Quake Planning : Hugo--a Lesson for California

The hurricane that hit South Carolina was more devastating than anyone had expected.

The power failures alone were so widespread and long-lasting that they virtually crippled an area extending as far as 200 miles inland from Charleston.

Gasoline, water and sewage could not be pumped. Automated teller machines stopped operating, and banks would not let customers withdraw money from the counters because their computers were down. Cash registers in retail stores went out of service, and credit cards were not being accepted. Vending machines stopped operating. Even cellular phones were inoperative because the relay stations were incapacitated.

Blocked roads made food distribution a dire problem. Even people who had stored food often found they couldn’t cook it, or retrieve it. On offshore islands resentment toward officials mounted as thousands were kept from returning to sift the rubble of their ruined homes.

In California, a continent away, disaster planners have been looking on with a kind of horrified curiosity. Already, they are absorbing lessons about what the Carolina disaster has to say about preparing for an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in urban California.

Because it severely damaged such a wide area and revealed the vulnerability of technology-dependent U.S. cities to electricity and computer disruptions, the South Carolina hurricane is viewed by planners as a significant case study.

Lessons From Disaster

Hurricane Hugo is an “important disaster,” even for an area like California that is concerned more about earthquakes, said Paul Flores, executive director of the Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project, a program of the state Office of Emergency Services.

“Hugo provides a better picture (than we’ve had recently), a more practical picture, of a big disaster,” Flores said. “In California, we have very little experience. The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco was the last really big disaster in California, and memories are short.”

As it is, he noted, the damage in South Carolina, even if it reaches $3 billion as some authorities now predict, falls far short of various estimates of anywhere from $17 to $60 billion in destruction that the “big one” could inflict on Southern California.

What are Hugo’s main lessons for California?

The main one, say the experts, is that individuals and families should prepare for disaster on the assumption that there will be little or no outside assistance available to them for several days. In Charleston, government agencies were overwhelmed. And some surrounding rural communities did not get any help to speak of in the first week.

“It demonstrates the necessity of being able to take care of yourself and not having to rely on the government being there with a water wagon or the Red Cross being there with food,” said Bob Canfield, Los Angeles’ new Emergency Preparedness Coordinator.

It is obvious that this means having food in storage that is “not dependent on refrigeration or special cooking or preparation.”

But the experts also say that in South Carolina it meant less obvious things--having a reserve of ready cash available, knowing how to use small amounts of regular chlorine bleach (scented bleach will cause diarrhea) to purify water, getting wicks to burn with vegetable oil rather than kerosene and keeping ice three times longer by loading up ice chests and putting them in insulated refrigerators. Or being aware that toilet tanks and water heaters may contain gallons of purified water, if their intake valves are quickly shut against outside contaminants.

Hurricane Hugo showed that planning is too often geared to the moderate-sized disasters. When the extraordinary event occurs, it overwhelms the plans.

It had long been assumed, for instance, that inland communities would not be severely damaged by hurricane winds. In South Carolina, authorities in these towns had not even bothered, in many cases, to attend preparedness sessions. Yet Sumter, population 88,000, about 100 miles from the coast, suffered $100 million in damage in 109 m.p.h. winds, and in Charlotte, N.C., 200 miles inland from Charleston, 200,000 homes and businesses were still without power a week after the storm.

Overwhelming Debris

In Charleston and the outlying islands, so much debris was left by the storm that there were no landfills big enough to put it in. Debris disposal became a giant problem that had not been contemplated in advance. That could become a particular problem in Southern California where officials are hard-pressed to come up with enough landfills to accommodate routine trash disposal.

“Our earthquake plans have worked well in Southern California so far,” Gary Lambeth, manager of operations support for the Southern California Gas. Co., remarked this week. “We recognize that our resources are adequate enough in some of the moderate earthquakes. But we never have had the big one they talk about on the San Andreas or the Newport-Inglewood faults. I think in such instances, most people are going to have to manage on their own for the first 72 hours.”

At the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, spokesman Edward Freudenburg, while generally optimistic about the status of DWP planning, nonetheless added: “We have these (preparedness) scenarios. But what if everything is down? What do you do?”

There can’t be too much preparedness, authorities say. Foresight paid off in South Carolina.

“I’m real happy that we prepared for the worst,” said Brent Groome of GTE’s South Carolina affiliate, speaking about the eight-day supply of gasoline for backup generators that had been stored at each GTE facility and the sealant and water-resistant gel put around all vital connections. “It’s very fair to say the telephones survived better than any utility. At 5:30 a.m. on the morning after the hurricane here in Myrtle Beach, with all the damage there was, I saw a gentleman standing there using a pay phone, and it was working.”

But getting food to where it was most needed proved a more difficult problem, and Jane Hindmarsh, chief of the planning division for the California state Office of Emergency Planning, said that her agency is already drawing a lesson from this.

“We have made an assumption that food would not be a problem in the first 24 hours,” Hindmarsh said. “That wasn’t true in South Carolina. This may help us to understand how to set up a distribution system ahead of time that may, in fact, work. . . . We think that after they come out of this, they’ll be able to teach us a lot and we want to learn from them.”

