THE BAY AREA QUAKE : What If? : HOW SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WOULD HAVE FARED : Bracing for Fury and Fire, Sirens and Looters

Helicopters, dozens of them, rising like a flock of frightened birds from a quivering landscape, would be the first signs of response if a major rush-hour earthquake struck Southern California.

Whining over paralyzed freeways, sharing the sky with plumes of smoke from flash fires on the ground, the darting aircraft would scatter to pick up officials responsible for protecting public safety and managing the region’s recovery.

As airborne ferries and aerial spotters, as firefighting aircraft and emergency rescue ambulances, these helicopters would climb off helipads from Van Nuys to San Diego to become essential links in the region’s mobilization.

Richard B. Dixon, Los Angeles County’s chief administrator, would meet one of the helicopters on the roof of the Hall of Administration or at a park near his home.

Capt. Gary Snelson, chief of the emergency operations bureau for the Sheriff’s Department, would meet his assigned helicopter on the roof of Methodist Hospital in Arcadia. Destination for both Snelson and Dixon: the county’s earthquake command post in East Los Angeles.

Other helicopter crews would deliver Orange County disaster officials to the basement of the Santa Ana Civic Center.

Then would begin the task of assessing damage and allocating rescue, recovery and cleanup resources. Every agency--from cities to counties to harbor districts--has its own custom-designed earthquake response plan.

In the city of Los Angeles, the plan calls for Mayor Tom Bradley, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and about two dozen department heads to hunker down in a high-tech bunker four floors below the east wing of City Hall, a facility equipped with steel doors, flashing lights, communications gear, tracking maps, cots and extensive supplies of food and water.

“Realistically, we don’t know how many of these (officials) would survive a major quake and how many could make it downtown,” said Anton Calleia, Bradley’s chief administrative assistant.

Lower-level city employees would be dispatched to outlying emergency centers. Rescue work would fall to firefighters. Police would be assigned to maintain civil order. Parks and recreation officials would open shelters. More than 70 building inspectors would fan out on foot to assess damage to about 1,000 of the city’s most vulnerable buildings.

Because of the likelihood of death, injury and family emergencies, personnel officials would work from a list of five city employees for each job. One City Hall office would be responsible for dispatching citizen volunteers to help man police and fire stations and other government offices.

Helicopter pilots would check from the air for damaged freeways, refineries, dams and buildings, as police cars drove gingerly down debris-strewn streets.

Sheriff’s deputies would check major facilities in their areas, including hospitals, schools, banks, utilities and others that might require assistance. At the county’s 20 sheriff’s stations, watch commanders would evaluate their own buildings and telephone nearby cities for local damage reports.

In Orange County, the task would be only slightly less difficult, as officials tried to coordinate relief efforts with representatives in 28 cities scattered across 786 square miles. The condition of the San Onofre nuclear power plant in North San Diego County would be an especially urgent concern.

Department heads would staff a command post deep in the belly of the Civic Center. “A lot of thought has already been given to what could happen here,” said Orange County government spokeswoman Helen Lotos. “We have 2.2 million people to consider.”

The nature of the response would largely depend on where the quake hit. The two most hazardous faults in Southern California are the San Andreas, which borders its most densely populated areas and runs along the backside of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the smaller Newport-Inglewood Fault, which runs through crowded neighborhoods and commercial centers in Orange and Los Angeles counties from Newport Beach to Long Beach and north to Beverly Hills.

Officials say it would be impossible to assist many people in the immediate aftermath of the quake. Streets would remain clogged with fallen power lines and other debris. Gas and electricity service might not be restored for days. And phone service would remain crippled. Many of the people lacking the essentials, such as food and water, would be left to fend for themselves as officials dealt with rescue operations, mass deaths and breakdowns in the area’s infrastructure.

Coordination of services and activation of the Emergency Broadcast Network, which would broadcast emergency information on commercial radio stations, would be handled by members of the Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project in Pasadena. The group would assess damages and provide assistance to local governments. It would also help run disaster aid offices in the weeks after the quake.

Reports of looting in the wake of a devastating earthquake would reach police--but officials say human suffering would probably monopolize officers’ time during the first frantic hours after the quake hit.

