Paying Attention to Detail Is Small but Important Lesson

Sometimes the lessons learned from an earthquake are small--but important.

Officials at Los Angeles International Airport used the San Francisco quake as a living laboratory. “We tried to take our earthquake plan and superimpose it on San Francisco,” said Capt. Bernard Wilson of the airport police department.

And what he found was, “the little things come to mind.”

Wilson is now stockpiling batteries for radios and flashlights. “You’d be surprised at how many batteries you go through when the lights got out,” Wilson said.

Airport officials who raced to San Francisco in the hours after the temblor also quickly learned that stranded passengers in terminals will need a host of products and services that had not been planned on, Wilson said.

Chief among those products are disposable diapers, which are also now on Wilson’s shopping list.

Other jurisdictions got down to similar levels of fine-tuning.

Besides death and destruction that a team of Los Angeles County building inspectors witnessed in San Francisco, they also found a shortage of simple government forms--which are always somehow necessary but particularly so in an emergency.

Ed Biddlecomb, assistant superintendent of building and safety for Los Angeles County, said “I want to make sure we have what we need . . . the lesson here is, ‘be prepared.’ ” As a result, the presses at the county are now humming to produce reams of building inspection forms.

County supervisors also responded swiftly to the Northern California quake. Supervisors voted unanimously two weeks ago to seek private funding for a second “Yogi Bear Schoolhouse,” a mobile classroom that simulates an 8.7-magnitude earthquake and is used to acquaint children with earthquake safety information.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for some disaster planners is that planning isn’t needed for some things.

The airport, for instance, has elaborate plans for evacuating terminals after an earthquake. But Wilson found in San Francisco that “once the ground starts to shake, the ceiling tiles start to fall and power goes out . . . people self-evacuate.”