Aid Offered From Around the World

Word of the massive Northern California earthquake hit Manila just as the Wednesday morning news programs went on the air. Almost instantly, the telephone began ringing at the Washington home of Filipino Ambassador Emmanuel Pelaez.

Halfway around the world, reporters for the Polish television network received word of the quake in the middle of the night and began calling their Washington embassy for information on casualties.

Disaster had struck San Francisco, that most cosmopolitan of cities, and suddenly it seemed that nowhere in the world was too far away to be worried.

“There’s an umbilical cord between the Philippines and that area,” embassy spokesman Adolfo Q. Paglinawan said of the Bay Area, home to thousands of Filipinos, as well as hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Poles, Irishmen and immigrants from virtually every sector of the globe.

By Wednesday morning, offers of aid, most of them of little use but all well meant, were flooding into the State Department and the White House from around the globe. Greece, a nation with a long history of earthquakes, offered a team of 25 experts on seismology. Israel offered to help on rescue efforts. The Soviet Union, which has never before offered to aid the United States in a disaster, offered unspecified help. Pope John Paul II offered prayer.

And along with those offers came messages of condolence.

Some were expressed in the deep formality of diplomatic exchange. “I hasten to express to your excellency and to the bereaved families my heartfelt sympathy and condolences,” wrote Japan’s Emperor Akihito in a cable addressed to “His Excellency the President of the United States of America.”

Others took a more familiar tone. “Dear George,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cabled from a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, “please let me know if there’s anything at all we can do to help.”

But all expressed the same reality--in the age of instant communications, few events grab the attention of the world so quickly as the sight of an earthquake striking at the heart of a great city.

“It’s terrible,” said Greek Embassy spokesman Achilles Paparsenos, “we’ve gone through it before. I, too, grew up in an earthquake area, Yolos, and I remember the shocks. You feel helpless. It’s terrible.”

About 40,000 Greek-Americans live in the Bay Area, including San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos. The Greek government was one of the first to offer aid, sending its foreign minister to the U.S. Embassy in Athens with a list of experts who could travel to the United States if their services were needed.

In Greece and elsewhere around the world, foreign ministry officials were flooded with calls asking for information and reassurance about the fate of aunts, uncles, children and friends.

“We’re trying to deal, as best as possible, with it, but like everyone else, we’re having trouble getting through to people because of the telephone lines,” said Daniel L. Labrosse, first secretary at the French Embassy here. “We have a lot of French tourists in the area,” he said. “There have been a lot of calls.”

Nor were relatives the only ones calling. The size of the earthquake and the prominence of San Francisco made the disaster a leading story for journalists around the globe, who deluged their embassies with requests for information about just what had happened.