“Saving life takes precedence over saving property,” said Capt. Snelson of the Sheriff’s Department.

A quake the size of the 6.9-magnitude temblor that hit Northern California could devastate commercial shipping, as well as the region’s vast oil- and gas-production facilities.

The fate of schools would be uncertain until officials determined which buildings were structurally sound and educators were able to make their way back to the classroom. Dormitory residents at major universities such as USC and UCLA might be left homeless.

Students in at least one community would be prepared. In the Antelope Valley, some schools have required children to bring in emergency food supplies that have been stored in anticipation of an earthquake.

The Southern California work force would be sharply affected. Office buildings would require thorough inspections. And even if they were judged to be safe, transportation problems could prevent workers from returning to their jobs.

Shopping malls would be deserted or converted to makeshift hospitals, day-care centers or even schools.

Production of television shows and motion pictures, the very symbol of Southern California to many, would temporarily halt. And movie theater marquees would be veiled in shadows.

Television--for those with electricity--would become more like a 24-hour-a-day community bulletin board, abandoning its regular programming to provide a window on the devastated region.

FIRES

Vast Distances Make It Hard

Surviving the initial jolt of an earthquake is sometimes just the beginning. Fire can be the real enemy.

Had this week’s Northern California quake hit the Southland instead, city and county fire officials would have confronted many of the same problems--fires from natural gas lines, access to parts of the city blocked by fallen debris, possible water pressure failures and difficult rescue operations--but possibly on a larger, more sprawling scale.

For example, in San Francisco delicate decisions about who got gas and electricity service and how soon they got it could be made by a single utility. But those decisions must be coordinated among several utilities in this region--including Southern California Edison, the Southern California Gas Co. and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Fire response in some areas of the Southland could be hampered by damage to fire stations themselves. The Los Angeles County Fire Department, for example, which provides protection to 46 cities as well as unincorporated areas, has six fire stations identified as seismically unsafe--and county officials estimate that it will be four years until they are brought up to code. Four of the stations--in Claremont, Watts/Willowbrook, West Hollywood and Malibu--will have to be torn down and replaced. Those in Altadena and Commerce will be reinforced. The cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach also have stations that are undergoing renovations. Fire stations in San Juan Capistrano, El Toro and Dana Point have also been identified by Orange County officials as unsafe in a quake.

In the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, fires burned for days, destroying the city and taking hundreds of lives. This week, San Francisco officials substituted fireboats for hydrants where they could--and had remarkable success in overcoming low water pressure in the fire-plagued Marina District.

Cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties are too widespread and too far inland to be helped by fireboats. But Southern California officials say they have ways to overcome a lack of water pressure here.

Los Angeles County, for instance, has three miles of 20-foot-long, portable sections of aluminum pipe that can be snapped onto water mains to bypass broken segments. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power says it has the same capability.

In addition, fleets of water trucks with individual capacities of 1,000 gallons are available. And Los Angeles County can employ up to three firefighting helicopters capable of dropping about 400 gallons of water each.

“If we had an incident like they had in San Francisco where they had one large building completely involved with fire, we can come in with helicopters and make water drops right on those structures,” said Rudy Monarrez, emergency services coordinator for the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

A strong jolt to the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors or at Marina del Rey, the closest Southland equivalents to San Francisco’s Marina District, could create havoc for local firefighters, too, but officials here said their problems would not be as severe as those in San Francisco.

Water cannon on two fireboats stationed at Marina del Rey can reach most buildings in the marina, the officials said. This would mean that these boats could fight fires directly--unlike fireboats in San Francisco that had shorter reaches and were limited to feeding water to the fire engines on land.

Newport Harbor also has three fireboats and can make use of a police helicopter capable of making limited water drops, officials said.

In extreme cases, officials say, they can call on Navy personnel on Terminal Island to coordinate a military response that would involve positioning aircraft carriers offshore. Military helicopters could be used to airlift victims from coastal cities to medical facilities on the carriers.

Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, a leader in regional earthquake preparedness, said that, in Los Angeles, the greatest fire danger after a quake would be to old neighborhoods in the Central City, along the Wilshire Corridor and in Hollywood, where unreinforced masonry structures are concentrated. Similar buildings could pose a threat to residents in San Diego’s University Heights, Hillcrest and Golden Hill neighborhoods, according to city officials.

