THE BAY AREA QUAKE : Pressure Points : WHAT WORKED, WHAT DIDN’T, AND WHY : PREPAREDNESS : Real Disaster Has Eerie Similarities to Emergency Drill

Like hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents, Herb Brosowsky closed his San Francisco cheese warehouse early Tuesday so he could get home in time to watch the 5 p.m. start of the World Series telecast. Getting there was unusually easy.

“There was almost no traffic,” said Brosowsky, president of Northwest Cheese Distributors. On this star-crossed day he drove with an ease that belied the rush hour from one side of San Francisco to the other en route to his house near Golden Gate Park. “People were already home or in Candlestick (Park). Even the sidewalks were almost empty.”

A major sporting event, although not necessarily a World Series between two Bay Area teams, was something disaster planners included in their most recent earthquake drill last August. Because it got people home earlier than usual and off the streets, the baseball championship may have helped keep injuries and fatalities from being even worse in the nation’s second-deadliest earthquake.

Planners seemed prepared for a range of subtle contingencies. It was as if local, county, state and federal agencies were trying to march, if not always in step, to the same music.

In recent years, some regional officials sounded sour notes, contending that the Bay Area was not prepared for an earthquake registering above 6 in magnitude. In fact, in the August drill federal officials found several glitches that needed correcting, but they had not yet completed their report when Tuesday’s temblor shook the area.

But disaster, often the mother of discord, produced relative harmony this time as the city coped with Tuesday’s 6.9 quake. Even segments of the San Francisco community that had never attended a rehearsal joined in the performance.

The August earthquake drill with federal, state and local officials foreshadowed Tuesday’s quake with eerie similarities. They simulated the collapse of a portion of the Bay Bridge and of portions of elevated freeways, problems with water pressure, gas leaks and fires. And in the drill, as in Tuesday’s earthquake, there were frustrating delays in learning the extent of the disaster.

It was hours before planners and managers had reasonably accurate reconnaissance by their own staffs.

One lesson is that people involved in disasters are quick to begin assisting one another without the intervention of government. Residents of San Francisco almost instinctively seemed to know what to do. Those who did not could turn to their telephone directories for detailed instructions.

Complaints may yet surface, as they did last month in South Carolina after several seemingly smooth days of reactions to Hurricane Hugo’s widespread devastation. In fact, it was the demands that Hugo put on the Federal Emergency Management Agency that delayed completing an assessment of the August drill in California.

But because of the August exercise, the federal government was able to move more quickly in coming to San Francisco’s aid. “Just by our having known about (glitches in the drill) made us more sensitive to them,” said Larry Zensinger, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official who managed the drill.

Still, initial indications suggest that in San Francisco and adjacent communities, planning, luck and a lower-than-expected casualty toll combined for a relatively successful response in the critical hours immediately after the quake. Preparation seemed to be laced with thoughtful nuances.

For example, some owners of stores specializing in cellular telephones were called at home during the night and asked to open their shops and to reserve their supplies for city workers. This approach allowed the city to purchase state-of-the-art equipment in a quickly changing field of technology when it was most needed. The preparation required only keeping an up-to-date list of the shop owners.

Similarly, the Fire Department anticipated broken water mains in some areas of the city where the soil is particularly vulnerable during earthquakes and devised a system for pumping water from the Bay inland several blocks to fight fires. It allowed firefighters to eventually control a natural gas-fed blaze that destroyed several apartment buildings in the Marina District as the nation watched on television.

“Movement of the ground broke . . . water mains,” Battalion Chief Jack Hickey said. “We turned to our portable high-pressure system--our own creation.” The system uses a series of trucks, each with half a mile of five-inch fire hose to pump seawater through a series of portable hydrants.

There was evidence through the night and at daybreak of the detail in the city’s plan. With street lights out, volunteers directed traffic at intersections, using flares distributed from passing police cars.

It was hours after the earthquake before local disaster managers had a sense of the damage to the city and well into the next morning before they had a complete assessment. But by daybreak Wednesday, yellow caution tape warned pedestrians away from places where they could be hurt by falling debris or where there were cracks in sidewalks and streets.

