BAY AREA QUAKE : Clear Skies, U.S. Aid Cheer Shaken Area : Disaster: Officials nearly double estimates of number of homeless. Hopes rise that Bay Bridge may reopen in three weeks. Santa Cruz merchants are allowed back into their damaged stores to retrieve cash and merchandise.

Clear weather and new hopes that the Bay Bridge may reopen in three weeks took some pain out of Bay Area commuting Wednesday, while Congress sent a $3.45-billion aid package to President Bush and Santa Cruz merchants were let back in to their devastated downtown for the first time to retrieve cash registers and merchandise.

Officials refining the toll from last week’s 7.1-magnitude quake also nearly doubled the number of people displaced from their homes, to 13,892. At least 9,500 are in Santa Cruz County, where scores of mountain homes were destroyed and the downtown sections of Santa Cruz and Watsonville were irretrievably altered.

Bush said he would sign the record relief package, rushed through Congress with unusual haste Wednesday.

“This is a tremendous amount of good will,” Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento) told his House colleagues. “We thank all of you.”

In Sacramento, Gov. George Deukmejian ordered the immediate release of $117 million in state money to help local officials pay for quake repairs and aid for victims.

In the San Francisco area, adjusting of public habits was given the credit for the remarkably smooth morning and evening commutes this week. The main driving links into downtown San Francisco have been severed, but traffic has kept moving.

Many people have found a way to avoid daily commuting, perhaps through the use of computers or by arrangement with their employers, state traffic surveys have found.

“If I had to make a guess right now, as to how many people are staying home or doing something else--such as staying in hotels--I’d say it was well above 5,000,” said George Gray, Caltrans deputy director for planning and public transportation, at a briefing Wednesday.

About 70,000 commuters used the Bay Bridge during rush hours before the quake, which forced closure of the bridge and shut down the Embarcadero and Central freeways and Interstate 280 in downtown San Francisco. Across the bay, the Nimitz Freeway was closed in Oakland by the collapse of the elevated, double-decked Cypress section.

But many thousands have crowded onto the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which set new records in ridership, and onto expanded trans-bay ferry service. Others have elected to leave the house earlier and travel by other bridges into the city.

Caltrans officials also sounded new optimism Wednesday that the damaged 50-foot section of the Bay Bridge will be repaired and ready for use by Nov. 17--a month after the quake.

“The work is going very well and the worst of it is done,” said Jerry C. Hauke, a Caltrans senior engineer. “At first I said that a Nov. 17 reopening was ‘optimistic.’ Now we can say it’s ‘realistic.’ ”

Would the work guarantee that the bridge would withstand another severe earthquake? “There are no absolutes in life,” Hauke replied. “It’s your choice whether to get on an airplane or whether to use our freeways. . . . There are no guarantees.”

Hauke also said that remedial work on the other closed freeway sections would be far enough along to allow reopening by February. But it will be a political decision whether to reopen the freeways or have them undergo more extensive retrofitting.

“These are the city’s lifelines,” Hauke said. “It’s going to be a tough call.”

Back to Normal

Traffic across the Golden Gate Bridge moved closer to the more normal pattern as the week goes on. Many motorists are still making their commutes before 5 a.m., but now many are also leaving home at their normal times.

“They anticipated, like we did, that there would be a real crunch on Monday morning,” said bridge district spokesman Bruce Selby. “Well, the crunch never came, and we’re slowly getting back to more conventional commute hours. . . . People now are saying, ‘what the heck? We can sleep in later.’ ”

Starting today, the $2 toll will no longer be suspended--except for car pools during rush hours. The change in policy may slow traffic somewhat today, officials said.

Morning rush-hour traffic on three other bay crossing options--the Richmond-San Rafael, San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges--has also increased from a pre-quake average of 34,300 vehicles to 41,727 during the same period Wednesday.

There has been a steady increase in the use of ferries, but officials remain disappointed that the boats are still far short of being filled to capacity. Ferry use was up 25% Wednesday morning, but the boats are generally crossing the bay half-filled.

Ridership also increased on Caltrain, the train service on the San Francisco Peninsula, from a pre-quake average of 3,560 to 4,607 during the morning peak hours Wednesday. Seventy of those patrons took advantage of new service from Salinas to San Francisco.

BART patronage, meanwhile, continued to grow. The system, now offering 24-hour service, served more than 300,000 people on Tuesday, eclipsing a record 290,000 set on Monday.

Undoubtedly more commuters are trying to form car and van pools. But officials, lacking any hard data, fear that an equal number may have temporarily disbanded pools because of the quake. “Right now, we may just be at a break-even point on car pools,” a Caltrans official said.

State officials, updating their damage estimates, said Wednesday that the Oct. 17 quake destroyed 414 single family homes and 104 mobile homes in the greater Bay Area. Efforts were continuing to count the number of homes damaged, although earlier this week, state officials estimated that more than 108,000 homes sustained damage.

Property damage was estimated at more than $7 billion. Almost 100 businesses were destroyed and 1,700 damaged in the quake.

The death toll remained at 63.

At the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, site of the most massive loss of life, work crews continued to knock down portions of the freeway, and officials announced plans to construct a temporary six-lane roadway once the area is cleared. Caltrans officials said the temporary road is expected to be in place by early next spring.

