s use if they become trapped at the school. Others rely on cafeteria supplies.

Administrators have been instructed to have available first-aid supplies, water, stretchers, water purification supplies, flashlights and tools.

“Especially crowbars,” said Anderson. “We’re big on crowbars. In the 1971 quake, some of our bungalow classrooms were knocked off their foundations and the doors jammed shut. If classes had been in session at the time, the kids would have been trapped inside, and the only way out would have been to break the windows.”

Schools have first-aid teams, firefighting and prevention teams and search-and-rescue teams designated to search evacuated buildings for frightened children hiding in closets or under desks, he said.

Some schools have plans to create makeshift morgues, he said, commenting: “There’s a potential for fatalities and we had better be ready.”

With that in mind, assignments are not given to individuals, but to groups, he said, so that any teachers or administrators killed or disabled by the earthquake would be replaced by others in their group.

“I may be a casualty,” he said, “so there are others trained in my job.” At individual schools, a chain of command has been determined so that there will always be someone designated to take charge if the principal or his chief assistants are not available.

Teachers have been told to have available personal items such as sturdy shoes, spare eyeglasses and gloves for handling debris, he said. “A teacher who cuts a hand open is not going to be of much use.”

At the Erwin Street Elementary School in Van Nuys, Kay Goodman, the school coordinator, pointed to three outdoor lockers, each the size of a large closet, stuffed with earthquake supplies.

Stockpiled Supplies

“We have bullhorns, walkie-talkies, an extra set of first-aid supplies, flashlights, a wheelchair, two regular stretchers and some more stretchers improvised from big cardboard boxes,” she said. “There are buckets and plastic bags to use as toilets if we can’t use the ones in the building.”

The school cafeteria has stockpiled crackers, fruit juice, canned soup and frozen hot dogs.

“In the classrooms, each teacher keeps water, a first-aid kit, flashlights and games to amuse the children if they’re stuck here for days,” Goodman said.

The children have been trained to evacuate the buildings and assemble in small groups on the playground, where they are to place name tags on each other. Some have been detailed as stretcher-bearers.

Two “search-and-sweep” teams of staff members have been trained to go through the building, checking the smallest hiding places “in closets and under sinks, for terrified children,” she said.

To make sure that children end up in the proper hands, the school district has placed heavy emphasis on returning children after an earthquake or similar disaster only to their parents or a responsible adult known and trusted by the child. Adults will have to sign a release for each child they take away.

In a plan similar to those adopted by many schools, the Erwin Street school would be sealed off by staff members to keep children on the grounds and would-be intruders outside its fences equipped with two operating gates on different sides of the grounds. Other entrances to the school will be sealed off.

Parents or other adults looking for a child would go first to one gate, to identify themselves and the child they are looking for, and then go to a “reunion gate” on another side of the grounds. Student council members--fourth- to sixth-grade class leaders--have been designated as “runners” to carry messages to teachers, identifying wanted children. The children would then be sent to the reunion gate, where they would have to confirm the identity of the adult before being released.

A major force behind the program at Erwin Street school, considered by district safety officials to be one of the better prepared in the Valley, is the principal, Jilane Fager, Goodman said.

“Her house in Sylmar really caught it in the quake in 1971,” Goodman said. “It was very heavily damaged and that made her very preparedness-conscious.

“The parents of children here can be very grateful she had that experience.”