We Are Ready, Disaster Teams in L.A. Assert

In August, 1987, a little-known commission issued a scorching indictment of Los Angeles County’s preparedness for a major earthquake: The county for years had neglected its obligation to coordinate the countywide response to the long-awaited Big One.

Planning had been left to mid-level bureaucrats, the commission said. Some county departments had no emergency planners at all. The county Disaster Council rarely met, and most cities took no part in the county’s, or even their neighbors’, earthquake drills.

“We just found tremendous gaps in the preparedness . . . and a tremendous lack of coordination,” George A. Morrison, a member of the Emergency Preparedness Commission, said. “We really couldn’t get the attention of the supervisors.”

The report--and the October, 1987, Whittier earthquake--rattled the county. The new chief administrative officer, Richard Dixon, began making preparedness a high priority. Over the last two years, Morrison and others say, Los Angeles County has made up for lost time.

But the Oct. 17 Bay Area quake has refocused attention on Los Angeles: Would this county have risen to the occasion as the Bay Area apparently did? Or have this region’s reputed powers of self-delusion left it ill-equipped to face down a massive disaster?

Los Angeles County and city officials say they are optimistic. They say the county is as well prepared as the Bay Area--perhaps better.

Nevertheless, emergency-management specialists have traveled north on reconnaissance missions in recent weeks, searching in Northern California’s experience for weaknesses in Southern California’s plans and how those plans might be improved.

Among their findings:

* Emergency communications systems in Los Angeles County need to be upgraded to allow for the possibility that not only telephones but radio systems may fail in a major quake. Satellite systems may be the only way to avert a communications breakdown, officials say.

* The Bay Area experience underlined the need for a state-of-the-art “emergency operations center” from which to coordinate the countywide response. Los Angeles County is currently without an adequate facility; construction of one is scheduled to begin in 1991.

* The phenomenon of liquefaction, or ground failure, must be restudied in light of the collapse of San Francisco’s Marina District. Los Angeles city officials intend to consider whether new controls are needed on the kinds of buildings constructed on loose soil.

* Southern California cities and counties must develop plans to accommodate the legions of volunteers who can be expected to offer their services in a catastrophe. Officials say they had not anticipated the degree of public-spiritedness that surfaced in the Bay Area.

* Los Angeles County has failed to achieve the degree of cooperation among cities that will be needed in a catastrophe, several officials said. Without that coordination, there can be no speedy assessment of damage after a quake, and no rational allocation of resources.

“Mutual aid is greatly lacking as far as these smaller cities in Los Angeles County,” said Lloyd J. Wood, the Azusa police chief and a member of the Preparedness Commission. “They just haven’t pulled together. It’s just, I think, general apathy on the part of the cities.”

“There’s an old adage in business that people do well what they believe the boss is interested in,” said one official who asked not to be identified. “Government people react to elected officials. Elected officials don’t care. (Preparedness) doesn’t get them elected.”

But many city, county and public utility officials insisted that they came away from the Bay Area not only impressed by its response to the 7.1-magnitude quake, but confident that Los Angeles County is equally ready to handle an emergency of even greater proportions.

“I came away feeling that Los Angeles County is very well prepared,” said Constance Romero, assistant manager of the county’s Office of Emergency Management. “This county has done a great deal of work in the past two years. . . . I felt good.”

“What you will see are spots of brilliant staff work and excellent communication and . . . spots of poor staff work and poor communication,” predicted Harry S. Hansen, another Preparedness Commission member, speculating on how Los Angeles County would respond to a major earthquake. “When they average out, what you will see is some successes and some problems. It’s like any other kind of emergency.”

The gospel guiding each region’s earthquake response is its emergency plan--a series of massive, multivolume documents required by law and outlining who does what, and when, in the face of disasters ranging from a tsunami to a nuclear attack.

San Francisco’s plan was last updated Sept. 29. The phone list of vital numbers was updated in October. Federal and state agencies, utility companies and the Red Cross have copies. So do all city and county agencies--from the War Memorial trustees to the grand jury.

The 5-inch-thick document details the duties of every city department in an emergency. It includes all laws and regulations that can be invoked. There are drafts of orders, copies of mutual aid agreements and details for setting up shelters and assessing damage.

It even includes a checklist for mass burials: Officials are reminded to remove teeth and collect and tag jewelry for later identification. Instructions on how to embalm a body quickly, and the importance of covering it before burial, are also included in the plan.

The plan is tested in a full-scale earthquake drill every April--marking the anniversary of the city’s 1906 quake. The Fire Department, the lead emergency-response agency, has been testing its communications system every two months.

The plan appears to have worked well, San Francisco officials say.

For example, within five minutes of the Oct. 17 quake, every piece of San Francisco Fire Department equipment was out of its garage. Within three hours, 400 off-duty firefighters living outside the city had checked in and were reporting for duty.

So many off-duty firefighters reported to work that every fire truck was carrying at least double its normal complement of workers within hours. That allowed the department to handle the Marina District fire and 26 others without calling in extra help.

The average number of fires in the city is 13 in 24 hours.