No firm plans have yet been made about the design of the freeway that ultimately will replace the temporary road. But Caltrans spokesman Kyle Nelson implied that state transportation officials have ruled out building a new double-decked road.

“I think it would be unacceptable to the public from a political standpoint,” Nelson said. “From an engineering standpoint it would be feasible.”

His statement followed demands by local leaders that Caltrans rule out a new double-decked design.

“Double-deckers are completely out of the question,” Oakland City Councilman Leo Bazile told United Press International.

Nimitz Freeway debris was being sifted for personal belongings of the victims, auto parts, and any evidence that might offer clues to the collapse. Afterwards, it was being shipped to dump sites, including one located in Crow Canyon in the Castro Valley 20 miles southeast of the Nimitz site.

The concrete will be ground up and used to build and shore up other freeways, Caltrans officials said.

“I would hope that wouldn’t haunt somebody,” said Tom Noble, a CHP officer conducting a tour of the area Wednesday.

In historic downtown Santa Cruz, a few merchants who fled amid toppling bricks and collapsing roofs from the Pacific Garden Mall a week ago were let through a wire fence Wednesday to check on their shops. Some retrieved money left in cash registers, while others removed merchandise to prepare for building demolition scheduled to begin today.

Of about 130 buildings in the mall--many of which date from the last century--11 have so far been red-tagged for destruction by inspectors, said Louie Rittenhause, president of the Santa Cruz Downtown Assn. A few yellow tags are visible, meaning some damage but that the structure is safe. No green tags--signifying no damage--are apparent.

Demolition crews expect to begin this morning at the Spodick General Furniture Store showroom, housed in an 1890 brick Victorian. Florence and Saul Spodick would have marked their 40th year in business at the old store next month.

Instead, their son, Jerald, spent Wednesday moving furniture out of the showroom and into an adjacent annex building that was not as severely damaged.

Spodick’s will be the first to go because of its unfortunate location. It is across the street from a bus terminal where traffic has been shut down for fear that the vibration might send the Spodicks’ building tumbling. Now officials would like to get the buses rolling again.

The Spodicks were able to recover 99% of their inventory in a few hours Wednesday.

“My competitors were the first ones to help,” said Jerald Spodick. “It’s unbelievable. Every furniture store in Santa Cruz was over here giving us a hand. I can’t believe it. They are so kind. Even the demolition crew who came here to tear down the building is helping us to get our merchandise out. . . .”

Preparing the old building to fall was wrenching for the Spodicks. “Today I am in tears,” said Florence Spodick. Her son vowed to rebuild on the spot, if permitted.

“I love that building,” Jerald Spodick said. “I love the architecture. I just love it.”

Another building certain to be razed is Cooper House, a historic landmark on Cooper Street. The yellow brick former courthouse was rebuilt after the 1906 San Francisco quake, but now is webbed with cracks across its face. It contains five shops whose owners may not be allowed back in because of fears that the structure could fall.

Louis Swisher, owner of the Crystal Kaleidoscope shop in Cooper House, left $2,000 in his register when he left. “I don’t think my feet hit the ground until I got out of the store,” he said. “I locked my place, then I ran around to the other places to see if anyone was stuck inside, then I got out of there. I was just covered with plaster dust.”

But April Shen was allowed three hours to retrieve artworks, furniture and jewelry from her nearby Asian antiques gallery. She and manager Ron Taylor showed up Wednesday morning in hard hats with friends and customers to clean out the gallery. They were allowed to take three people in, while others waited on the sidewalk to load trucks.

“I am very pleased,” Shen said, adding that “90% of what we had in the store was undamaged.”

THE QUAKE AT A GLANCE

The Damage

The state Office of Emergency Services now estimates damage at more than $7 billion, including about $1 billion to state highways and bridges. U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s office estimates total damage at $7.12 billion, including $2.5 billion in San Francisco alone.

The OES estimates 414 single-family homes, 104 mobile homes and an unknown number of apartments destroyed, and 5,618 single-family homes, 20 mobile homes and 320 apartments damaged.

The OES estimates 97 businesses and three public buildings destroyed, and 1,676 businesses and 24 public buildings damaged.

The state estimates that 13,892 people were displaced from homes and housed in shelters, 9,500 of them in Santa Cruz and 1,100 in San Francisco.

Casualties

Deaths: Latest figures from the state Office of Emergency Services show that 63 people died, with 39 of the bodies found in the wreckage of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland.

Injuries: The state tally is 2,435, with 650 of them in Santa Clara County, 730 in Santa Cruz County and 300 in San Francisco.

Services

Bay Area Rapid Transit added trains, buses and ferries and increased schedules to handle above-normal loads as transportation officials sought ways to ease traffic jams.

Electric power, water and other utilities were restored to most areas, but Monday’s storm caused outages. Drinking water and portable showers were trucked into mountain areas such as Redwood Estates, where water service will not be restored for days.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said seven one-stop disaster assistance centers opened Sunday. Victims can register for everything from temporary housing to grants and loans. One center is located in each of the hardest-hit counties.

Sports

World Series play is scheduled to resume Friday at Candlestick Park, although Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said there could be further delays.

Aftershocks

More than 4,000 aftershocks have been recorded, with 78 over magnitude 3 and at least 17 over magnitude 4.