Quake Drill Was Realistic to a Fault : Preparedness: The test of Pacific Bell’s Emergency Operations Center was going by the book. Then an unscripted emergency shook up all concerned.

Radio operator Marty McCune was talking into a high-frequency radio Wednesday afternoon at the Pacific Bell Emergency Operating Center, requesting additional fuel for a backup generator in the aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake.

It was only a test, part of a two-day drill for one of Pacific Bell’s four emergency centers throughout the state.

But at 3:43 p.m., the phone company’s 45-member emergency team had to move from script to the uncertainty of reality. A 5.5-magnitude tremor was shaking Southern California.

Initially, McCune thought the rumbling was aircraft taking off from the nearby Tustin Marine Corp Air Station. After 15 seconds of rocking and rolling, he knew it was no jet.

“I said into the radio, ‘We are currently experiencing a real earthquake,’ ” McCune said. “ ‘This is not part of a drill. I repeat, this is not part of a drill.’

“We had to repeat it about 500 times so they wouldn’t think we were pulling their legs,” he said, explaining that he had been talking with his counterparts in San Diego and Northern California, where other emergency centers are located.

Besides Orange County, the Tustin center handles emergency operations for almost 2 million customers in Riverside, San Bernardino, Inyo, San Diego and Imperial counties. A center in Sherman Oaks handles Los Angeles County.

The Tustin center, its walls lined with maps, white wipe boards with instructions and a sign that reads, “Collect, assess, prioritize and act,” quickly took on the feel of a war room.

“We didn’t know if it was based right beneath us, or if the epicenter was 300 miles away and had leveled cities and we had caught only the tail end of it,” he said.

While McCune was in the cramped radio room when the quake struck, an eight-member team of leaders had been huddling in the Strategy Room next door, debriefing each other on the status of the 7.0 mock disaster.

“We felt everything start to move, and what I thought was, ‘This is ridiculous for a disaster drill,’ ” recalled Bob Kohn, another team leader. “But we immediately decided, let’s drop the drill and do this for real.”

A few minutes later, the mock instructions that had been written in black felt-tip ink on the wipe boards was overshadowed by instructions in red ink--the real instructions.

In the end, many customers reported that they were having trouble getting through on telephone lines, but officials at the center said that the problem was one of a system overload, not equipment failure.

“The network is not designed to handle all the customers at the same time,” Kohn said.

There were two other problems: Two fuses blew out in the Anaheim switching office, and the electrical power went out at the Fontana switching center, which serves about 20,000 customers. But officials said phone service was never interrupted.

Orange County’s customers are served by 32 switching centers, the locations where calls are routed from point of origin to destination. The equipment is normally powered by electricity, but if that goes down because of a disaster, the system automatically switches to battery power or to a generator, with no loss of service, Public Affairs Director Linda Bonniksen said.

“There is a backup to the backup to the backup,” she said.

Bonniksen said that the center’s goal is to restore emergency service within 24 hours. But the magnitude of the disaster determines whether that goal can be met, she said.

The Federal Communications Commission, she said, requires that utilities restore service in this order: first it must repair itself; national security such as military operations and civil defense; fire, police, hospitals and other community operations.

Restoring service to individual customers--residential as well as business--is the last order of priority, Bonniksen said.