Good Timing With Quake

The earthquake that rocked Palm Springs on July 8 proved a boon for the Long Beach-based Assn. of Contingency Planners, a group of corporate managers who plan how to rebuild their companies after an earthquake or some other disaster.

By chance, the association had scheduled its July meeting at the Orange County emergency services center in Santa Ana for just hours after the early-morning earthquake that registered 5.9 on the Richter scale.

The topic? How the county would respond to an emergency situation at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

In addition to rocking the Southland and forcing San Onofre to run through its lowest-level emergency response drill, Mother Nature’s show of force pushed attendance, which had been running below 40 people, to a record of more than 60.

Instead of asking the planners to “imagine (that) there had been an earthquake, we were told ‘here’s what we did earlier this morning when there was an earthquake,’ ” association President Dianne Smith said. “It was an excellent presentation . . . because it simply could not have happened in a more timely fashion.

“The earthquake did prompt a larger turnout, and it gave the meeting more realism and credibility,” Smith said. “But my first thought, when the radio went off at 5:30 a.m., was if we’d even be able to get into the center, given the earthquake that had just happened.”

Not surprisingly, disaster planners hope that the ultimate test of their emergency planning never occurs. But, during the association’s annual meeting in May, one corporate planner pleaded with a state emergency official to “schedule one or two slight earthquakes just before our annual meeting, just to get the message across” that disaster planning, though a bit costly, is important.

Was Smith, unlike the state official, able to pull some strings?

“Let’s just say it was one of those wonderful coincidences,” Smith said, laughing.