Weather Adds to Bay Area Misery; Bush Views Havoc : Earthquake: Cold and the threat of rain dampen spirits as a grim President promises quick federal aid.

Bay Area quake victims, including more than 6,500 still displaced from their homes, were beset by new miseries Friday in the form of falling temperatures, the threat of rain and mounting damages, but they were promised quick federal relief by a grim President Bush.

Any relief will be welcomed as more careful study of the area struck by Tuesday’s 6.9-magnitude quake--and more than 1,500 aftershocks--pushed conservative damage estimates to more than $4.2 billion. “On paper, the city is broke,” said San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos.

The official death toll rose to 53 Friday as more bodies were pulled from the debris of the collapsed Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. The toll includes 32 in Alameda County, where the double-decked freeway is located, 10 in San Francisco, five each in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties, and one in Monterey County.

A San Francisco coroner’s office spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said five people are also missing and presumed dead in the rubble of the city’s Marina District buildings.

At least 3,011 injuries were reported, the state Office of Emergency Services said, and a hospital association said that 250 people were still being treated in hospitals.

Weather conditions turned less favorable Friday, with cool blustery winds pushing out the Indian summer that had made the first two days after the devastating quake at least bearable. But rain was forecast for much of the region on Saturday, and temperatures were expected to drop into the 40s in the Santa Cruz mountains, where many residents are camping in their yards.

Bush flew into the Bay Area from Washington on Friday morning and made inspection stops at the site of the crumbled Nimitz Freeway in Oakland and in downtown Santa Cruz, where several buildings in a pedestrian mall had collapsed.

Bush appeared stunned as he arrived Friday morning at the scene of the crumbled freeway in west Oakland. “Jesus,” he muttered aloud. “I’m deeply moved by this, deeply moved,” the President said.

Bush named Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner to keep federal relief flowing smoothly.

Agnos said he talked with the President for about 45 minutes Friday and was pleased with the conversation.

“I am satisfied that we had a chance to get our points across. We had plenty of time to talk to him,” Agnos said. “He was disturbed by what he saw and I was impressed by the sincerity of his reaction.”

At the scene of the Nimitz Freeway disaster, Oakland police said 32 bodies had been recovered and about 85 possible other victims are listed as missing. About 40 vehicles have been pulled out, half of them without occupants. Police Capt. James Hahn said at least 52 cars remain stuck in the rubble.

Work was suspended at 7 p.m. Friday after workers using a jackhammer to break up concrete debris felt “some shifting and shaking of the entire structure,” said Kyle Nelson, spokesman for Caltrans, the state transportation authority.

Nelson said he anticipates rescue work resuming by daybreak after the collapsed double-decked freeway is shored up with steel, wood and “tons and tons of dirt.”

The vehicles being pulled empty from the rubble apparently were abandoned in the seconds during and after the main quake, Caltrans spokesman Greg Bayol said.

“People must have stopped their cars and got out when they realized (the upper deck) was beginning to fall,” Bayol said. “I know one person’s body was found on the freeway; we think that person stopped the car, got out and got hit by another car.”

Some cars may also have been parked in a lot beneath the lower deck of the 1 1/4-mile stretch of Interstate 880 freeway that fell.

The state Office of Emergency Services said it knew of 6,569 people believed to be displaced from their homes. Most of them were forced to seek the aid of friends, check into hotels or motels, spend the nights at evacuation centers or camp out in parks and front yards. As many as 500 victims have been spending the night on blankets at Callaghan Park in Watsonville.

But in Santa Cruz County, the area with the most residences destroyed by the quake, officials said the number of people facing the weekend--and perhaps far longer--out of their homes is much higher.

Nancy Gordon, Santa Cruz County emergency services coordinator, estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 county residents are in that situation. “They are not necessarily homeless,” she said. “Some are just afraid of aftershocks.”

Small towns along the mountain ridges that isolate Santa Cruz from the Bay Area took the worst hit, with hundreds of houses and other buildings destroyed or damaged.

