L.A. Crews Standing By for Big One

Building inspectors rank high among the most-hated occupations, right up there with reporters, lawyers and car dealers.

They’re a grating part of the bureaucracy, enforcers who bring government regulation directly into the home. No faceless bureaucrat, the building inspector personally delivers the bad news that the walls of your new addition don’t meet standards.

But Wednesday afternoon, I got a different picture. “Find the bureaucrat in charge of earthquakes,” an editor told me about an hour after the quake. I knew what he had in mind. It was something we’ve talked about here at the paper. Many unknown people--bureaucrats--make the cities, and county, work even in times of calamity. But we never write about them unless they screw up. This was a chance to tell another side.

There is no one earthquake czar, it turns out. In the 85 cities in Los Angeles County, and in the county government itself, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and others share the responsibility for managing things in a vast but fragile metropolis built on a network of active faults.

The building and safety inspectors and engineers are some of the most important earthquake bureaucrats. As soon as the shaking stops, they check government buildings to see whether the police and fire dispatchers and all the other implementers of disaster plans must be shifted to emergency quarters. In Pomona, just after the quake, inspectors examined shattered windows, stairwells and fire escapes, and closed the damaged City Hall.

If the quake is bad, the engineers and inspectors fan out into the neighborhoods and check the houses and businesses. When residents were ordered to remain out of their houses and apartments in San Francisco’s Marina District last October, it was the building inspectors who did it.

I took the elevator up to the ninth floor of Los Angeles City Hall to the executive offices of the Department of Building and Safety, the building inspection agency. By then it was 5 p.m., and it was clear this had not been The Big One. With the exception of a few people, the office was empty.

I found two of the earthquake bureaucrats in a back office--Earl Schwartz, the department’s executive officer, and Tim Taylor, chief of the building bureau, in charge of inspecting commercial buildings. Taylor, alerted I was coming, had put on a white hard hat for his earthquake interview. Building inspector humor.

Taylor wore a blue blazer, not your tailored Armani but something sturdy enough enough for an inspection tour through an old downtown warehouse. Schwartz was dressed in a serviceable, wash-and-wear, short-sleeved dress shirt and slacks.

When the quake hit, both were in the office suite. Schwartz turned on the radio. Reports from listeners who call KFWB and KNX, the news stations, from around the basin are the first indication of the extent of damage. Damage seemed light or nonexistent, a finding that was confirmed by telephone calls to branch building and safety offices in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

“Within five or eight minutes, we knew we wouldn’t have to activate our emergency plan,” said Schwartz.

If the telephone system had failed, they’d have been worried. Schwartz, who’s been with the department 34 years, and Taylor, a 26-year Building and Safety man, recall the Sylmar earthquake of 1971, when communications from the Valley were cut off and downtown didn’t immediately know the extent of the disaster. Wednesday, everything was fine.

I could see I was outstaying my welcome. When I left, Taylor was on the phone, talking to someone about construction of a new animal kennel at LAX. He wasn’t hassling her, just trying to get a kennel properly built.

If I were still a reporter writing news stories, I’d have called in and said “no story here.” Action makes stories, and there wasn’t any in Building and Safety on Wednesday.

But actually, I’d seen something worthwhile. I’d been reminded of the importance--the presence, really--of people like Taylor and Schwartz, and thousands more like them. They’d been on the job, shifted into action and were ready for the worst when the quake hit. That all went well kept them out of the news Wednesday, but they are used to that.