NEWPORT BEACH : ‘Temblor’ Tests City Disaster Response

At 8:42 a.m. Thursday, 75 city officials and staff gathered in the conference room at police headquarters suddenly felt the room begin to rumble.

The morning “earthquake,” said to be a 6.1-magnitude quake centered in Long Beach on the Newport-Inglewood fault, actually was sound pumped into the room through an amplifier hooked up to a concert speaker. The city’s disaster response drill was underway.

The three-hour exercise was the first major test of the city’s disaster response plan since it was adopted by the City Council in March, 1992.

The drill capped a weeklong series of exercises designed to get people ranging from council members to ham radio volunteers to work together in a crisis.

“We feel it is important to be prepared,” Fire Chief Tim Riley said. “We believe that the city has the potential to be heavily impacted in an earthquake. We know that someday in the future we will have to deal with that reality.”

After the artificial temblor, officials opened an emergency operations center full of phones and wall-size maps. Pretend-disaster reports from the field began trickling into the command center. The parking structure at Hoag Hospital had collapsed, the clock tower at Newport Harbor High School was devastated, there were fires throughout the city, and hundreds of residents were dead, injured or left homeless.

City workers pretended to dispatch work crews, medical relief, and food supplies to trouble spots.

“We made it so that (disaster officials) could not wave a magic wand and the problem would be cured,” Riley said.

By the end of the drill, the participants had succeeded in partially stabilizing the situation.. By 11:30 a.m., officials halted the simulation, leaving long-term crisis issues, such as bridge repairs, unresolved.

“Each time we do this, we learn a little more,” said Councilman Phil Sansone, who watched the exercise. He said that city response exercises are useful for putting into practice new equipment, such as computer-generated maps.

The city has been developing a disaster response plan. Each of the 16 departments have guidelines which spell out the general disaster response. They also have individual departmental procedures and contingency plans for earthquakes, toxic chemical spills, floods and airplane crashes.