THE FIRE ON FIGUEROA : Damage Will Not Affect Health Service, Officials Say : Impact: Computer data that monitored the county’s trauma system is destroyed. Medical programs are expected to continue.

Although Saturday’s fire at the Los Angeles County Health Services Department building destroyed the offices of the department’s Emergency Medical Services division, there should not be a direct impact on health services for the public, officials said Saturday.

The computer system that dispatches ambulances and paramedics is located at County-USC Medical Center and was not damaged, department spokeswoman Sharon Wanglin said.

“There should be no impact on direct services to the public,” Wanglin said.

Nonetheless, the fire destroyed a computer data analysis system that had been monitoring the emergency trauma network, department administrators said, and the damage will affect long-range studies of the trauma care system in Los Angeles County.

“That data was all destroyed,” said Bill Koenig, the division’s medical director. “I think that’s the greatest loss.”

The fire destroyed the seventh-floor offices of the division, which oversees the emergency trauma network for the six Los Angeles County hospitals, and the offices for the facilities management branch, which oversees the physical structure of the building.

“The floor was packed with people and cubicles, as many as we could get,” Wanglin said.

After touring the ruins with Fire Department officials, Koenig said the entire floor had been destroyed.

“It’s just melted,” he said. “The emergency medical services agency was completely destroyed.”

The destroyed data was part of a long-range trauma system study designed to investigate problems in the network and how frequently it is used, Koenig said. The data contained a breakdown of how many patients went to each hospital, patients’ financial status, severity of injuries and which paramedic squad handled patients.

“The irony was that the system was beginning to be useful,” Koenig said. “It was being productive. This fire really set us back.”

However, he said it might be possible to re-create the data from the hospitals.

Wanglin said it will take time to evaluate what impact the fire will have on operations at the building.

“From what we’ve seen, it doesn’t look awfully good,” Wanglin said. “Everything is real uncertain. We’ll just have to roll up our sleeves, dig in and see how much we can save.”

Wanglin added that workers on the lower unaffected floors might be allowed in the building Tuesday, if there is no structural danger.

“There are a lot of medical services, such as nursing, communicable diseases, maternal health and family planning, that just have to go on,” she said. “We’re just hoping that everything else is all right.”

Virginia-Price Hastings, chief of paramedic and trauma hospital programs, said computer data on quality assurance programs and emergency room problems were also destroyed.

“We’re obviously going to have to re-create everything from square one,” she said. “I think we can re-create all of our computer information from the different hospitals. It will be harder to re-create some of our Fire Department files.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said after touring the seventh floor. “I always thought things would burn in place, but this was all helter-skelter. It looked like bombed-out Berlin on the inside.”