When a Killer Quake Strikes Our Schools, Will Poor Planning Add to Toll?

April is California earthquake preparedness month, and this week is school preparedness week. School officials will be pointing with pride as students and teachers obediently perform disaster drills as a show of their school’s preparedness.

But as a member of the special task force set up by a recent law mandating a review of school earthquake preparation laws, I know that these exercises will disguise the fact that most of California’s 1,027 school districts are woefully unprepared to handle the multiple crises that will arise should an quake of 8.0 or higher on the Richter scale strike during school hours.

For example, most plans call for schools to evacuate the injured to the closest hospital. In the 6.5 Coalinga quake of 1985, however, the hospital directly across the street from the high school was incapacitated. How many school plans take into account that there may be no emergency services available for three days or more? According to Bob Vert, school superintendent at the time of the Coalinga quake, most schools don’t have disaster plans--they have plans for a disaster.

The circumstances that led to the recent Exxon oil spill in Alaska bear an uncomfortable resemblance to what could happen here during an earthquake: When disaster struck, effective management procedures were ignored; those in charge were inept; equipment and supplies needed for cleanup were defective or unavailable; confusion and delay exacerbated the situation, and the tanker met shipping standards, but the standards were not high enough (although school buildings must meet earthquake standards, those standards still allow schools to have large plate-glass windows that could implode into classrooms during a major quake).

When a killer quake strikes our schools, the toll won’t be measured in birds and fish, but in children. For, even though school buildings have been designed to withstand major quakes, children may be injured or possibly die due to inadequate earthquake management plans.

Whose fault is this?

We can point the finger at many. Gov. George Deukmejian declared April to be California earthquake preparedness month. Yet just one day before the Whittier quake on Oct. 1, 1987, the governor vetoed important school earthquake safety that would have required, among other things, that earthquake safety courses be taught to schoolchildren. The state Legislature, which passed a bill in 1984 mandating schools to establish earthquake emergency procedures, provided no funding to help with compliance. And local school boards, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, failed to budget any money toward earthquake preparedness equipment, supplies or training this year.

Teachers, knowing they will be on the front lines in the aftermath of a major quake, are beginning to bring pressure to bear at the grass-roots level. As the coordinator responsible for the development of a school earthquake management curriculum and educational videos to aid schools in disaster planning, I deal daily with growing teacher frustration.

One educator, evaluating his school’s evacuation plans as part of a course in earthquake planning, angrily writes that at his school, emergency escape routes take students past such deadly hazards as a 120-foot-high water tower, high-tension lines, high walls, narrow passages, fences and gates that inhibit entrance to the assembly area.

Grass-roots efforts might do a better job of forcing change than the state political machine would. Parents and school administrators can work together to make sure that at least their local area is well prepared.

South Gate Junior High School, in the center of an industrial area, provides an excellent case study. This innovative school, prompted in large part by Latino parents whose families have experienced loss in earthquakes in their homelands, has utilized local business donations and district funding for a plan that includes teacher training, enough food and water onthe premises for more than 4,000 students and staff for up to three days, and designation of selected students with special photo identifications as disaster-plan monitors.

More than 12,000 people are expected to die when a major quake hits Southern California, according to a federal study. But that figure will rise right in our local schoolyards in the hours and days after a quake unless strong school earthquake management plans are already in place to deal with injured children.

It’s always a tragedy when people die needlessly. But when those people are children who are victims not of a quake but of their school district’s lack of preparedness, it is nothing short of an unconscionable--and potentially litigable--crime.