“When these buildings collapse, the (gas) pipes break, creating the greatest threat,” Bernson said.

He has proposed an ordinance that would require all new buildings to be fitted with gas valves that would shut off automatically during a strong earthquake. The ordinance “has gotten nowhere,” he said, because of opposition from utilities that fear that these valves would shut off gas even if there were no leaks.

Should a San Francisco-sized quake hit Southern California, the massive underground network of petroleum and chemical pipelines that crisscross the Los Angeles Basin could be damaged. Firefighters would have to contend with scores of industries that work with hazardous, often highly flammable materials, ranging from metal platers in Boyle Heights to oil refineries in the South Bay.

Weather conditions uncommon to San Francisco also could increase danger after such a quake. Santa Ana winds, for example, could complicate firefighting efforts, especially in isolated areas such as the Santa Clarita Valley, which was cut off for a time from the rest of Los Angeles after the 1971 Sylmar quake leveled the Golden State-Antelope Valley freeways interchange.

Under different weather conditions, a quake that followed winter rains could trigger mud slides in hillside neighborhoods, many of which already pose severe safety hazards because of roads that are too narrow and poorly paved to accommodate fire trucks and ambulances. Neighborhoods nestled in the Santa Monica and Verdugo mountains and the far stretches of the San Fernando Valley have been identified by the city as particularly vulnerable.

Despite these dangers, fire officials throughout Southern California said they are far better-prepared than a decade ago, when their earthquake emergency plans were often incomplete and ineffective. These officials said they now have detailed emergency plans and better regional coordination, plus emergency centers themselves are better fortified.

HOSPITALS

Prescription: ‘Golden Hour’

In a perverse sense, experts say, the nature of earthquakes makes it unlikely that large numbers of people with critical injuries will require medical care. “People who are injured are usually killed or have minor injuries,” said Dr. Larry Baraff, associate director of UCLA’s emergency medical center.

The major impediment to swift medical response in the event of a severe temblor is not the availability of facilities but the ability to get to them. The success of medical treatment would, in large part, depend on the condition of major roads and how quickly police, firefighters and paramedics could stabilize damaged structures and rescue those who are trapped.

Trauma care experts speak of a “golden hour” after a severe injury, a critical time during which the odds of saving a severely injured patient remain high if the person can be rushed to a hospital.

“Following a large earthquake, the critically injured die . . . because no one can get to them,” Baraff said.

That phenomenon was dramatically illustrated in Oakland when the quake caused a large stretch of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway to collapse, sandwiching dozens of cars between layers of concrete. Most victims either died, or walked away from the tragedy with little more than minor scratches and bruises. It was virtually impossible to reach seriously injured people caught between the two layers.

“No amount of medical preparedness can address the problem of collapsed concrete,” said David Kears, interim chief of Oakland’s Highland General Hospital.

Any earthquake that did overwhelm the health care system with critical patients probably would be so severe that the medical facilities themselves would suffer serious damage as well. Hospitals are just as likely to be destroyed in a major quake as are any other buildings. The 1971 Sylmar earthquake, for example, killed 49 patients and workers at the former San Fernando Veterans Hospital and demolished the county’s Olive View Hospital, which was only three months old.

One uncertainty in the event of a quake is the impact of cutbacks in trauma care and burn care on medical earthquake prepabedness in the region. Over the last several years, the number of designated trauma centers has dropped from 23 to 10, as many facilities, faced with rising expenses and tightened reimbursements from government agencies, have dropped out of the costly program. In addition, there are relatively few specialized beds for burn victims in the area.

Orange County has four trauma centers at its disposal, although the one in Fountain Valley is scheduled to close at the end of the year. San Diego County has six trauma facilities.

“It seems reasonable if you had all those trauma centers operational, you would get better care (during a disaster),” said Dr. Gail Anderson, chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at County-USC Medical Center.

Public safety and health care facilities throughout Southern California should be mobilizing armies of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other emergency personnel from the moment the shaking stops.

