Planning and Aftershocks

In the first hours after the earthquake Tuesday, television cameras lingered over a battle against an inferno in a block of apartments in San Francisco’s Marina district. When the earth shook, it snapped water mains in the neighborhood, but firemen still had pressure in their hoses because a fireboat had edged to shore five blocks away and was pumping water from the bay.

The boat was not there as a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. It was included in contingency planning for an earthquake, planning that for years nobody took very seriously. But a fairly recent decision by former Mayor Dianne Feinstein to pay more attention to planning apparently is an important reason why the immense task of pulling the Bay Area back to its feet has gone so smoothly, even as aftershocks rumble through the region.

By the end of the second full day since the quake, heroic measures by medics, police, firemen and bystanders had saved all of the lives that could be saved in the rubble of the Nimitz Freeway and other scenes of the quake’s savagery. Now it is the turn of an army of building inspectors, linesmen, gas company repair crews, mental health counselers and others from all over the state, again pulled together by preparedness planning. As Times writer Larry Green reports in today’s special earthquake section, the plan used by local, state and federal officials to run thousands of people through a Bay Area earthquake drill in August bore eerie similarities to this week’s real thing.

Some of the planning goes back a long way. Southern California Gas Co. and Pacific Gas & Electric Co., for example, have been prepared for years to loan each other repair specialists in emergencies. By yesterday, 240 gas workers from Southern California were in and around San Francisco helping search for leaky gas lines. Looking for leaks, restoring power, bulldozing damaged buildings before they can collapse in aftershocks, inspecting other buildings before residents or workers can return is front-line drudgery. But that is how cities get pulled to their feet. It also is the way California learns to cope better with the next earthquake than with the last.

A pervasive theme in discussions with utility companies is that with every earthquake since 1933 they have learned to design equipment to make it better able to ride out temblors. They have learned, for example, to stock repair trucks with food and water and to disperse them through a service area, rather than keep them in one maintenance yard, so that they can reach trouble faster.

San Francisco understands that there is an element of luck to the success of rescue and recovery missions. If the quake had struck in the dark, there might have been more panic. If there had been high winds, fires might have been harder to contain. Officials still savor the way volunteers pitched in to help with whatever task was at hand and the level of teamwork among professionals.

But it is important to note how the fireboat came to be on hand off the Marina and that there must be similar lessons to be learned from Tuesday’s quake. The violence and havoc of some future “great” quake may overwhelm the best of plans, but it may not. That is enough to lure California into a permanent process of learning and planning.