Coping With Quake a ‘Dress Rehearsal’ : Emergency Crews Passed the Test for ‘the Big One’

In the aftermath of Thursday’s temblor, police, firefighters and ambulance crews were able to respond to all emergencies, officials said.

But that was because the quake’s power was slight--relatively speaking--and coping with it amounted to little more than a dress rehearsal for “The Big One.”

Within an hour of the quake, for example, about 45 Los Angeles city officials had assembled to assess damage and make key decisions at their command post four floors below street level in the Civic Center. A like number of county officials had gathered in a bunker built into an East Los Angeles hill.

But as the day unfolded, neither group of officials had to do its most important work: deciding who should get quick help, and who should not.

If, as experts predict, a quake as large as 8.3 on the Richter scale strikes Southern California sometime in the next 30 years, it would release about 1,000 times the energy of Thursday’s 6.1 quake.

The ground would shake harder and for four times as long in the 8.3 quake, and as many as 14,000 people could die, said Richard Andrews, assistant director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

“There will probably not be (enough) police available,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who has long crusaded for more stringent earthquake safety measures. “There will probably not be (enough) firefighters; (enough) paramedics.”

Officials will have to decide where to allocate scarce resources.

“Most neighborhoods and people are going to be on their own for 72 hours in a major quake,” Bernson said. “There is probably going to be chaos all over the city. . . . Streets would be closed. . . . Fire engines would not be able to get through to certain neighborhoods. . . .

“Most people are going to have to be prepared to deal with emergencies . . . in their homes and their neighborhoods.”

Bernson has proposed that Los Angeles take a lesson from Tokyo, where residents have apparently never forgotten that their city was leveled in 1923 by a 7.8 quake that claimed 142,000 lives.

“One of the things they do in Tokyo is involve a tremendous amount of civilians” by training them to respond to earthquake emergencies, Bernson said.

Survival Measures

He said select civilians are taught to survey their neighborhoods, evacuate buildings, fight fires and provide first aid.

Bernson said he has established a cadre of 25 such volunteers drawn from Neighborhood Watch programs in his sprawling San Fernando Valley district who are “prepared to spring into action and literally do what has to be done.”

Within minutes of Thursday’s quake, two of them showed up at his Valley office, the councilman said; others called in. But they were not needed.

Bernson said he plans to try to persuade his council colleagues to authorize spending more than $1 million a year on training such volunteers citywide.

Critical Facilities

In a quake, police, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters make assessments of conditions from the air and on the ground, with particular attention given to critical facilities, such as hospitals, schools, power plants and dams.

Reports are then funneled to command centers, where red tape can be cut with dispatch since representatives of public utilities and private organizations such as the Red Cross sit side by side with police, fire and other government officials.

“Speed is of the essence,” said Los Angeles Police Officer William Frio, who was stationed at the city’s modern command center Thursday. “The faster we can get communications working, the faster we can get things under control.

“I think there were something like 38 fires that broke out (in the city) and the Fire Department was on them instantly because of a lot of communication between people in this room. We were hearing about the fires through (the Department of Water and Power). People were calling the DWP (to report them) because they couldn’t get through to the Fire Department.”

Fires on Roofs

In addition, Frio said, public safety workers in helicopters spotted several fires on rooftops of commercial buildings and called them in to the command center. “People didn’t even know they were going on up there,” Frio said.

Soon, Bernson said, new technology the city has copied from Japan will allow helicopters to transmit live television pictures of ground conditions to the command center.

“We’ve been continually updating our technology,” the councilman said. “We are probably the most prepared city in the world (outside of) Japan.”

Still, officials acknowledge, there is much room for improvement.

To curtail a major cause of fires--broken gas lines--city Fire Chief Donald O. Manning has said he favors controversial legislation that would require placement of valves on lines that would shut off automatically in the event of an earthquake.

Gas Company Opposed

Southern California Gas Co. has opposed the idea in part because the valves would shut off gas lines even if there were no leaks, forcing the company to go door to door later to restore service.

Manning said his department was able to handle all fires in the city Thursday without help from departments in other jurisdictions, but he said outside help was needed from private ambulance services. “We maxed out right away on rescue ambulance(s),” the chief said.

The scene was very different from that of the last major Los Angeles quake, in 1971 in Sylmar.

More than 60 people died then--in contrast to the three people killed Thursday--and 2,500 were injured.

Most of the dead were in a Veterans Administration hospital in Sylmar that collapsed. The hospital was not built to withstand earthquake stress.

Stricter Standards

Local officials said the federal government has since increased its earthquake construction standards to conform to those prevailing in California.

More than 60 freeways were damaged in the 1971 quake and some overpasses crumbled.

In its wake, Caltrans embarked on a program to insert steel cables into freeway bridges--tying them to supports to make sure they don’t slip off, said Kevin Pokrajac, a Caltrans engineer.

That program worked. Only one interchange--that of Interstates 605 and 5--had to be closed Thursday. It had been “retrofitted” with the steel cables, Pokrajac said, but concrete columns were seriously damaged.

A key danger, however, remains in the thousands of brick and masonry buildings in the area built before 1933, when the first earthquake code went into effect. It is feared that they are prone to collapse.

Reinforcement Slow

A 1981 city ordinance sponsored by Bernson requires that such buildings--whose walls are frequently not securely anchored to ceilings and floors--be reinforced or demolished.

But enforcement of the ordinance has been slow. In six years, fewer than half the city’s 8,000 such buildings have been reinforced.

Los Angeles County only recently passed a similar ordinance applying to its unincorporated areas.

The director of the state Office of Emergency Services, William M. Medigovich, said he thought Thursday’s relatively smooth emergency response was a “substantial payoff” for several years of efforts to coordinate preparedness programs between government agencies and businesses.

The quake came just two weeks before the state planned a test of its program in Southern California to gauge preparation for “The Big One.”

In fact, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Bill McSweeney and many of his colleagues were headed for the county command post for what they thought would be a practice session for the practice session when they felt the quake and were pressed into service on the real thing.

“This (quake) was obviously an attention-getter,” said the officer in charge of the command center, Chief Rick Merrick of the Sheriff’s Department “I hope it creates concern and awareness and improves the state of preparation.”

Times staff writer Douglas Shuit contributed to this story.