THE LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE : Paneful Ordeal : Glassy-Eyed Crews Use Plywood for Stopgap Repairs

It may have seemed like a glazier’s dream.

But at Montebello Glass and Mirror Co. Thursday morning, there was just as much concern about cleaning up the back lot as cleaning up financially.

When manager Julian Bustamante drove up to the Whittier Boulevard shop, he recalled later in the day, he discovered that more than 75 panes of glass worth $5,000 retail--the firm’s entire stock for window repairs--had crashed to the ground during the early morning earthquake.

“I came through the alley and saw it and it just blew my mind,” said Bustamante, whose mother, Julie, bought the 49-year-old business just three months ago.

Until Thursday, business for the Bustamantes’ had been excruciatingly slow, Julie Bustamante noted, as she fielded a torrent of calls from repair seekers who were lucky enough to get through on the jammed phone lines. But even as her three repair trucks did land-office business by temporarily covering gaping holes with plywood for $125 and up, she referred to the circumstances as an “ordeal.”

“This helps business, but it’s unfortunate. I don’t want any more earthquakes,” she declared.

‘Today, We’re Carpenters’

As it stood, most repairs made by glass companies in the Montebello area Thursday were of the plywood variety.

“Today, we’re carpenters,” joked repairman Dave Walter, 30, a five-year employee of Beverly Auto Glass & Mirror in Montebello, as he drilled a screw into a 2-by-4 to hold a plywood sheet into what was previously a display window at Colome Motors Inc.

Beginning at 9 a.m., Walter and partner Christopher Medina, 21, spent their day driving from business to business in Montebello, removing remaining dangerous shards of glass from display windows before making their temporary repairs.

“It beats being slow. When it’s busy, it helps the day go by,” said Walter as he packed a power drill, hand tools and rubber gloves, like a surgeon preparing for the operating room.

“But there’s just so much damage,” the thick-bearded glazier added, as he roped six eight-foot panels of plywood to the side of a Ford pickup. “It looks like every four to six buildings you find plate-glass broken.”

In the front office, which had taken on the atmosphere of an emergency communications center, Walter’s boss, Bud Rheinhardt, 51, fielded the constantly jangling phones, scribbling repair orders far more quickly than he could dispatch his troops.

As far as he was concerned, Rheinhardt said, an occasional baseball through a window or a stone through a windshield beat an earthquake anytime.

“This is far and away the busiest day in my 17 years in business,” Rheinhardt explained. “But I’m not very happy. I prefer it to be normal. This business of trying to help people and doing the best you can is just not good enough. They need glass and we don’t have enough manpower or glass.

“You can’t even get glass from the wholesale houses--they’re all busted there.”

Still, Rheinhardt added, he felt lucky in a couple of ways. Most callers “had been very nice, very cooperative,” he said. Furthermore, he was in his shop when the earthquake hit and, surrounded by glass, just managed to duck under a desk to safety as mirrors crashed off a nearby wall.