Search for Bodies to Take Days : State Puts Toll at 273, Then Says It Is Uncertain : Disaster: Earthquake may be America’s second deadliest ever. Swath of carnage is 100 miles long. Marina area in San Francisco is evacuated.

Still rocking from what probably will be the second deadliest American earthquake ever, the Bay Area slowly began Wednesday to dig out its dead and repair the damage left in a swath of carnage 100 miles long.

At least 35 people have been confirmed dead, and officials expect the toll to reach well over 200 when victims are dug from beneath the collapsed double-deck levels of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. Several hundred people may have been crushed under tons of concrete, but it will be days before the bodies can be recovered and an actual count taken.

State officials had estimated Wednesday morning that the toll could reach 273 dead, but later said that it was too early to know for sure.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit District tube beneath San Francisco Bay was briefly closed Wednesday night after a BART train operator “reported some water seepage,” said Kay Springer, manager of passenger services. But the tube was reopened without incident after the damage was pronounced minor.

Also Wednesday, an eight-block area of the well-to-do Marina District near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco was hurriedly evacuated because of fears of gas explosions and falling debris from damaged buildings. The area suffered the greatest damage in the city, although it was more than 50 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter near Santa Cruz.

Police barricades were erected at every key intersection, and Red Cross workers went door-to-door and down the middle of streets with bullhorns to ask residents to leave quickly. Residents who had left to go out to dinner were stopped and turned back on their return.

State disaster authorities have counted at least 1,390 injuries from the quake in five counties, and scores of buildings have fallen in a swath reaching from San Francisco south to Hollister. Thousands of homes suffered damage ranging from items knocked off shelves to shattered windows and toppled chimneys. Damage could easily mount into the billions of dollars.

While rescue crews and the California National Guard continued searching for survivors and bodies, President Bush on Wednesday signed a disaster-relief declaration and said the federal government “will take every step and make every effort” to help.

Gov. George Deukmejian arrived at the scene of the Nimitz Freeway collapse after hurrying back from a trade trip to West Germany.

Deukmejian said the damage looked worse than he expected. “It is just a horrible sight,” he said. “It’s something that you cannot fully appreciate by looking at the television screen. . . . I have to say I am greatly displeased and disappointed because I had been under the impression that all of the structures that had been built” after earlier earthquakes were seismically safe.

Struck at Game Time

The 6.9-magnitude jolt struck Tuesday afternoon at 5:04, just before the start of Game 3 of the World Series at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The entire Bay Area had been basking in the glow of national attention for having its two baseball teams in the Series.

Instead, the whole nation was sharply reminded of the Bay Area’s vulnerability to quakes. Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said in a candle-lit press conference at the St. Francis Hotel, however, that the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics would try to resume play next Tuesday at Candlestick.

Mayor Lionel Wilson of Oakland, which was supposed to host two games this weekend, said he did not want any games played before then.

“I told them that at this time I felt it would be inappropriate to play baseball in our city while there are still bodies still resting under the concrete of the overpass,” Wilson said.

So far, 14 bodies have been retrieved from the debris left when about a mile of the upper deck of the Nimitz Freeway--a portion of Interstate 880 near the entrance to the Bay Bridge--collapsed on rush-hour commuters on the lower level.

In some places rescuers were left with a crawl space of only one or two feet between the two decks. But in some spots the two decks meet in a tight fit, leaving no hope for any motorists caught underneath.

“It’s like a huge concrete sandwich with people in between,” said Alameda County Sheriff Charles C. Plummer, who added it could take five days to dig out the victims. “It’s total devastation.”

Kyle Nelson, public information officer with Caltrans, said 150 to 250 vehicles--including some buses--may lie crushed between the decks.

It may take days to recover all the bodies, officials said. “It’s going to be real slow, painstakingly slow,” said Marty Boyer, spokeswoman for Alameda County. “It’s very grim out there.”

Rescuers shined lights and probed metal rods into the crawl space in the darkness Tuesday night, but they moved cautiously. Sections of pavement weighing 500 tons were piled at odd angles.

“They are afraid it is going to collapse with the slightest aftershock,” said Nelson, the Caltrans spokesman. “Sound, movement--anything could make it go.”

Said Craig Kocian, acting city manager of Oakland: “It is possible that if a piece of concrete is moved, the rest will come down like dominoes.”

Powerful aftershocks as strong as magnitude 4.5 were felt through the day Wednesday.

The confirmed death toll of 35 is lower than state officials had reported in the first frantic hours after the earthquake before sunset on Tuesday. The state Office of Emergency Services, which relies on local officials for its numbers, also has dropped its widely reported estimate that the death toll would reach at least 273.

But the death toll could ultimately climb even higher unless officials are wrong about the number of vehicles trapped on the crushed section of freeway.

Frank Potter, a spokesman for the state office, said the agency decided late Wednesday to be more conservative.

At least 10 deaths have been confirmed in San Francisco, where thousands of residents and suburban commuters stranded by damage to the Bay Bridge and the shutdown of Bay Area Rapid Transit trains spent Tuesday night out of doors or in hotel lobbies.

