Days of Agonizing Choices Haunted Rescue Officials

Nine minutes after the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway--the scene of the greatest loss of life in the Oct. 17 earthquake--Assistant Fire Chief Al Sigwart was the first commanding officer to arrive at the site. He listened in horror to the radio reports as waves of fire trucks screeched toward him.

In seconds, Sigwart would make This article was reported and written by Times staff writers Stephanie Chavez, Ashley Dunn and George Ramos.

his first critical decision, one of the most difficult in 37 years as a firefighter.

“Where do I put my ladders?” he asked himself.

Only seven ladders in the entire Oakland Fire Department were tall enough to reach the elevated freeway. More than a mile of crumpled highway and perhaps 200 trapped, screaming people lay before him.

His was one of the first of hundreds of crucial decisions faced by top-ranking officials as they commanded dramatic rescue and demolition operations at the earthquake’s most horrific disaster site. Nearly two-thirds of the quake’s 64 dead were entombed in the fallen double-deck section of roadway.

In a series of interviews with The Times, all of these top decision makers--from the Oakland fire chief to Caltrans engineers--told for the first time their stories of the wrenching choices and behind the-scenes-debate about life and death that went on inside a complex of trailers behind police barricades.

It began right after the 7.1-magnitude quake, with a jumble of decisions made by individuals in the midst of flashing red emergency lights. And it would reach a crescendo four days later when an unassuming Caltrans engineer, in a decision that drew angry criticism, ordered a slow and cautious rescue of the quake’s most famous survivor, Buck Helm.

By all accounts the most important choices--how to remove bodies, when to stop searching for victims and when to evacuate nearby residents--were reached by consensus, sometimes forged in hours of dispute.

Involved were officials of five public agencies--the Oakland police and fire departments, the California Department of Transportation, the California Highway Patrol and the Alameda County Sheriff-Coroner.

No single person called all the shots. No department head grandstanded.

“There was no need for someone to jump up and down and say, ‘I’m in command,’ ” said Oakland Police Chief George T. Hart. “No operation is perfect and this one was far from it. Were the right areas secured? Were the right people on hand? In the aggregate it worked. It worked as well as it could.”

For Assistant Fire Chief Sigwart, the magnitude of his first decision “completely overwhelmed” him. The positioning of those seven precious ladders would determine who would be the first to be saved.

“Mentally, I distanced myself from what I saw.” said Sigwart. He told firefighters to raise the ladders where they found the most smoke and cries for help. Better that victims be trapped in their cars than burned or asphyxiated by fire and smoke, he decided.

As hundreds of firefighters converged on the site, Sigwart said he made a controversial choice that angered some anxious crews. He prohibited about a third of the companies from coming near the structure and ordered them to wait at a staging area.

“I was worried that the entire freeway could fall to the ground,” he said “I had to have companies on hand to rescue the rescuers.”

It was the first of a series of decisions made during the Nimitz rescue operation that forced officials to weigh the lives of rescuers against the fate of those entombed in the wreckage.

Sigwart had one of the rarest and most valuable commodities around--a mobile telephone. Top commanders at the site gravitated to the Fire Department’s chubby, red hazardous material or “haz-mat” truck where the phone was hooked up.

Within hours, a ragtag caravan of cars, mobile homes and trailers began congregating around the haz-mat truck, eventually forming a U-shaped complex of command centers that stretched for a block on West Grand Avenue.

In the five mind-numbing hours after the 5:04 p.m. earthquake, rescuers worked mainly by instinct.

Firefighters took the lead in deciding how to pull out the living victims. But, by law, the coroner had authority over the dead.

So it was Alameda County Sheriff-Coroner Charles C. Plummer who laid down the rules for pulling the dead from the mangled wreckage of cars flattened under hundreds of tons of concrete.

Plummer, an erect, no-nonsense law enforcement careerist, decided rescue workers should be allowed to dismember body parts if necessary to free corpses from the pancaked rubble.

“We had to do whatever was necessary to get those bodies out of there with all due speed,” he said. “Was there mutilation? If you have a body in a car this high,” Plummer said holding his hands two feet apart, “you’re going to have to amputate something to get them out. Is it mutilation? I don’t know.”

According to sheriff’s officials, no complaints have been received from the families and friends of the victims over the handling of the bodies.

Because of the gruesome nature of the catastrophe and the disfigurement of the corpses, Plummer decided the remains did not have to be viewed in order to make a positive identification. Thus, some families and friends were spared looking at a smashed torso or a severed limb--the only remains rescuers in some instances could salvage of a victim.

“We made the IDs through fingerprints, teeth records . . . ID photos,” the sheriff said.

Each day, dozens of decisions had to be made as rescuers worked their way through the rubble. What areas were safe to enter? What was the best way to shore up the span? What had to be demolished?

The process was difficult and fraught with peril. The morale of rescuers, super-charged in the early going by the excitement of extricating survivors, sank as the days wore on and hopes faded of finding any more victims alive.

Then, on the fourth day, a Saturday morning, Buck Helm was spotted by a Caltrans worker peering through a notebook-sized crack into a particularly hazardous recess of the freeway debris. It was a section of the battered span that had been searched to no avail several times and then bypassed because of the extreme hazard.

The longshoreman’s fate was placed in the hands of a 33-year-old Caltrans engineer named Bob Travis.

With some of his adrenaline-pumped workers clamoring for faster action, the lanky, unassuming Travis decided to take a cautious approach to pulling Helm from his crushed Chevrolet Sprint.

“If there is a hero in all this, it’s Bob Travis,” said Oakland Police Capt. Steve Jensen, the day commander at the Cypress structure. “He was making judgment calls in a very imprecise situation, all the time.”