Most off-duty personnel would be expected to report for work. Hospital wards that are normally closed could be temporarily reopened. Private hospitals, which often turn away indigent or uninsured patients, have agreed in advance to treat whatever injured people arrive for treatment, regardless of their ability to pay.

Emergency service experts are cautiously optimistic that area hospitals could effectively respond to a massive earthquake similar to the one that rocked the Bay Area.

“We are probably in a good state,” said Sadonya Antebi, chief of disaster planning and operations for the county Department of Health Services.

County-USC’s Anderson agreed that a San Francisco-sized earthquake would not overwhelm emergency services here. If it were stronger, say on the size of the so-called Big One that seismologists warn is bound to eventually strike Southern California, Anderson is less confident that medical facilities could cope with the situation.

“I don’t know what will happen,” she said.

UNDERGROUND

Looking Out for Hidden Hazards

All across Southern California--underground and unseen--sprawl hundreds of miles of pipelines. All kinds of pipelines. High-pressure pipelines. Heated pipelines. Potentially explosive pipelines.

They carry the fuel that runs homes and industry and the gasoline for about 11 million motorists.

Southern California also is the refining center of the West Coast, its landscape marked by towering vent flames, eerily steaming processing facilities and the sprawling storage tank farms.

In areas such as the South Bay and the Los Angeles Harbor, where the refineries are concentrated, the underground web of pipelines also is especially dense. But few regions are unaffected.

Hardly a neighborhood exists, for example, without natural gas distribution lines.

Experts say that small 1- to 1 1/4-inch gas lines are the most vulnerable to rupture from ground motion. And those gas lines are even more vulnerable above ground, in buildings that suffer extensive damage.

In San Francisco, natural gas lines leaked in more than 50,000 places. Not all of these leaks were underground. Most, in fact, occurred inside buildings that were severely damaged by the earthquake, a factor that helped cause the deadly fire that swept through the city’s Marina District. But at least two large underground gas transmission lines were also ruptured.

To firefighters and other emergency response experts, underground lines raise some of their most serious public safety concerns. They have much to consider in Southern California, where the underground network is three times as extensive as in the Bay Area.

“We can require these pipeline systems to be built to meet, say, a theoretical 8-point earthquake, but we can’t ever be absolutely sure what will happen until the real thing hits,” said Mark Dallas of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s office of pipeline safety.

When “the real thing” hit San Francisco, preliminary assessments indicated that none of the underground liquid lines suffered damage. But state officials, wary of undetected damage, ordered all operators of liquid lines to shut down and complete structural integrity tests were ordered.

Officials said the precaution was taken in response to a recent disastrous fire in San Bernardino that resulted from a leak in a gasoline line that had sustained undetected damaged during a train derailment days earlier.

“We’re erring on the side of caution since the San Bernardino leak,” said Jim Wait of the state fire marshal’s office. “We’ll do the same if the next one’s in L.A.”

Petroleum products pose potential hazards in a number of other ways.

All those corner gas stations across Southern California, for example, have underground fuel tanks that can rupture. It happened in Salinas during this week’s Northern California quake. City officials declared a state of emergency when the gasoline poured into storm drains.

At Unocal’s Richmond refinery north of Oakland, three gasoline storage tanks ruptured during this week’s quake. They spilled more than 500,000 gallons of unleaded gas. Two split at the seams, and one was knocked from its foundation.

All of the gasoline was contained in dams around the tanks. Such dams are required around all storage tanks throughout the state.

“The concern is always to keep the (gasoline) out of sewers and waterways, and that was done,” Unocal spokesman Barry Lane said. “We didn’t expect those tanks to break, and we don’t expect our tanks down here to break in an L.A. earthquake--but we do have safety systems to contain spills if they happen.”

But Lloyd Milburn, director of the Office of Emergency Transportation for U.S. Department of Transportation, cautioned that surprises should be expected during earthquakes.

“The collapse of (the Nimitz Freeway) we didn’t think would happen, but it did.”

FREEWAYS

Clogging Up Road to Safety

With its immense latticework of freeways, streets and thoroughfares, Southern California is a sprawling mecca to the car culture, a place where status is defined in convertible tops, where commuter distance is a vital barometer of quality of life.

