When the Big One comes, they’ll be the ones to look for.

Forty Los Feliz residents stood on a stage at Marshall High School last week to receive diplomas. They wore fluorescent green vests and hard hats and carried gray flashlights.

When the Big One comes, they’ll be the ones to look for.

They are the core of the civil defense team the Los Angeles Fire Department hopes will rise to care for Los Feliz neighborhoods when the destruction overwhelms the city’s resources.

They’ll be on the streets and easy to spot, partly because of the outfits but also because they’ll be the ones who know what they’re doing.

For seven weeks, they’ve assembled each Wednesday night for 2 1/2 hours of tutoring by the Fire Department’s Community Response Team Unit. Twelve such teams are being trained every seven weeks, throughout the city.

They study fire extinguishers, first aid, communications, maps, search and rescue and logistics. They also study that most elusive of subjects, command.

When the time comes, they’re expected to become leaders.

Some of them already are. Among the Los Feliz group were a Vietnam vet, the president of the Los Feliz Improvement Assn. and the housewife who organized the campaign to save Marshall’s Gothic architecture more then 15 years ago.

But there were also retirees, teen-agers and others whose main focus in life has been the duties of student, parent or employee. There’s no way to know ahead of time which ones will have to take control in a disaster.

In their final lesson last week, they got a mild preview of what could happen. Capt. William M. Cody of the department’s disaster preparedness division broke the class into four groups and sent them different ways.

“OK, Group 2, you will have the dubious honor of being the victims first,” he said.

Cody assigned each victim symptoms and spotted them around the auditorium.

“I’m hysterical and in shock,” said one woman who lay with her legs on the stage steps and her head on the floor. The woman beside her was simply dead.

Cody then briefed the search and rescue group in the hall. The plan was to find and count all victims, put a tag on each identifying injuries, mobilize the able-bodied and perform first aid on those whose lives were in danger.

The group fanned out in the darkened room using flashlights.

It seemed a simple exercise. But there was confusion. Some victims were counted twice by different searchers. Some searchers gave too much attention to the first victim they found, forgetting that their duty was to determine the number and extent of injuries.

Afterward, one commented on how overwhelming it had been to encounter a mere 10 victims. Cody warned that the greatest threat to their success would be the urge to focus on a single task.

Meanwhile, in the hall, firefighter Thomas Guzman took another group through a fire suppression drill.

Heading down the hall toward an imaginary fire, he stopped them at a door on which he had placed a hazardous-chemical sign.

“What does this tell you?” Guzman asked. “Danger. To me, it’s a stop sign. Keep the door closed. Don’t go in and investigate the fire.”

“What if there are people known to be trapped there?” one of the group asked.

“That will be your decision as a team,” Guzman said.

Decisions were piling up quickly in the command post on stage.

“If you don’t set up a command post after an earthquake, you’re going to have nothing but chaos,” junior firefighter Gilbert Urrea told his group. “A lot of energy and trained people, nothing done in concert.”

Urrea began reading messages representing news brought by returning runners.

“Message No. 4, library,” he said. “We have a collapsed building, Waverly and Edgewater, northeast corner.”

The communications leader logged the message in blue ink, indicating search and rescue, and passed a memo to the search and rescue leader who dispatched a group.

As messages came in, groups were split up and sent in different directions, their tasks marked on a map.

“We have 20 injured at Edgewater and Rowena,” Urrea said.

Urrea questioned the decision to send only part of a six-member group.

“As group leader, you feel that four people might be overwhelmed by 20 injuries,” he advised. “Go with entire group.”

The command post members sensed a shortage of people.

“How do you correct that?” Urrea asked. “Call logistics and ask for runners.”

They wondered where the new people would come from.

“Word of mouth is going to travel very quickly that at the corner of Ivanhoe and Edgewater there is help,” Urrea said.

It was evident that not everyone felt comfortable with command.

“The reason people will follow you and submit to your authority is that you know what you’re doing,” Urrea assured them.

Edgewater and Ivanhoe was an imaginary command post, by the way. In a real disaster, the people who know what they’re doing will go to Michael’s on Los Feliz Boulevard.