In the city of Santa Cruz, about 50 houses were judged uninhabitable. But Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt said six to eight buildings along the open-air Pacific Garden Mall, the heart of the city’s historic downtown, will have to be demolished and that another six or so may face a similar fate. In all, 250 businesses that employ 2,000 people were damaged on the mall. Most of the buildings date from 1880 to 1910 and were of unreinforced brick construction.

At least three people died when a department store and a coffee emporium on the mall collapsed.

Santa Cruz’s popular beachside amusement area suffered some damage. The ground buckled near the Ferris wheel and log ride, which will remain closed until spring, but the 65-year-old Big Dipper roller coaster and other rides will reopen in two weeks, said Marq Lipton, marketing director of the boardwalk complex.

Long lines were reported at Santa Cruz markets and gasoline stations Friday. And some people complained of price gouging.

Employees of a local Long’s drugstore filled two vans with water bottles, batteries, baby formula, diapers and other items, and gave the products away to customers and social service agencies. The prescription pharmacy was run out of a side door by flashlight even though “literally 65%” of the store’s stock lay on the floor, dumped there by the quake.

Charleston, S.C., hit hard by the recent Hurricane Hugo, sent five police officers and 7,000 gallons of fresh water to help Santa Cruz, as a way of thanking California for its aid. “We thought we’d return the favor,” said Charleston Patrolman Frederick Pasley, 25, who was standing guard along the mall.

Caltrans estimates that California 17, the major highway into Santa Cruz from the north, will be closed for four to six weeks. Raw sewage from the Santa Cruz area continued to flow into Monterey Bay Friday from breaks in two major sewer lines. “It’s pretty significant,” said Diane Evans of the county Department of Environmental Health, adding that beaches in the area were closed.

Gary Patton, chairman of the Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors, said he was pleased that Bush came to Santa Cruz.

“He understands that we’ve got to get people out of the shelters, and he said, ‘We will do as a nation whatever is necessary,’ ” Patton said. “We’re going to hold him to it.”

Others in the Santa Cruz area said they hoped that the devastation in their less-traveled county would not be forgotten as the media attention focuses on San Francisco and Oakland.

“I hope we don’t get forgotten. We are smaller but proportionately we were hit very hard,” said Karen McNally, geophysics professor at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Charles F. Richter Seismology Laboratory.

In Watsonville, which sometimes calls itself the frozen-food capital of the country, processing plants were finding it hard to get workers to help with clean-up efforts and work in fields.

The town’s center took heavy damage from the Tuesday quake, and several hundred families have stayed huddled outside of their damaged homes since a major aftershock Thursday morning.

“Our house is in terrible shape, and we have nowhere to leave the children,” said Armando Ortiz, warming his hands over a barrel fire on a high school football field. “They are still very frightened, and I don’t want to leave my family alone.”

In Salinas, in Monterey County, the City Council ignored pleas by the Salinas Historical Society that they were “throwing away the most historically significant buildings in Salinas,” and ordered demolition of six badly damaged old structures on Main Street. Among the buildings the society had tried to save were the Cominos and Franklin hotels.

The Cominos, which used to be the largest hotel in Salinas, was built in 1874 and was immortalized by John Steinbeck in “East of Eden.”

Meanwhile, geologists said Friday they had found evidence of slippage along the San Andreas Fault in a 30-mile section between Lexington Reservoir and the town of San Juan Bautista.

James Diederich, a spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, said the slippage was found in a laser survey of landmarks in the area. Preliminary evidence showed a right lateral “strike-slip” along the San Andreas, but does not conclusively prove that the notorious fault was involved in Tuesday’s earthquake.

In San Francisco, the biggest crowd of displaced victims--about 1,000 people, most of whom were homeless before the quake--have spent the nights at the Moscone Center convention hall. Bob Prentice, the mayor’s coordinator of homeless programs, said that as many as 1,000 city-financed hotel rooms used to shelter the homeless had been lost to the earthquake.

Meanwhile, San Francisco city inspectors continued their evaluation of 2,000 Marina District buildings that were damaged in the quake. Laurence M. Kornfield, the chief building inspector, said the job should be finished today.