“Clearly we were tested and the response was magnificent,” Mayor Art Agnos said in an interview. He said the public may be skeptical that government could design and carry out such a plan. “But it worked,” he insisted.

Even so, there were contingencies that the plan failed to anticipate.

Among them, the onslaught of reporters at times created a distraction from the immediate crisis, Agnos said. City officials ended up calling newspapers and radio stations and asking that reporters and crews not interview workers engaged in rescue operations.

City officials also found themselves forced to ban helicopter traffic over the Marina District after it appeared that vibrations from the innumerable choppers surveying the damage might increase the likelihood of damaged buildings collapsing.

The city’s plan also did not take into account the anger and desperation of residents informed that they could not return to damaged homes--a reaction that Agnos describes as the “need to re-establish a connection with a house that is standing but yet is unsafe.”

“A person will say, ‘My wedding ring is on that table by the window,’ and they’re ready to crash through a police barricade to get it,” Agnos said. “What do you do? Shoot them down?”

Some seat-of-the-pants decisions made after the quake will be part of future plans.

Building-safety officials improvised a now-notorious system of issuing colored tags to identify safe and unsafe structures. That colored “pass system” will become a part of San Francisco’s emergency plan--and may make its way into Los Angeles County’s as well.

“That impressed me as a reasonable approach,” Ken Weary, disaster services coordinator for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, said in an interview. “I’ve asked people to add that to our plan. That could possibly be a lesson learned.”

But there were far more significant lessons for Los Angeles County, some officials say.

San Francisco County consists only of the city of San Francisco, but Los Angeles County includes 85 incorporated cities. Although each city and town may have emergency-response plans, the county is responsible for overall coordination and for unincorporated areas.

The city of Los Angeles has an elaborate, two-volume plan like San Francisco’s, outlining each department’s responsibilities. It also has its own emergency operations center, mobile communications equipment and regularly scheduled drills.

Los Angeles city officials say their equipment is far superior to that of San Francisco and Oakland: They cite tractor-trailers, mobile command posts, and helicopters equipped with video cameras capable of transmitting pictures directly to the emergency operations center.

Even so, Shirley Mattingly, director of emergency management for the city, said, “We will be reassessing our entire plan, every area of it.” She said the Bay Area quake has raised in particular the question of how to restore city services when city administration buildings are uninhabitable.

“That’s going to be a major problem,” Mattingly said. “We had considered it, but we need to spend more time on it. We’re not ready. The more that you have planned and practiced your plan ahead of time, the easier the response comes.”

Los Angeles County, meanwhile, has its own 574-page plan outlining a system that has been upgraded dramatically in recent years. The Board of Supervisors recently approved funding for a new county emergency operations center to replace an inadequate, interim center.

There are also plans to replace the county’s existing disaster communication service--a network of amateur radio volunteers--with a system of computers capable of transmitting messages via portable radios in the event that telephone lines are down.

Other improvements will include video cameras for Sheriff’s Department and Fire Department helicopters, said Capt. Gary Snelson, commander of the sheriff’s emergency operations bureau. Department communications are being improved, with new frequencies being added to the system.

“We’re heading in the right direction,” said Snelson. “We’ve improved so much over the last three years that there isn’t a lot else that we could do.”

But George Morrison, one of the architects of the county’s emergency-operations ordinance, said the Bay Area’s experience underlined the need for cooperation between political jurisdictions--something many say has long been lacking in Los Angeles County.

Without cooperation and mutual aid, it is impossible in an emergency to efficiently assess the extent of damage and to dispatch limited resources where they are most needed--at freeway interchanges, bridges, petrochemical facilities and other crucial areas.

“The media pretty well determined the focus of the earthquake response in Northern California because of their ability to get out and assess the damage,” said Morrison, who stressed that he was not faulting the Bay Area’s handling of the quake.

“As a result, resources were committed on the basis of media reports rather than the government’s assessment of where the need was greatest,” he said. Less populous but badly damaged areas, like Santa Cruz, attracted attention relatively late.

Others said the Bay Area quake showed them the need for satellite communications systems in the event that telephone lines and radio towers are knocked out. Others suggested Los Angeles County could benefit by more heavy rescue equipment for search-and-rescue operations.

Petty cash must be kept in the gas company’s operating districts for covering expenses in the event of a massive quake, one gas company official said. One fire official said he was struck by how rescue efforts in the Bay Area strained Fire Department resources.

Mattingly, director of emergency management for the city of Los Angeles, said the Bay Area quake reinforced in her mind the need for plans for long-term economic recovery as well as a new look at the risks of liquefaction.

“We have done a lot in this city on unreinforced buildings,” she said. “But I think we need to reassess what kind of construction is being allowed in the city on areas that we suspect may be subject to ground failure.”

In the end, officials concede, they can only guess how Los Angeles County will fare.

“You have to understand that in Los Angeles County, you have an immense area, immense population and over 80 political jurisdictions, each with its own responsibilities,” said Hansen of the county Preparedness Commission.

“To try to meet the immediate effects of a major earthquake, in my opinion, is going to be extremely difficult no matter how well prepared we are,” he said, “because the complexity of it exceeds anything I am aware of.”