Ingenuity : Doing Business With Bay Area Took Extra Effort

People trying to do business with the Bay Area faced frustrations Wednesday as Tuesday’s earthquake disrupted telephone and computer communication and shipments by truck between that city and the rest of the country.

The Pacific Stock Exchange was forced to shut down options trading altogether but continued to trade stock at its floor in downtown Los Angeles. Volume, however, was extraordinarily light.

Out-of-town workers for San Francisco-based companies were especially isolated, often unable to reach their employers and forced to direct customers elsewhere.

“Basically, everything is at a standstill,” said Kimberlee Wilt, an assistant in the Los Angeles office of Hambrecht & Quist, a San Francisco investment firm. “We have no (stock) quotes, so we have to redirect all our clients to New York.”

Power was out throughout the day in San Francisco’s financial district, halting the normally brisk flow of electronic data to the world beyond. Employees in Los Angeles reported some luck in receiving calls from the stricken area but little success in placing them.

Besides slowing the flow of information, the earthquake also disrupted the shipment of goods into the Bay Area. Air cargo companies, such as Federal Express, said they were able to receive packages at Oakland’s airport but that ground transportation from the airport was at a standstill.

Trucking firms said they avoided San Francisco as earthquake damage clogged key roadways, and shipping activity was disrupted by severe damage to one of nine cargo terminals at the Port of Oakland.

Sporadic power outages throughout the day forced Bay Area firms to quickly adjust. One Oakland shipping firm, American President Cos., said power interruptions disrupted its computerized cargo tracking system. As a result, cargo was catalogued the old-fashioned way--by hand.

In ways large and small, workers hundreds of miles from the temblor’s epicenter coped with the problems that a natural disaster can wreak on modern technology.

Attorneys at the Los Angeles office of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, a San Francisco law firm, were cut off from a computer that holds key information about pending litigation and other business. But they figured a way around the maddening lack of telephone service--by contacting colleagues in Sacramento who were able to relay their messages to San Francisco.

Los Angeles brokers at Sutro & Co., a San Francisco-based investment firm, were able to conduct business by placing orders through a sister firm in New York, Tucker Anthony & R. L. Day. “There hasn’t been one order we haven’t been able to execute,” Charles W. Daggs, Sutro’s chairman, said.

Los Angeles became the relay point for stock orders placed with the Pacific Stock Exchange. Workers at the exchange’s San Francisco headquarters labored by candlelight before dawn Wednesday as markets opened on the East Coast. They relayed stock orders by telephone to Los Angeles, where employees of the exchange carried them out.

Despite such efforts, however, the day’s trading volume of 770,200 shares was meager, just 20% of normal. “There’s an awful lot of brokerages out there that assumed we were down altogether,” said Dale Carlson, a vice president of the exchange.

Later in the day, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that the exchange would resume options trading today. Under the unusual plan, options listed on the Pacific exchange will temporarily be parceled out to the New York, American and Philadelphia exchanges and the Chicago Board of Trade.

Indeed, many companies that normally do a lot of business in San Francisco seemed to proceed remarkably well Wednesday.

The quake knocked out the internal telephone system of the Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards investment firm in Los Angeles, because the lines ran through San Francisco. But most calls could be completed by using outside lines.

The quake deeply cut Airborne Freight’s Bay Area business. Robert Brazier, Airborne’s president, said the firm’s Tuesday night flight from Oakland was delayed and that Wednesday’s shipping volume was down by 75%.

A vice president with Viking Trucking in San Jose said his company stayed out of San Francisco entirely Wednesday but was plotting a route to use to service the city today. “Many of our customers just aren’t open today,” said Bill Mahan, Viking operations vice president. Viking delivers freight to stores and small businesses.

The Coast Guard said the ports in San Francisco and Oakland were open Wednesday but that activity was slow. Few trucks made cargo deliveries to the port areas, and many shipping companies told employees to stay home so the streets would be clear for emergency vehicles.

Mel Wax, a spokesman for the Port of Oakland, said the earthquake seriously damaged the Seventh Street terminal, which has been closed indefinitely. He said ships destined for that terminal were diverted to other terminals. On Wednesday, for example, a Hanjin Line cargo ship was moved from the Seventh Street terminal to one operated by Matson Navigation.

“As long as we can divert ships to other terminals, we’ll be all right,” he said.

Wax said there were no estimates on the extent of the damage or how long it would take to repair the terminal.

Across the bay at the Port of San Francisco, the Coast Guard reported that one crane was heavily damaged and that the port suffered from power outages and downed phone lines throughout the day.