BAY AREA QUAKE : Orange County Offers Assistance to Tremor Victims

While local schoolchildren practiced diving under desks and people throughout the county scrambled to contact friends or relatives, Orange County’s disaster preparedness crews mounted a relief effort Wednesday for San Francisco Bay Area cities racked by Tuesday’s earthquake.

As news of the disaster spread through Orange County, fire departments, the local chapter of the American Red Cross, businesses, the military and the public offered a variety of aid--from pints of blood to checks to an evacuation hospital--for stricken Northern California communities.

And purchases of earthquake survival gear increased at some grocery and backpacking stores.

The violent quake, with a magnitude of 6.9, hit the Bay Area at 5:04 p.m. Tuesday during commute hour and immediately before Game 3 of the World Series at Candlestick Park.

In 15 seconds, it shattered buildings, turned sections of San Francisco into flame, buckled a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, collapsed a one-mile stretch of double-deck freeway in Oakland and left behind a 100-mile-long swath of devastation.

At least 34 people had been found dead in the rubble or died at hospitals by late Wednesday. Several hundred people may have been crushed under tons of concrete in the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway, Interstate 880 in Oakland near the Bay Bridge. It will be days before all the bodies can be recovered and a reliable death toll taken, officials said.

Meanwhile, disaster authorities have counted at least 1,390 injuries. Scores of buildings have fallen in five counties, reaching from San Francisco south to Hollister, in San Benito County.

In Orange County, the biggest local relief response has come from the military. A reserve unit of Army helicopters and two California National Guard units from Los Alamitos have been sent to Northern California.

Shortly after the quake, the 194 doctors, nurses, medics and staff of the National Guard’s 143 Combat Support Hospital were loaded onto C-130 transport planes and flown to Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento.

There they set up an evacuation hospital to treat any overflow of casualties from Bay Area hospitals. The unit was joined by air crews and helicopters of the 140th Aviation Battalion, which is assigned to fly the injured to Travis.

“Fortunately, right now we’re there and ready if needed,” National Guard spokesman Capt. Mike Borkowski said. “Our information is that the hospitals are handling their casualties quite well.”

Capt. Steve Lambert, a spokesman for the Army Reserve Center at Los Alamitos, said the 1/214th Aviation Regiment has sent five helicopters to help the 6th Army assess earthquake damage. Their operation is separate from the National Guard’s.

And since 6 p.m. Tuesday, more than 10,000 telephone calls have inundated 38 lines at the county chapter of the American Red Cross in Santa Ana. In addition, at least 100 volunteers showed up at the Red Cross offices Wednesday, offering to give blood or help in the relief effort.

By about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, 412 pints of blood were collected at the county’s three donation centers, and about 400 pints had been shipped to the disaster area, Red Cross spokeswoman Sylvia Stewart said. Also, $10,419 in contributions had been received from donors who personally dropped off their contributions.

At one point Wednesday morning, about 75 people were lined up outside the Santa Ana center to donate blood, but many were turned away because of a minimum two-hour wait.

Many county employers, including the Oakley Co., a manufacturer of sunglasses, had told employees that they would be paid while they donated blood.

Jim Carr, owner of Inacomp, a Santa Ana computer center, closed his business early Wednesday and took nine employees to the blood bank. “We shut down the company today, as part of our contribution for this disaster and for those less fortunate up there,” Carr said.

Terri Crawford, attorney with the law firm of Harrington Foxx Dubrow & Canter in Orange, said she walked into her office Wednesday morning and just told them, “I’m leaving--I’m going to give blood. . . . I went to school in the Bay Area, and I have a lot of friends there.

“For us down here in Southern California, the only thing we can give is blood or money. So here I am,” she said, as she and two law firm employees, Kathleen Wolfe and Carrin Gidekel, waited to donate.

Mark Harris, 30, who operates heavy equipment for Newport Beach, said he was in Pico Rivera and heard that the Red Cross needed blood.

“I called my boss, who’s pretty good about these things, and I told him I was going to give blood,” Harris said. “He said it was OK.”

The overwhelming response prompted Red Cross officials to lengthen their business hours, Stewart said. Starting today, offices will be open from 8:30 a.m. until 10 p.m.

Donations of money can be sent to the American Red Cross, Orange County Chapter, 601 N. Golden Circle Drive, Santa Ana 92711. Contributors should mark “earthquake” on donation checks.

More than $10,000 had been received by late Wednesday, Stewart said. Food and blankets will also be accepted.

While the Red Cross coped with jammed switchboards and crowded corridors, more than 900 students at Dr. Edward L. Russell Elementary School in Santa Ana dived under desks and hugged the desk legs early Wednesday in an earthquake exercise.

The drill, planned before the San Francisco disaster, began when a bell rang longer than usual. When the mock temblor was over, children filed onto the playground to stand with their teachers, who held signs with room numbers on them.

“We had a brief meeting with our teachers this morning, and everyone wanted to know, are we ready for something like what happened in San Francisco,” Principal Richard Mobley said. “The kids are as aware (of the San Francisco quake) as little kids can be.”

In Irvine, teacher Marion Zenoff turned to a special curriculum she created to help students from kindergarten through sixth grade deal with fear of earthquakes.

“The children in the different (Irvine) schools were very, very upset because so many of them had watched television last night,” Zenoff said. “There were such graphic descriptions.”

Her teaching materials are designed to help children prepare psychologically as well as physically for a quake, to let them know that it is normal to be frightened and to help them overcome their fears by discussing them.

Zenoff said she will contact Northern California school districts next week to see whether they would be interested in her materials, which include a special booklet for parents entitled, “Mommy, I’m Scared.”

Shortly after the Bay Area quake hit, officials of Southern California Edison Co. in Orange County called Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the major supplier of power to the Bay Area. They offered materials, engineers and repair crews to help restore electricity to more than a million people, Edison spokesman Steven Nelson said.

No crews had been sent by late Wednesday because PG&E; was still assessing its needs, he said.

Similarly, the Orange County Fire Department offered to send heavy equipment, trained rescue workers and fire engines to the disaster area. The department’s four-person rescue squad was dispatched to Mexico City several years ago to help find survivors amid the slabs of concrete buildings that had pancaked in that major earthquake.

While Orange County firefighters awaited word Wednesday from the state Office of Emergency Services, sales of drinking water, flashlights, batteries and emergency foodstuffs were on the increase at local grocery, hardware and backpack stores. But the demand was nothing like it was after the 1987 Whittier quake.

“I don’t think (the earthquake) was close enough,” said James Williams, assistant manager for a Vons grocery store in Fountain Valley. “Unless we feel a tremor, it doesn’t affect us.”

Dave O’Brien, manager of the camping department of the Army-Navy Store in Orange, said he stocked up on emergency kits and blankets Wednesday night but had gotten only a few calls.

Those shoppers who did stop by Wednesday were “not panicky,” he said. “They just say, ‘I should do it now,’ like a one-time insurance fee.”

At Emergency Lifeline in Santa Ana, however, there was a sudden run on food, candles, light sticks and water drums.

“It’s really booming,” said Kathy Gannon, owner of the earthquake preparedness products company. “A lot of people had it on their to-do list, and this prompted them to do it.”

Staff writers Leslie Berkman, Tina Daunt, Sonni Efron, Lily Eng, Maria Newman, David Reyes and Chris Woodyard contributed to this story.