A Sooty Adventure at County Building : Fire: Health department manages to function despite confusion and glitches on the first day of work since high-rise blaze.

When Ramon Nunez arrived at the address on the form Tuesday morning in search of a copy of his new son’s birth certificate, the high-rise building was cordoned off with yellow police tape.

He was directed to a building down the street, where he was sent through winding hallways to a tiny back room. When a harried county worker noticed him standing perplexed in a doorway next to a reporter, she looked at the two of them and asked, “Are you morticians?”

Nunez, a Pasadena landscaper, was abruptly hustled back to the front lobby, where the flustered worker finally told him how to get a copy of the birth certificate.

And so it went Tuesday morning for some of those who ventured downtown to the county Department of Health Services administration building, which was seriously damaged Saturday in a spectacular fire.

Because of the Presidents Day holiday, Tuesday was the first business day at the building since the fire. It provided more than the typical adventure in bureaucracy for citizens like Nunez, who showed up seeking birth and death certificates, as well as funeral directors seeking burial permits.

There were also glitches in the county’s attempt to smoothly relocate about 460 workers who could not return to the building and who may not be able to go back for months.

Most were reached by phone Monday and told where to report for work the next day. But those who could not be reached showed up at the charred building Tuesday morning looking lost.

Shuttle buses took most of the workers to temporary space at County-USC Medical Center and Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey as well as to work space donated by IBM.

But as it turned out, some had come to the right place after all.

Three floors that sustained little or no damage were open to about 140 employees who went about their work as crews in other parts of the building began a massive cleanup.

But the public was not allowed in the damaged 14-story building and the two most heavily damaged floors--the sixth and the seventh--were completely sealed off to prevent the leakage of asbestos or other harmful substances.

On the 11th and 12th floors, lab technicians tested urine, blood and tissue samples from hospitals and clinics as usual, even though the air stank of charred wood and they had to step over sooty plastic and cardboard to get to elevators.

The office of vital records--where birth certificates, death certificates and burial permits are filed--also was undamaged and open on the first floor.

To get copies of the documents, however, one had to go to a health clinic just down the street, put in a request, then wait for a worker to hand-deliver them from the damaged building.

Toby Staheli, a spokeswoman for the county, said she could not say when the vital records office will be operating normally.

“We still have so many workers in there--cleanup crews and investigators--that it is impossible to say,” she said.

Larry Portigal, who oversees the vital records operations, said people who need birth or death certificates more than 3 months old can get them from the Hall of Records. Birth certificates for infants who are only a few weeks old can sometimes be found in satellite offices, he said. Burial permits, however, are issued only from the downtown office.

On the bright side, no documents in the vital records office were damaged, Portigal said.

Other offices, however, lost millions of computer records of ambulance and paramedic operations and emergency services at public and private hospitals.

Workers began the painstaking job of re-creating those records Tuesday.