Hugo has made it painfully clear that the computers and electronics that make everyday life easier can suddenly become a giant headache when a major disaster strikes.

A visitor staying in a South Carolina hotel said she found that even if the establishment had telephone service, without electricity it couldn’t plug calls through to the rooms. The vending machines in the hotel didn’t function, and there was no ventilation upstairs because the windows could not be opened manually.

“There were subtle effects of the loss of electricity that you never would have anticipated,” she said.

California experts appreciate the problems. “The computer is a complicating factor,” said Richard Warford of the Los Angeles Fire Department. “On an everyday basis, it makes life a lot easier. But pull the plug, and we’re in a world of trouble.”

In Charleston, the owners of Dosher’s Food Store, their cash registers out, were able to admit only a few customers at a time while they totaled prices by hand. At a K Mart, clerks made change out of a shoe box, while a nearby Sears sold emergency goods such as lanterns and water jugs off its loading dock while the store itself remained closed, its computerized operations at a standstill.

Sometimes, the remedies can even complicate the situation. The standard advice to business is to set aside generators, with adequate supplies of gasoline, for the day the power fails. But utilities officials in Los Angeles caution that should homeowners, or even small business, do this, and not notify them in advance, repair crews could be endangered by back-feeds of power from residences or stores as they seek to restore regular electricity.

Ken Miyoshi of the Department of Water and Power says that with large businesses “we have a system. But with private homes, we have not established that system. We are in the process of attempting to find out who has generators. In the meantime, if a disaster strikes, I would imagine people would turn those things on, and it poses a problem for us.”

It would appear on the surface that a hurricane is a far different kind of disaster than an earthquake. One obvious dissimilarity is that, with modern weather surveillance, it has become a predictable event, and with time to prepare, communities can be evacuated and lives saved.

“The problem in L.A.,” says Freudenburg, “is in an earthquake you don’t evacuate in advance, so you have the potential for greater loss of life.”

But the results from a massive hurricane can be quite similar to those of a large earthquake, even in terms of flooding from possible dam breaks or tsunamis. The threat of a breakage of the Van Norman Dam in the Sylmar-San Fernando earthquake of 1971, for instance, forced the evacuation of thousands of Valley residents.

“Regardless if it is a hurricane or an earthquake, you have many of the same emergency management problems,” observes Tom Heaton of the U.S. Geological Survey’s field office in Pasadena.

“Getting information to people is essential in both instances, where to go, what do. . . . In many ways, I think we’ve developed greater capabilities for providing information important in saving lives in a hurricane, warning that the storm is coming, mandating evacuations and so on.

Information Issue

“Even putting predictability aside, I’m not sure we’re so advanced in earthquakes. If we have a big earthquake now, and there are a million people downtown, what information would be given them on what to do? When I saw Charleston, I thought about this. It’s a problem we ought to work on. And with an earthquake, there’s also the probability of aftershocks, which we don’t have in hurricanes.”

In some ways, California authorities are convinced that they have advantages in dealing with disasters that did not exist in South Carolina.

This, points out Mike Guerin of the state Office of Emergency Services, is a much larger, diverse and more populous state.

“Through our mutual aid plans and systems, we can shift large numbers of firefighters, law enforcement officers, public works and streets and roads people from one part of the state to another to augment the government work force,” he noted.

“As soon as law enforcement problems were beyond the scope of local law enforcement down there, they immediately called for the National Guard. With thousands of law enforcement officers in California, our policy would be shifting some of the law enforcement to the impacted area, and we’d use the National Guard for such things as transportation, logistics, supply management, engineering and construction and debris clearance, for which they are suited.”

Electric power officials say that in contrast to low-lying South Carolina, with its high water tables, where power lines often went overhead, many of California’s power transmission and other facilities are below ground where they believe they would be less susceptible to earthquake damage, except in the relatively rare instance where they crossed active faults.

“In the usual earthquake, the poles and wires we do have are shaken but don’t come down,” remarked Miyoshi. “But in a hurricane, they do often come down, or trees are knocked against them.”

But, he went on, “a gigantic earthquake would change the scenario because it would shake everything down.”

This theme is often expressed by California disaster experts: As long as the disruption is moderate, the plans are adequate. But plans may go awry if the earthquake is a giant one.

“The long delays in restoring (electrical) service may have something to do with the basic facilities not being intact in Charleston,” said Jim Jackson, manager of system operations for Southern California Edison. “So far in our outages, our facilities have been left fairly intact.”

Another Edison spokesman, Kevin Kelley, remarked, “Our estimate of power outages are much shorter than a month (predicted for some South Carolina localities). But they would still be extended if the earthquake were big enough.”

Times staff writers Larry Green in Charleston and Melissa Healy in Myrtle Beach, S.C., contributed to this story.

HURRICANE AID: Federal disaster officials were assailed for allegedly being slow to help victims. Page 18