Five other deaths have been reported in Santa Cruz County, five in Santa Clara County and one in San Mateo County, state officials said.

Transportation in the Bay Area gradually improved through the day Wednesday, thanks in large part to residents who heeded advice to stay at home. What traffic there was moved freely. The toll on the San Francisco-bound lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge was suspended in the morning to help traffic flow smoothly.

But little progress was made on reopening the vital San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, closed when 30 feet of the upper roadway snapped and fell onto traffic lanes on the lower deck. A decision on whether to reopen the bridge with temporary repairs will not be made until an inspection is completed.

A crane en route to the bridge will be used to lift the fallen section of pavement so that Caltrans engineers can inspect the bottom span. “What it basically boils down to is that they have to pull that section up and look under it,” said Anita Yoder, a Caltrans spokeswoman.

San Francisco International Airport and Oakland Airport reopened Wednesday morning. The Golden Gate and Richmond-San Rafael bridges had remained open, but the San Mateo Bridge was closed for inspection. The Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco was open, but volume was light as traders worked by candlelight, flashlight and light filtering through skylights.

The San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune published as usual Wednesday. In San Francisco, The Chronicle reportedly hit the streets with a scaled-down edition at 7 a.m. and an abbreviated edition of the Examiner appeared about three hours later.

UC Berkeley opened for classes Wednesday, but other area campuses canceled classes for the day. At UC Santa Cruz, about 10 minor injuries were reported, including some students hit by falling books in the library. Several thousand students camped outdoors Tuesday night until most dormitories were declared safe around midnight, officials said.

Some San Francisco city schools and Stanford University planned to hold regular classes today.

More than 1 million people lost electricity, said a spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and about 400,000 customers remained without power through at least part of Wednesday.

Almost all of downtown San Francisco’s high-rises began the day without electricity. “Service is being restored slowly downtown, and the reason is apprehension about possible leaking gas in buildings. We have to work building to building,” PG&E; spokesman Chuck Peterson said.

Most attention throughout the day Wednesday remained riveted on the Nimitz Freeway and surrounding sections of Oakland, where crowds gathered to watch the search and cleanup efforts.

Harrison Brown, 29, had been driving his express delivery truck south on the upper level of the freeway when the quake hit.

“Imagine you’re driving down the freeway at a normal pace and, all of a sudden, the road in front of you just drops. The freeway starts rocking and then there is no more freeway,” he said. “Then all around you these people are screaming and hollering.”

This stretch of the Nimitz was built between 1955-57 and may have been reinforced after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the 6.5 magnitude temblor that killed 58 people in the northern San Fernando Valley.

Asked if the Nimitz would meet today’s quake standards, even after the reinforcement, Caltrans’ Nelson said, “No, it would not meet code today.”

U.S. Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley), who came to the scene Wednesday and said he was born “just a few blocks from where we are standing,” called for a state and federal investigation of the freeway failure.

“We are confronted with (questions about) the integrity of the bridge and freeway system in the Bay Area,” Dellums said. “We have a moral and human obligation to return that integrity, whatever the dollar figure. We’ve got to find out what happened to make sure it never happens again.”

Oakland School District Police Officer Dave Drury said dispatches on his police radio indicated that some people apparently had climbed onto sections of the broken freeway after Tuesday’s collapse and stole wallets.

“Vultures don’t do that. Vultures don’t steal wallets,” he said with disgust.

Police said there was sporadic looting in downtown Oakland after the quake knocked out power to most of the Bay Area, but no arrests were made. Brick walls and smokestacks were down on several Oakland streets.

Terry Roberts, Oakland’s director of public works, said the walls of City Hall West, an auxiliary building across the street from City Hall, had separated and the building would not be usable for up to a year.

Engineers said Oakland-Alameda County Stadium, where the Athletics play, was structurally sound but that the neighboring arena where the Golden State Warriors of the NBA play basketball had suffered significant damage inside.

Alameda County officials said that the county courthouse had also suffered extensive interior damage and would remain closed indefinitely.

In addition to the 10 San Francisco deaths, there also were three murders that Police Chief Frank Jordan said were not related to the quake. About 209 people were treated for injuries, 25 of them critical.

Among the dead were a man and a woman on the second floor of a collapsed four-story, 30-unit apartment complex at the corner of Cervantes and Fillmore, also in the Marina District. They were heard alive about 7 p.m. Tuesday, buried in debris and pleading for help.

“All we could see were their hands sticking out of the rubble,” said an emergency medical technician at the scene Wednesday. “They were screaming that they were suffocating.” Firefighters tried to feed them oxygen, but the paramedic said: “When I went in at 10 p.m., they were dead.”

Firefighters, National Guardsmen and Red Cross workers--aided by a Caterpillar tractor-- finally removed the bodies Wednesday night. “It looked like they had interlocked arms beneath a door frame, which is what they were supposed to do,” said Fire Chief Michael Moran. But the couple apparently suffocated.

Ken Dorrance, co-owner of the building, said a third person believed to have been residing on a lower floor at the time of the earthquake was also missing.