Travis, a methodical man who speaks respectfully of logic and hard facts, had the unenviable job of deciding what areas were safe for rescuers.

Many rescuers wanted to ignore the risks and dive into unstable sections. But Travis adhered to a principle that the other commanders supported:

“We were not going to risk known life for unknown life,” he said.

Travis was aware that to some this seemed like a cold position, but he believed it was the correct one.

“I’m not going to lose any sleep over my decisions,” Travis said. “They were based on gathering the facts and making logical decisions. Any engineer would have made the same decisions I did.”

Travis knew there were only three options for reaching Helm: from the west or the east by boring through concrete walls or from above. All the choices were risky.

A row of dangerously cracked girders ruled out boring a hole through the upper deck to reach Helm.

The west side was eliminated because of a precariously balanced supporting column. An approach from he east seemed workable, but there was little headroom to maneuver and he couldn’t see Helm at first.

All the options heightened the risk that rescue work would put enough stress on the span to bring it down. As Travis tried to decide, pressure was mounting from rescuers to save the trapped man.

One contractor yelled at Travis to do something. When the engineer did not budge, the contractor turned and stomped away.

Another contractor had already put equipment on the top span in preparation to drill a hole through the top layer of concrete.

Travis refused to let any work continue. “Basically, I wouldn’t let anyone do anything,” he said.

Travis himself was torn, but he thought: “Do you run in there and risk someone’s life or do you spend a little extra time and protect everyone?”

The commanders agreed that everyone had to be protected.

After an hour and a half of studying the structure, Travis settled on entering from the east. There were no obvious hazards nearby and Helm’s car was just eight feet away from the edge of the freeway.

Rescuers knocked a hole on the side of the span and Helm was brought out at 11:27 a.m.

“Safety came first and it all seemed to come out right,” Travis said.

Travis has never doubted the decision he made that day.

Sigwart, however, remains haunted that the survivor was not spotted earlier.

“I feel bad that we didn’t find him sooner,” he said, in an anguished voice that begged for understanding. “We had searched the length of that freeway several times. Maybe he was in a position that we couldn’t see. Maybe the tons of concrete had an effect on the (infrared) cameras. I’ve thought about this a lot. But in my mind I know we couldn’t see anyone.”

Discouraged rescue workers burst out in cheers when Helm was rushed by ambulance to Highland General Hospital. The dramatic rescue gave crews new energy to keep looking for other survivors.

But over the next 24 hours, after two more sweeps of the span using infrared cameras and specially trained search dogs, no more survivors were found. Publicly, officials announced “redoubled efforts” to find more survivors.

But inside the trailers, officials were confronting a dilemma that clearly no one really wanted to address: At what point would they call off search and rescue and begin demolition?

The answer would tell the world that only the dead remained.

It was Plummer, the Alameda County sheriff who broached the subject at a noon meeting on Sunday, Oct. 22.

“We had a moral obligation to get all the bodies out with all due speed,” he recalled in an interview in his office. “But there was concrete coming off the side of the freeway that day and that span was pretty unstable.”

The sheriff remembered a “4 rule” he once heard that made sense to him: A person could survive up to four minutes without air; four days without water, and four weeks without food.

So the sheriff posed the question: When could demolition work begin?

Caltrans engineers hesitated, but said one week.

“How about 48 hours?” Plummer countered.

Fifteen people attended the pivotal two-hour meeting, including Police Chief Hart and Travis. They warmed to Plummer’s proposal and agreed.

Later that day, Plummer issued a written order that relieved many officials by removing the constant pressure to send rescuers into dangerous areas.

Plummer’s edict read, in part:

“Those excavation sites which present an imminent threat or danger to rescue workers will be left in place. At the time the structure is dismantled, all attempts will again be made to remove all body remains, personal property and effects.

“It is my intention to make every effort to identify each victim at the site and to recover their remains.”

That decision resolved one of the most agonizing questions left.

But there was still one more crisis to come Sunday evening.

Caltrans engineers had noticed earlier that day a series of stress fractures on columns supporting an intact section of the double-deck freeway near 8th Street.

No one was sure what caused the cracking, but they feared the structure was coming apart, possibly endangering four buildings in a low-income housing complex called Cypress Village.

Late in the afternoon, a Caltrans engineer alerted the police commander on the site, Capt. Steve Jensen, that the span at 8th Street was in imminent danger of collapsing.

The engineer insisted the span was moving two inches an hour, Jensen said. Travis argued that measuring devices showed it was not moving at all.

The two engineers debated the point but in the end, Jensen ordered an emergency evacuation of 100 to 150 people that night to be safe.

In retrospect, it was a decision he regretted.

The hectic evacuation had forced families out of their homes into the chilly night with little notice and diverted workers from other spans. As it turned out, the span stood for days before demolition work began.

“It could have been done in an orderly manner and perhaps we could have started work on another section,” Jensen said.

By last Thursday, most of the span had been demolished. No new victims had been found on the freeway since the previous Saturday and with the demolition of the 8th Street span, the crisis they had lived with for so many days had finally ended.

Jensen finished his last shift at the Nimitz at 6 p.m. and went home.

Outside, night was beginning to settle on the area as groups of workers stopped to shake hands with each other before departing. Many were also leaving this night, their work completed.

Travis finished his last shift Thursday. He had been on the site for almost nine days, scrambling over tons of rubble and shaky slabs of concrete, and now he was going home for good.

From across the street a man wearing a hard hat and an orange construction worker’s vest walked toward Travis.

He stood in front of him and stretched out his hand to say goodby.

“We should have a reunion,” the man said.

Travis stood up and nodded in agreement.

“We should do that,” he said with a smile.