Bay Area Firms Begin Revising Quake Plans : Aftermath: Companies found that their emergency procedures were generally effective, but some discovered gaps in communications systems.

At 5:04 p.m. last Tuesday, Dave Kvederis and his son were on an escalator at Candlestick Park when the Bay Area earthquake struck. By 5:45, the Wells Fargo senior vice president was on his car phone to the bank’s headquarters in San Francisco trying to assess the situation. “They were telling us from operations that our power was out, that they were trying to get emergency generators to restore power to the building.” His main concern was that the bank’s computers would crash.

Meanwhile, across the bay at a Danville residence, Jack Woycheese huddled with members of Chevron’s emergency group, gathering information and dispatching instructions. They quickly established that the 200 employees still at the company’s San Francisco headquarters were safe and equipped with flashlights, radios and other emergency supplies. A special team was put on alert to head for Houston with crucial data tapes if the computers failed. Executive command posts were immediately established on each side of the bay.

Emergency plans such as Chevron’s and Wells Fargo’s helped many big Bay Area companies quickly assess their damage from the earthquake and resume near-normal business. Most expect to be operating at normal levels today--assuming their employees can make it through the near-gridlock of traffic that is expected.

Extensive preplanning and practice drills enabled these firms to respond quickly with action plans that ranged from employee hot lines to emergency computer backups. Still, some say they have learned valuable lessons from the Bay Area earthquake and already are taking steps to fine-tune their emergency plans--especially when it comes to communications.

By week’s end they were grappling with another unanticipated problem: the logistics of getting their employees to work in San Francisco because of the collapse of sections of the Nimitz Freeway and the Bay Bridge, the main artery from the East Bay. “Even though we started planning two years ago, no plan is complete,” explained Woycheese, Chevron’s emergency plan coordinator.

Firms already are beginning to improve their emergency communications planning. Hewlett-Packard is ordering a batch of new walkie talkies. Wells Fargo is considering a major review of its telephone network. Dale Carlson, a vice president at the Pacific Stock Exchange, is flying east tonight to brief officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency had approved, by telephone, the exchange’s plan last week to temporarily transfer its options trading to Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

Injuries to employees and disruption of business from the earthquake were limited partly, according to corporate emergency coordinators, by the time of day that the quake hit. By 5 p.m.--just before the start of the third game of the World Series--most offices were closing for the day and many employees were on their way home.

For companies that were still conducting business, the first priority after the shaking stopped was the safety of employees. Soon thereafter, attention turned to checking which operations had been knocked out.

At some companies that lost electrical power, batteries and backup Diesel generators didn’t kick on immediately as they should have, halting computers and other equipment. The disruptions, however, were limited, and most major businesses on both sides of the bay and down into Silicon Valley were back to business by last Thursday.

Bank of America computers, for example, were able to process Tuesday’s full $27 billion in electronic transfers of funds by the following morning. However, the bank lost a day in processing the 5.5 million to 6 million checks cleared through San Francisco. By Thursday, the bank was back on schedule.

Banks, in particular, weathered the disruption rather well because they have been encouraged to have emergency plans in place ever since the big fire at First Interstate Bank’s headquarters in Los Angeles in May, 1988.

“Ever since the First Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles, bank examiners and auditors have been all over us to put together and practice our plan,” explained Wells Fargo’s Kvederis, who oversees cash management operations. “That becomes a pain in the neck as you do it. You have so many other things to do. . . . But it all pays off--all the drills, the practices, the sitting and planning.” After the earthquake, he recalled, the plan “worked incredibly well. I was surprised that everything went off as smoothly as it did.”

Larry McNabb, executive vice president and manager of B of A’s operations division, agreed that planning is crucial. “Probably one of the values with the plans, in addition to having something written down, is to have people who have been through it, through the thought processes, who are better prepared to make the decisions. There are not many occasions that a plan manual would work 100%. But people having been though it makes them smarter at making the decisions.”

One unanticipated snag for most businesses was jammed telephone lines. Wells Fargo relied on a national sales manager in Omaha to make its calls to the bank’s offices and clients in Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York. When the bank discovered that clients were unable to connect to the San Francisco office, they rerouted the calls to Los Angeles. Within hours after the quake, the bank was rerouting its computer data network through Denver because its regular San Francisco switching system was jammed.

Physical damage to plant and facilities was limited because many businesses are housed in relatively new buildings designed to withstand earthquakes, or in older buildings that have been reinforced. Only four of Emporium’s 22 stores in the Bay Area remain closed, thanks to a program of seismic reinforcement.

Hewlett-Packard found that its hefty investment in recent seismic reinforcement paid off. Although computers in its Palo Alto headquarters were bounced around, the floor beneath them didn’t break, thanks to $750,000 in reinforcements that were installed early last year. Similarly, 50,000 to 60,000 magnetic computer tapes survived intact due to reinforcement of the racks in which they are stored. The company had recently spent another $750,000 bolting them to the ceiling instead of the floor.

Surprisingly, much of the damage at Hewlett-Packard was caused by broken water lines. Pipes snapped because water heaters sit on separate foundations from the buildings.

This week, companies are preparing to review their emergency plans. Some additions are simple: more flashlights, extension cords to connect computer terminals with emergency electrical power, better systems for telephoning employees at home, stronger supports for file cabinets. One B of A employee went off to get coffee just before the earthquake, and when she returned to her desk, she found a file cabinet had smashed down on the chair where she would have been sitting.

A top priority across the board is emergency communications. “Some radios didn’t work,” explained B of A’s McNabb. “One lucky thing was that the Pac Bell system was working all the time. Communication is one of the keys to making a disaster plan work.” Kvederis at Wells Fargo expressed the same concern. “What would we do if Pac Bell took a hit and the phones were out of order and no one could get through?”

For now, emergency coordinators believe that the biggest problem continues to be transportation, and they expect that commuters will have big problems getting to work. At Chevron, 1,600 of its 3,000 headquarters staff commute from the East Bay to San Francisco. The company has been working with BART and bus transit authorities to determine where van pools will be needed.

Bank of America is encouraging managers to use flex time and alternative work sites for its employees. It’s also importing its Southern California car-pool plans to Northern California. The bank also will begin operating a hot line at 6 a.m. today to inform employees about van pools, ferry and BART schedules, and other transit alternatives.