From the Wreckage Come Tales of Horror and Heroes

For Dr. James Betts, the horror of Tuesday’s earthquake peaked right around 8 p.m. It was then that the surgeon reached a frightened young boy named Julio Berumen after slithering 20 yards on his belly through a 2-foot crawl space in the wreckage of the crumpled Nimitz Freeway.

Julio, 6, was pinned in a car, the weight of his mother’s dead body upon him. After a quick look around, Betts and paramedics knew what had to be done: Using a chain saw, they cut through the woman to reach her trembling son.

Covered with blood and crying weakly, Julio was not yet out of trouble. To free the boy, whose limbs were entwined in the mangled car, Betts had to amputate the child’s right leg above the knee, working for three hours under floodlights in cramped, sweaty confines.

Betts has seen many gruesome sights in his lifetime, working air crashes and other disasters. But none compared to the rescue of Julio.

“I hope I’m never involved in something like this ever again,” the weary surgeon said later at Children’s Hospital, where the boy was in critical but stable condition after undergoing further surgery. The amputation took “10 minutes, but it seemed . . . like an eternity.”

As the sun cast light on the shattered Bay Area on Wednesday, the horror of the earthquake and the Nimitz Freeway collapse crashed down full force upon survivors, from doctors and rescue personnel to relatives of people still missing and feared dead.

More than 250 people were feared killed after the upper deck slammed upon the lower level of the busy freeway during rush hour, and searchers with specially trained dogs said there was little hope anyone remained alive in the rubble.

At hospitals, mortuaries and coroner’s offices around the area, the day after was filled with wrenching stories of the killer quake’s victims and near victims.

Survivors driving on the freeway during the collapse spoke in shaky voices from hospital beds as they recalled their brushes with death--and wondered why they made it.

Darrell McDaniel, 32, a bookkeeper, left work early to rush home from his job in Richmond for Game 3 of the World Series. Driving along the upper level of the Nimitz, McDaniel said he suddenly thought he had a flat tire.

“I was trying to control it when next thing I knew I was moving toward the guard rail. . . . I hit it. I remember (the truck) rolling over and winding up upside down and just waiting for another car to hit me,” McDaniel recalled as he sat in a wheelchair awaiting X-rays at Samuel Merritt Hospital in Oakland.

Although in pain from cracked ribs and a fractured vertebra, McDaniel attempted to subdue a hysterical woman trying to jump over the guardrail in a desperate attempt to get off the lurching highway.

“You could hear the cars on the level underneath exploding (popping as they were crushed), people hollering, asking for help,” McDaniel said as his daughter and former wife stood by his side. “But there was nothing you could do. . . . It was like a science fiction movie, like those old San Francisco quake movies. But this time I was in it.”

Using ladders provided by volunteers, he climbed down from the freeway. “People were just lying all over the streets,” he said.

The trauma was no less real for relatives of those still missing. Grim faced, they talked of trying frantically and fruitlessly to place telephone calls through the night, of scouring hospitals for their loved ones, of praying that their relatives were spared and somehow had been unable to get word through.

The Salvation Army established a missing person information center in Oakland and was swamped with calls from as far away as Alaska and Italy. Oakland police estimated the number of missing people at 150.

As the day wore on, many families ended their hunts for missing relatives at the Alameda County coroner’s office, where they filled out missing-person reports stacked neatly on the front counter.

Lillian Moton, 47, of Berkeley, joined the crowd of distraught people in the small office Wednesday morning. Television footage had brought her there in search of her two grown sons.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea where they are,” Moton said. “I saw two pictures on television. I saw someone lying on the ground in jeans and tennis shoes, lying on the ground. It looked like it could have been (Philip).”

Relatives of Alameda County social worker Tarrann Fortune, who works with the homeless in Oakland, were equally worried. Fortune, 27, who lives in Richmond with her parents and brother, normally leaves her job about 5 p.m. But Tuesday was Game 3 of the World Series, and Fortune--a lifelong Giants fan--was not about to miss a moment of the broadcast from Candlestick Park.

So she left at 4:30 p.m. and, family members assume, was motoring along the Nimitz Freeway when the earthquake hit.

“I’ve heard nothing, nothing,” said Fortune’s sister, Robin Harris, as she held a picture of the missing woman. “My mother is hysterical. I didn’t sleep all night.”

James Fortune, a thin, trembling man wearing a Giants cap, said he had been “nauseated and nervous” since his desperate search for his missing daughter began Tuesday at 6 p.m. He said his wife, Barbara, has been prescribed sedatives and “is on the verge of a breakdown.”

“I’ve been calling and calling and calling,” he said. “I drove to every hospital last night. . . . They don’t tell you nothing. I’m going to go back home and just wait and see. I’ve done everything I can do.”

Legal secretary Brenda Livingston came to the morgue looking for her elderly aunt, Mary Washington. Washington, 72, a retired housekeeper, had last been seen at a family dinner at Livingston’s house Tuesday evening. She left at 4:55 p.m. for the long drive back to her home in Sacramento.

“I called all the hospitals last night,” Livingston said in a quiet voice. “Highland Hospital, Merritt Hospital, Providence Hospital, Peralta Hospital and Alta Bates. We know she should have been right there (on the freeway) when it happened.”

Michael Zachary, executive vice president of a structural engineering firm, wrote a handbook on unreinforced masonry for the state Seismic Commission. Although he was in demand for professional reasons Wednesday, he spent most of his day looking for an employee, Ray Holmes, 50, of Mill Valley. Holmes, a senior structural engineer, left the office in Oakland at 4:55 p.m. Tuesday.

“We haven’t heard anything. His wife hasn’t heard anything,” Zachary said, noting that she is still recovering from the loss of a child in a freak accident. “The longer it goes, the worse it is.”

Because the earthquake is likely to leave a lasting psychological mark both on those injured and those in mourning, charities and government agencies provided counselors for victims Wednesday.

“I can’t imagine everyone not having had some sort of (stressful) experience,” said Susan Solomon, an emergency-disaster researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. “It’s very frightening. Their very foundations are shaken.”

Melanie Sweeney-Griffith, Alameda County’s mental health director, said “grief counselors” will be available at the coroner’s office over the next few days. “Many times families come to the coroner’s office and there won’t be a body there,” she said. In many ways, “the uncertainty, the not knowing, is worse.”

Meanwhile, coroner’s officials made grim logistical preparations necessary to handle the flood of bodies coming in from the freeway collapse. Stretched across the wall behind the desk of coroner’s investigator Michael Yost was a large piece of butcher paper labeled “Cold Storage.” Yost said many mortuaries and refrigeration companies have offered space to help with the overload.

Although staggering tales of tragedy and heroics were heard everywhere Wednesday, none was as extraordinary as that of young Julio Berumen, which many likened to the rescue of children buried beneath the rubble of the Mexico City earthquake.

At nightfall, he remained in critical condition at Children’s Hospital, but doctors had reversed their earlier prediction that he might lose his second leg. Beside Julio’s bed was his father, Pastor Berumen of Richmond, who alternately cried and spoke softly in Spanish with his brother-in-law. Down the hall, in critical condition herself, was Julio’s 8-year-old sister, Cathy, who had been pried from the wreckage before Julio’s rescue.

Betts, 42, director of trauma services at Children’s Hospital, shrugged off suggestions that he had saved the boy’s life.

“I’m not the hero,” he said. “The firefighters, police officers, the paramedics who were down there at the scene . . . they were the real heroes.”