THE EARTHQUAKE IN ORANGE COUNTY : Emergency Center Is Jolted Into Action

Canary-yellow telephones rang sporadically. A monitor linked to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station read: “Zero radiation release.” Orange vests were draped over chairs, but the people who would wear them in a real emergency where elsewhere.

In a basement office of Building 12 in Santa Ana, home of the Environmental Management Agency, officials Thursday activated Orange County’s emergency operations center.

But it was an alert of the lowest ranking: a Level 1.

“Our major responsibility today is to coordinate information,” said Christine Boyd, an emergency manager with the county Fire Department. “We came up quickly and did that.”

In a Level 4 situation, all basement offices would fill with representatives of county departments: the sheriff, a deputy coroner, the Health Care Agency director and others.

At Level 1, those offices remained locked. The operations center consisted of only the situation room, the basement office with telephones, 10-foot-wide maps showing likely paths of radiation from the San Onofre nuclear plant and chalkboards updated with Thursday’s earthquake damage reports.

Checks With Home Offices

In the room, representatives of American Red Cross, Pacific Bell and the Fire Department told each other what their home offices were reporting. Periodically, they gathered around a TV to see for themselves what had happened.

The county’s emergency manual defines a Level 1 emergency as, for example, flooding within a city. A Level 4 is an earthquake with deaths and major structural damages in Orange County.

By the time the room was declared an emergency operations center at 9 a.m. Thursday, it was clear that the damage in Orange County was minimal.

Telephones rang with people seeking information, but without the volume and urgency of the last time the center was activated: the 1985 fire at the Larry Fricker Co. fertilizer storage warehouse in Anaheim that released a toxic cloud.

The first person into the room, shortly after 8 a.m., was Ben Coalmarino, a Fire Department official who helped write the county’s emergency response manual.

He normally works in Orange, at county Fire Department headquarters. But he was scheduled Thursday morning to look the room over and see if it was ready for next week’s major drill. Ironically, the county has been preparing for months for that drill, which will involve five other counties and the state. The topic: responding to an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude on the Richter scale.

Another Coincidence

Another man who was in Santa Ana only by coincidence was Don Stief, disaster preparedness manager for Pacific Bell.

Stief works out of Los Angeles and headed the governor’s task force on earthquakes and their impact on communications. He was in Orange County for a 9 a.m. meeting of the Orange County-Cities Emergency Management Services Organization, which meets once a month to discuss responses to emergencies.

The meeting went on, but with many of the usual conferees stuck in their home cities, responding to a real earthquake. Stief spoke anyway, on the topic of the telephone industry’s plans for a Level 3 catastrophic earthquake.

Stief said that in a quake of that magnitude, cities and the county could not help each other, having exhausted their resources, and would turn to the state and federal governments.

“When we get a Level 3, there’s not going to be a phone anywhere on these desks,” he said. The phones will tumble to the floor and go off the hook. Callers from across the country will be telephoning to find out what’s happening. People lucky enough to get dial tones are likely to face busy signals.

The coincidence today was helpful, Stief said: “It revitalizes the interest in the citizens to become prepared and in public officials to think about funding what’s needed for the big one.”