School Personnel Get Quake Tips

In the second such gathering since the October Bay Area earthquake, school administrators and teachers from Orange County met Monday at a workshop to help prepare for the next quake.

About 130 people convened at Irvine Civic Center for the event. So many school officials attended the first meeting, held two weeks after the quake, that another had to be scheduled to accommodate everyone.

Glorria Morrison, an emergency coordinator for Huntington Beach, said schools in Orange County vary in preparedness.

“Schools are at such different levels,” she said. “Some of them have done nothing, others have done a great job.”

Terry Bustillos, administrator of business services for the county Department of Education, said that while all schools have plans for what to do after a quake, not all are linked to city and county governments.

“Some districts have a Chevrolet plan and some have a Cadillac plan,” he said. “The Cadillac is having it all set with coordinating with city and county governments. Of that we have only a handful.”

School and county officials are planning to create an advisory committee to link the schools to the county communications network so all disaster relief efforts could be coordinated, Bustillos said.

“The most difficult thing is to get financing for the plan,” Bustillos said. “The dollar becomes kind of stretched out.”

The event was sponsored by the Orange County Cities Emergency Management Organization, the American Red Cross’ Orange County chapter and the Orange County Department of Education.