A CITY IN CRISIS : Paperwork Ignored in Crush of Emergency Calls

A major government casualty of the riots was paperwork.

The usual fire and police reports of damage, injuries, arrests, looting, financial losses and even locations of fires have been abandoned in the attempt to cope with flames and violence.

“We will be going back and (reconstructing) what we can,” said Los Angeles Deputy Fire Chief Don Anthony. “We haven’t been keeping the records that we normally keep.”

Under normal circumstances, Anthony said, fire officials record in computers the time and location of all fires, calls for paramedics and other emergencies they handle. Fire reports include the type of business hit, extent of damage and estimate of loss.

Once the rioting began, Anthony said, crews concentrated solely on fighting the blazes.

“We had to go back a number of times to the same buildings” when fires rekindled, he said, complicating bookkeeping.

Special assessment teams will travel through the fire areas beginning Monday, cataloguing locations of fires and assessing damage. He predicted that more than 1,000 buildings will have to be torn down.

“I do not know how many buildings we have totally damaged or partially damaged,” Anthony said. “It may take a little while to put it together.”

Anthony said the situation was so bad that while he was surveying the city from a helicopter, he would spot a fire, ask dispatchers how the department was handling it and learn that in some cases the blaze had not even been reported.

Los Angeles police officers said they had similar problems tracking reports of looting and other acts of vandalism.

A sergeant in the Hollywood Division said officers were too busy with emergencies to keep statistics. When asked for the number of injuries, arrests and looting incidents handled by his officers, the sergeant said: “We’ve got a . . . whole bunch.”