Dogs were probing the remains of more than a dozen other collapsed and heavily damaged buildings in the Marina District for survivors and bodies. “We have completed searching through six collapsed buildings as best we could,” said Fire Department Capt. John Rebholtz. “At least five more buildings will have to be razed by heavy equipment.”

Searchers were also checking a block of burned-out apartments in the Marina District that lit the skies over San Francisco Tuesday night. “There have got to be people in there--unless we got real lucky,” said Joseph Surdyka, the city’s administrative coroner.

The damage in the newer Marina area came as a surprise to city officials, who expected to find most problems in the older, rundown Tenderloin section or in Chinatown. But streets in the Marina area buckled and many buildings there will have to be condemned, officials said.

“It is not as big as it could have been, but we have all (the damage) we could handle,” said Carl B. Koon, head of the city’s office of emergency services. “Overall, we came out OK.” Deputy Fire Chief Michael Farrell said he saw “three or four buildings that used to be four stories high and now they are one story high.”

Presbyterian Church officials said Wednesday that the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church in San Francisco was “severely damaged.”

Teams of inspectors from the city and from Bechtel Co. went building by building looking for structural damage through the financial district.

“The high-rises did extremely well,” said Nicholas Duchon, a structural engineer from Bechtel. However, Duchon and city engineer Jim Buker--pointing to damage to several brick buildings up the block--noted that older structures did not fare so well.

The city was dark through the night Tuesday, allowing thousands of residents and stranded workers who spent the hours outside an unusual glimpse of stars. Headlights and an occasional building running on emergency generators were the only bright lights. Among the landmarks that remained lit were San Francisco General Hospital and the glass-front Davies Symphony Hall downtown, but the usually well-lit Bay Bridge was dark except for the flashing lights of emergency crews.

Mayor Art Agnos, tieless and weary, gave periodic briefings throughout the day Wednesday. After a tour of the Marina area, Agnos said, “I was dumbstruck by the enormity of the earthquake damage. . . . It was very scary, very tragic.”

He praised the “heroic performances” of the people of San Francisco, whom he credited with aiding their neighbors and acting calmly in the face of disaster.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith said Wednesday that police made 50 felony arrests for looting, burglary and assaults Tuesday night, mainly along Market Street, a shopping district where broken windows left merchandise exposed.

In Santa Cruz County, the epicenter of the quake, five bodies have been found so far, but officials said there could be others.

Two died when buildings collapsed in the Pacific Garden Mall, a pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz. One died when a bakery collapsed in Watsonville, another in a nursing home and another in a traffic crash following the quake.

In all, 40 buildings collapsed in Santa Cruz and Watsonville, where damage was estimated at $350 million, Santa Cruz County emergency services coordinator Dinah Phillips said. Hospitals remain open, but California 17, the main link to San Jose, was blocked by landslides and fissures. The highway crosses the San Andreas Fault near the quake’s epicenter.

A wildfire in the area had consumed 650 acres, while 25 buildings had also been burned by small fires. Officials were advising residents to boil all water because of concerns about broken water and sewer lines.

“People should stay home. They should boil their water. They should clean up and prepare for a long haul,” said Phillips, public information officer for the county.

The small city of Los Gatos, in Santa Clara County, suffered some of the heaviest damage in the Bay Area. Pavement was buckled on streets in the center of town, natural gas and water lines were ruptured, and several dozen Victorian homes were shifted off their foundations. Many chimneys had crumbled and some homes had simply collapsed.

On Main Street downtown, brick rubble from building facades was piled three feet high in some areas. No one was killed but Los Gatos police reported 214 people treated for injuries at local hospitals. Forty people stayed at an outdoor shelter set up at Los Gatos High School’s football field Tuesday night.

Officers stood guard in the downtown area through the night to ward off looters. They were joined by wary shopkeepers.

“I’m just out to keep an eye on things,” said Loren Johnson, who family owns a building on Main Street. “A lot of people are sleeping outside their buildings tonight.”

‘Bad, Really Bad’

A day-care operator in Santa Clara, who had nine children and three parents in her home when the quake hit, said she huddled in the door frame with the toddlers and infants, who were terrified but remained quiet.

“It was bad, really bad. We really shook,” said Celia Moreno, whose husband, Armando, survived the Managua earthquake of 1971.

At City Hall, San Jose spokeswoman Callie Gregory said the city had weathered the jolt quite well, largely because redevelopment has replaced many of the city’s old buildings with new ones in recent years.

“San Jose got off real easy on this one,” Gregory said. “We’re just trying to help our neighbors.”

Five commercial buildings in San Jose suffered “major structural damage,” including two downtown office buildings and a department store.

Further south in Hollister, a city located along the San Andreas Fault, a “couple hundred” homes were damaged and the city was left without water, power or telephones, San Benito County clerk John Hodges said. There were 49 minor injuries but no deaths.

“San Benito County was real, real fortunate,” Hodges said.

Still, the entire downtown of Hollister was closed off and buildings carried signs warning that they were unsafe for entry until further notice.

“Water is a major problem right now,” said County Administrative Officer David Edge.

This story was written in Los Angeles by Times staff writer Kevin Roderick based on staff reports from the Bay Area.