On Thursday night, emergency officials had to coax reluctant residents out of their earthquake-damaged homes.

“At 11 o’clock last night we got a 93-year-old man out of one house and we had 18 people who we had to get food and water for because they wouldn’t come out of their homes,” said Mayor Agnos, who had been on the scene. The residents were afraid that once they left, they would not be allowed to return, Agnos said.

Several hundred residents lined up Friday morning at Marina Middle School, the local center for disaster planning, to get the coveted colored passes that identified them as tenants and property owners so they would be allowed in to visit their homes. A green card bestowed permission to return home. A yellow one allowed a brief visit to remove possessions.

Red barred entry except with a city inspector, and only then after the tenant signed a waiver of liability for the city.

But enforcement was spotty. Getting through official barricades often depended on who was checking passes.

Joe DiMaggio, the baseball legend, waited in line with the less famous. “I’m just like anybody else,” said DiMaggio, who added that he has lived in the Marina District since 1937. Later a top-level building inspector took him in hand.

Liz Burrie finally got to her apartment building at North Point and Divisadero at 6 a.m. Friday. The entire four-story structure had collapsed. She picked her way over the rubble, accompanied by an inspector and a police officer, and climbed into what used to be her top-floor bay window. She spent an hour hauling out what she could find.

She found her cat alive, but the animal skittered away in the debris.

“It is unbelievable how much survived,” Burrie said.

Urgency built among the anxious residents, those without shelter and those just wishing to collect their possessions, as the changing weather brought blustery winds and the threat of a cold rain.

Residents cast out of their homes by the earthquake or the worried building inspectors continued to stream into shelters around the Bay Area.

“They keep condemning buildings and we get more and more people,” said Charlton Horne, volunteer coordinator at the American Red Cross shelter at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Oakland.

James Roberts, chief of the structures division for Caltrans, said in Sacramento that the Embarcadero Freeway in downtown San Francisco will remain closed, possibly until 1991.

Roberts said the Embarcadero, which is elevated above the San Francisco waterfront and ends in North Beach, will not be reopened until its concrete pillars are reinforced with steel to ensure that they will not give way and collapse in the next major quake. This work cannot even be designed until an investigation of the Nimitz collapse is completed in three or four months.

A moderate aftershock Friday evening briefly closed three lanes of U.S. 101 in Marin County, but Caltrans said the damage was minor.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles Friday announced a list of 19 Japanese corporations that had donated almost $4 million to the earthquake relief effort. A $1-million contribution from Sony Corp. was the largest.

This story was written in Los Angeles by Times staff writers Kevin Roderick and Myrna Oliver from staff reports in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz County.

The following Times staff members contributed to earthquake coverage. In Oakland: Stephanie Chavez, Ashley Dunn, Andrea Ford, Kenneth J. Garcia, Maria L. La Ganga, Maria Newman, George Ramos, Sheryl Stolberg, Donna K.H. Walters, Tracy Wilkinson and Jim Masko. In San Francisco: Jack Cheevers, Larry Green, Ron Harris, Scott Harris, Nancy Hill-Holtzman, Robert L. Jackson, Tamara Jones, J. Michael Kennedy, Dan Morain, Jim Newton, Suzette Parmley, Louis Sahagun, George Stein, Hector Tobar, Victor F. Zonana, Norma Kaufman and Warwick Elston. In Sacramento: Jerry Gillam, Carl Ingram, Paul Jacobs, Richard C. Paddock, Douglas P. Shuit, George Skelton, and Patti Cole. In Santa Cruz: Edmund Newton. In Hollister: Charles Hillinger. In Los Angeles: Russell Chandler, Steven Churm, Michael Connelly, Cathleen Decker, Patrick Lee, Keith Love, Eric Malnic, Judy Pasternak, Larry B. Stammer, Jill Stewart, Jenifer Warren, Elaine Woo, Cecilia Rasmussen, Tracy Thomas and Kristen Christopher.

STORIES, PICTURES: Pages A2-A3