Nowhere is a community so reliant on the automobile, so vulnerable to paralyzing problems. Here, entire traffic arteries can lock up over something as feeble as a clogged fuel filter. An earthquake? The 5.9 Whittier jolt in 1987 was enough to close 25 miles of the Santa Ana and San Gabriel River freeways for almost 24 hours--and that because of a single cracked concrete support column.

Fortunately, the region is without the double-deck construction or rigid tress bridge design apparent in Oakland’s Nimitz Freeway and Bay Bridge. The Vincent Thomas Bridge, for example, the graceful span linking San Pedro and Terminal Island, is a suspension bridge that might well absorb the jolts of a major quake in a way similar to the Golden Gate Bridge.

But that’s the extent of the good news.

Most of Los Angeles-area roadway construction is comparatively old. Hundreds of freeway overpasses and bridges in the region--including the towering Four-Level interchange in downtown Los Angeles and the East L.A. Interchange--date back to World War II.

Problems in that early construction technology were underscored graphically when the Sylmar quake hit in 1971, causing freeway bridges in that area to bounce like gigantic hammers on their support columns. Several overpasses collapsed.

Caltrans engineers responded by affixing heavy steel cables to every existing freeway bridge in California, effectively tying down over-crossings so they would be able to move but not bounce. Still, antiquated support columns throughout Los Angeles need to be improved and, in theory, could be vulnerable in a particularly powerful quake, said the agency’s regional director, Jerry Baxter.

Power outages could further snarl traffic. In the city of Los Angeles alone, there are a staggering 3,800 intersections controlled by electric traffic signals. If significant numbers of those lights were to fail, teams of traffic officers would be dispatched to major congestion points. City employees, meanwhile, would break out a stash of 400 portable stop signs warehoused in city storage yards.

Los Angeles International Airport, the world’s third-busiest, is crowded on any given weekday afternoon with upwards of 15,000 travelers and perhaps an equal number of airline employees.

Extensively remodeled and expanded to strict earthquake codes in the early 1980s, the airport is heralded by officials as a potentially vital link to outside cities in the event of a catastrophic temblor.

The airport remodeling also featured a new two-level road system, with a U-shaped upper deck containing five lanes and extending past all major domestic and international terminals. But that is expected to be less vulnerable to damage than older structures, such as the 12-story, 27-year-old control tower.

Even if the tower were to topple, however, the airport could function, said Lang Moy, emergency planning coordinator for LAX. Any one of at least six specially equipped cars would be dispatched to runways to handle the final approach of landing aircraft.

The airport’s four major runways would be inspected immediately after a large quake, but those runways are considered almost indestructible--capable of withstanding forces up to 1 million pounds per square inch.

STRUCTURES

Buildings That Can Shake It

Though it is not obvious to the naked eye, a crazy-quilt of earthquake fault lines runs menacingly throughout the Southern California basin.

Ten miles to the east of downtown Los Angeles is the Whittier Fault. The Raymond Fault lies beneath Pasadena, barely seven miles from the proliferating skyscrapers shaping the city’s new core. And the Newport-Inglewood Fault tracks through coastal Orange County and north through Long Beach, Inglewood, Culver City and Beverly Hills.

The 1987 Whittier quake helped scientists uncover a previously unknown network of deeply buried fold and thrust faults underlying Central Los Angeles. Passing right under downtown and Dodger Stadium, for example, is the Elysian Park Fault, the one involved a few miles further east in the Whittier earthquake.

A 1987 study funded by the National Science Foundation projected that an earthquake in Los Angeles with a magnitude of 6.3 could destroy or damage $4 billion worth of buildings. That would represent about 33,000 structures, or about 5% of the city’s building stock.

Still, regional officials say they are confident that building codes, substantially toughened since World War II, will significantly limit damage, even when the long awaited “Big One,” a quake of roughly 8 magnitude or greater, finally hits.

When a big earthquake does strike, the Los Angeles city battle plan calls for an army of more than 600 building inspectors and 150 engineers, all armed with walkie-talkies, to fan out either by car or--if roads are impassable--on foot to quickly target severely damaged structures.