The element of luck came into play at the ballpark. San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos said that because the quake hit while there was still about 90 minutes of daylight left, the 60,000 persons in Candlestick Park for Game 3 of the World Series remained calm. Had it happened at night and the stadium had been plunged into darkness, he said, the potential for panic and injuries would have been far greater. It was daylight, however, an early start for a night game so it could be broadcast in prime time to the East and Midwest.

As it was, most people remained calm in their seats until police, using loud speakers in their squad cars and portable public address systems, asked them to evacuate Candlestick.

Looting was also anticipated in the disaster planning. It is as much a part of catastrophes as property damage and injuries. Within an hour of the quake and before there had been a single report of quake-related crime, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith appeared on television to announce that anybody arrested for looting would be held without bond and would be prosecuted to the maximum allowed by law.

Even so, there were reports of looting in some sections of San Francisco, Oakland and Los Gatos. The most ghoulish incident reportedly took place along the Nimitz Freeway where, police believe, some persons crawled under sections of collapsed freeway to steal purses and wallets from the bodies of those killed.

“Vultures don’t do that. Vultures don’t steal wallets,” said Dave Drury, an Oakland School District police officer.

In San Francisco, at least 42 persons were taken into custody.

Every segment of the Bay Area community appeared to respond to the disaster. The Coast Guard sent boats and helicopters to search the waters around the Bay Bridge where part of the upper roadway collapsed on the lower lanes of traffic.

The California National Guard began mobilizing 20 minutes after the rolling and shaking ended, alerting 27,000 soldiers although fewer than 1,000 were pressed into action initially.

Military personnel and equipment were mobilized by the Pentagon, which over the last year has increasingly participated in rescue and recovery efforts at scenes of civilian disasters.

In an unusual and apparently unplanned move, military hospitals in the area opened their doors to civilians. At the Army’s historic Presidio, more than a score of civilians were treated in the first 24 hours after the quake.

Military police moved into the Marina District to help with traffic control. Military transports were put on standby, generators and trucks with loudspeakers were available to city officials, bottled water was sent in from the naval station at Alameda and the Navy warship Gridley, already in the Port of San Francisco, began to desalinate water in case it was needed.

Hospitals and their staffs of doctors and nurses--one of the best-organized efforts--were used far below the expectations of planners. In recent drills, earthquake preparedness planners had anticipated as many as 5,400 dead and 31,500 seriously injured in a Bay Area quake measuring 7.5 magnitude. Tuesday’s disaster left close to 300 dead and reportedly more than 2,700 treated at hospitals.

Some of the most dramatic medical work was done in the field at the scene of the Nimitz Freeway collapse where within two hours of the earthquake four doctors and three nurses established a triage operation.

Besides those rehearsed efforts, there were dramatic gestures by individuals.

In the Mission District, a policeman walked and shouted like an outdoor preacher with a message of salvation: “Prepare for 72 hours without services,” he said. “Store water. Turn off the gas. There are only 90 minutes of daylight. Don’t just stand there.”

In the Tenderloin District, Marvis J. Phillips, a jewelry wholesaler, stood in an intersection directing traffic with a flare.

“We’ve been planning for this, but tonight is a hell we never expected,” he said.

Motorists trapped on the Nimitz Freeway escaped down ladders put there by volunteers. Dozens of persons from nearby factories raced to the sandwiched roadway with tools, flashlights and fire extinguishers. Iron workers, carpenters and construction workers converged at the site with heavy equipment and then watched in frustration as cautious officials, fearing even more damage and injury, held them back.

“Hey, if there are people alive up there, why can’t we get them out?” pleaded Duane Tolbert, a construction worker. “If we get killed, it’s our own thing.”

Practiced in disaster work, the American Red Cross said it cared for 2,000 homeless people in San Francisco alone and 3,000 others in surrounding counties.

One of the events planners were most prepared for did not occur: Old buildings in Chinatown and the Tenderloin District survived. They were not expected to.

Carl B. Koon, head of San Francisco’s office of emergency services, said that was “a complete surprise.”

Assessing the city’s performance, Koon said the quake was “not as big as it could have been. But we have all (the damage) we could handle. . . . Overall we came out OK. However, the recovery will go on for weeks and months.”

Times staff writer Doug Jehl in Washington contributed to this story.