‘Yellow Cloud’ Fails to Faze Simi Evacuees

The old worried about oxygen and the young about hair spray, but for the most part, Simi Valley residents took the threat posed by a poison gas cloud calmly.

About 2,500 students and residents of nearby mobile home parks were brought to an evacuation center at Simi Valley High School. Throughout the afternoon and early evening, parents and relatives drove to the school to claim children and family members.

Principal David Ellis estimated that about 1,750 students were brought from 11 other schools. Other evacuees were residents, many of them elderly, of the Friendly Village and Villa Del Arroyo mobile home parks and a neighborhood known as the Greek Tract, close to the area where a damaged tank at a textile company let loose a cloud of toxic chlorine gas that covered a square mile.

Larry Petitta Jr., 30, helped his grandmother, Zola Browning, 78, when police came to the Villa Del Arroyo park, urging residents to leave.

“I just filled up her portable oxygen tank and grabbed warm coats and hats,” he said, as he sat with Browning and his father, Larry Petitta Sr., eating pizza made from French bread in the school cafeteria. His grandmother must have oxygen administered to her constantly because of a blood-gas disorder, he said.

‘See the Cloud Drifting’

The family headed first for Royal High School but turned back, the elder Petitta said, when they realized they “could see the cloud drifting” toward them.

“It looked like a yellow fog, erratic in shape, with puffs of it here and there,” he said.

Browning said she was not alarmed. “If it’s necessary to do it, you just do it regardless of what you feel or think,” said Browning, who was evacuated from a home in Sylmar after the 1971 earthquake. “I weathered that, so I figure I can weather almost anything.”

Emma Goff, 90, who gets around with the aid of a walker, sat calmly working in the word-puzzle book she brought with her to the high school when Villa Del Arroyo was evacuated. Leah Taves, 61, a park resident, brought Goff and Melba Landis, 71.

“I’m not frightened,” Goff said. “I’m a retired nurse. I never get frightened.”

The cloud forced the evacuation of five preschools--Arroyo Montessori, La Petite Academy, Bright, Simi Adventist and Hollow Hills YMCA. Also evacuated were four elementary schools--Abraham Lincoln, Justin, Madera and Park View--and two junior high schools, Sinaloa and Hillside.

Students at Sinaloa were at lunch “when they told us to rush to our classrooms,” said Jennifer Larsen, a ninth-grader. “They announced the problem and started evacuating us by bus.”

“We were all rad”-- meaning radically happy--to get out of school, said a classmate, Paula Carnevalini. But she was unhappy that her hairbrush and hair spray were left behind at school, she said.

Willie Blank, 45, opened her four-bedroom house across the street from the high school to evacuees “because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. An elderly couple joined her and her husband for bean soup, she said.

“It’s got to be more comfortable than those hard chairs,” she said. “I have a dad who’s old and I wouldn’t want him sitting in some gymnasium for hours.”

Children evacuated from other schools waited in the bleachers of the high school gym for parents and relatives to claim them. Parents had to provide identification to school officials, who then called out names of children through a loudspeaker.

Dawn Neff of Moorpark said she was more worried about finding her 4-year-old daughter, who had been evacuated from the Arroyo Montessori preschool, in the crowd than she was about the gas threat. She found her with little problem.

Driving Children Home

“It would be very nice if the city of Simi would not let people with chemicals in,” complained Grace Hale, who lives two blocks from the gas-escape site. Hale, who works as an aide at Big Springs Elementary School, had spent the afternoon driving children home. She came to the evacuation center to pick up her son, Michael, a sixth-grader at Park View.

“This is a small, nice valley,” she said. “I hate to see it become Carson.”

It was an unexpected introduction to California for Tom Pollich, 25, of Plumsteadville, Pa.

Pollich, who works for Semco, an elevator firm based in Plumsteadville, had never been to California before. But he is scheduled to take over the company’s Simi Valley office.

Walt Herrmann, 30, a company vice president, decided to fly him out “and show him around,” Herrmann said.

When they left Pennsylvania Thursday morning it was 12 degrees below zero, Herrmann said. They had just checked into a motel in Simi Valley “when they started rapping on our door and telling us we had to evacuate,” he said. “But we didn’t have a car.”

Hotel management called the Simi Valley Transit Authority for a bus. Shortly afterward, the two Pennsylvanians were rolling to the evacuation center, the only people aboard a 44-passenger bus dispatched for them.

“We came out here expecting sunshine and warm temperatures. What we got was rain and toxic waste,” Herrmann said, laughing. “I was looking forward to a nice thick steak and cold beer for dinner. Instead I’m eating chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. But we appreciate it. The people here have been real nice.”

“It wasn’t a very impressive debut,” said Pollich, the Simi Valley resident-to-be. ‘It’s been the longest day of my life.”

Times staff writer Carlos Lozano contributed to this story.