Even before they set out, inspectors will know where to look. Considered most vulnerable to damage or collapse in the event of a serious earthquake are aging apartment complexes and creaking commercial buildings built before World War II in an era when then city’s building code was far looser than it is today.

High on the priority list for the inspection teams will be Hollywood, the Wilshire Corridor and East Los Angeles--areas with old building stock susceptible to the same type of damage and destruction that hit San Francisco’s Marina and Mission districts.

Taking a broader look at Los Angeles and Orange counties, Jerry Takaki, a civil and structural engineer, said, “We learned a lot from the Whittier earthquake. So, in older communities such as Fullerton and Santa Ana, where you have buildings built prior to 1933 (the Long Beach earthquake), buildings of unreinforced masonry would suffer damage.”

Takaki, assistant chief of the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Building and Safety’s Earthquake Safety Division, said that because of the newness of much of the construction in Orange County, however, damage from a major earthquake there should be less than what would be inflicted in Los Angeles County.

“The newer areas,” he said, “like South Coast Plaza and Irvine, should do very well.”

Water

Keeping to the Essentials

Everywhere, Southern Californians--whether their homes are untouched or in shambles--would find their daily routines altered and disrupted. Power would be unreliable, mail service could be intermittent; supermarkets could be under-stocked and missing daily staples and cash might become unavailable from the corner automated teller machines.

One bright spot in the earthquake scenario is the region’s water supply. Officials say Southland residents would probably have an adequate supply to see them through even a lengthy recovery period.

Unlike Northern California, which receives most of its water from only one source--the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct--the Southland is fed by three separate sources: the California, Los Angeles and Colorado River aqueducts. And that does not include water already held in local reservoirs.

Officials got a good sense of how an earthquake affects the water supply during the Sylmar quake of 1971. That temblor knocked the Los Angeles Aqueduct and two major filtration plants out of service. It also damaged the Van Norman Dam. But the region’s water supply held up.

Sewage treatment plants might also be victims of an earthquake. In Orange County, officials said plants along the Santa Ana River in Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach--which pump nearly 260 million gallons a day and serve nearly all of the county’s residents--could be knocked out of commission for weeks. Raw sewage could also overflow into waterways and low-lying neighborhoods.

It is expected that electrical power also would be lost throughout much of the region. Substations are especially vulnerable. Residents from Anaheim to Antelope Valley could find themselves in the dark.

The DWP’s Ed Freudenburg said transmission lines usually “roll with the punches” of a major temblor, but power stations and large pieces of equipment do not.” The Sylmar substation was destroyed in the 1971 Sylmar quake.

Then there are the small nuisances that magnify the stress of post-quake life.

Automated teller machines at local banks would go on the fritz. Bank buildings in hard-hit areas would be closed for safety and security reasons. And downed telephone lines and blank computer screens would mean sparse communication, mounting paper work and even more frustration balancing a checkbook.

“We would have to make some judgment calls,” said Margaret Merrett, vice president of corporate communications for Sanwa Bank California. “People who are trying to pay with checks (will not) know their current balances, and you don’t always have up-to-date information when you have a disruption like this.”

Even with cash in hand to buy coveted goods, the grocery store could run out of toilet paper. Gas can’t be pumped without electricity. Microwave ovens and toasters can’t cook. Television sets can’t entertain or inform.

With telephones eerily quiet, emergency information can be relayed only by word of mouth or over battery-operated radios. In such a vacuum of information, it is even possible for a whole community to be isolated.

Caltrans engineer Bill Minter recalled that in the aftermath of the Sylmar quake the city of San Fernando’s phones were out of service for some time.

“It wasn’t until two or three days later that we found out they had any damage at all--and they had quite a bit,” Minter said. “We were so busy we didn’t even realize we hadn’t gotten through to them.”

The 6.9-magnitude earthquake was four times stronger than the 1971 Sylmar temblor which killed 58 and caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Geologists expect a major earthquake--at least as strong as 7.5 to 8.0--along the San Andreas’ southern section within the next 50 years.

Property damage from the 6.3 quake in Long Beach in 1933 caused $40 million in damage--equivalent to about $400 million today.

Should the Newport-Inglewood Fault produce a 7.0 magnitude or greater, property damage could be as much as $60 billion, and the death toll could be in the thousands.