Earthquake: Diaster Before Dawn : Anaheim Baby Makes Shaky Debut : Coincidence: Newborn weighing 6 pounds, 6 ounces is delivered by flashlight moments after 6.6 quake.

“Push, push!” the nurses urged Monica Scheerer as the mop of brown hair atop her baby’s tiny pink head began to emerge. She was almost there.

Then came the Big One--or at least what Scheerer, already miserable after six hours of labor, could have sworn was the Big One.

The medical staff scattered for cover under surrounding door frames. Scheerer’s fiance sprawled his frame across her. Scheerer herself prayed that the ceiling staring down at her hadn’t seen its best days.

Mercifully, the shaking stopped. But where were the lights, the backup power? How was her baby? Damn the dark; this is an omen, a bad one, the 28-year-old Anaheim woman thought to herself ruefully.

She felt so helpless. Minutes passed in panic. Then finally, nurses rummaged up a few flashlights, and Scheerer’s doctor--just arrived on the scene--was able to deliver a healthy girl at 4:45 a.m. Monday.

The topper to an already remarkable birth: The baby, born just after a 6.6 earthquake, weighed in at six pounds, six ounces.

“Unbelievable. I still can’t believe it,” said the father, 27-year-old Jim Nelsen, a cigar in his hand.

The delivery was the talk of Anaheim General Hospital all day. “Earthie,” one nurse called the newborn. “Quake baby,” suggested another.

The parents themselves shunned any thought of linking the baby’s name forever to her birth. (Rickie--short for Richter? Roxanne?) They stuck with the one they’d already picked: Nikki. At least it rhymed with Rickie.

Scheerer, who grew up in Orange County, said she has always been afraid of earthquakes. Monday’s temblor, she said, was terrifying.

Laying in the dark as the delivery room shook, “I just kept thinking--’This is it. It’s going to be the Big One.’ But it wasn’t like I could go anywhere, because her head was halfway out,” she recounted.

Dr. Sang C. Kim said he had just arrived at the hospital parking lot to deliver the Scheerer baby when the quake hit. At first he thought something was wrong with his car. Then he realized the whole earth was shaking.

With the main power out at the hospital, Kim stumbled through the dark to the delivery room to find the frantic birth already in progress.

“It was exciting,” Kim said in an interview in his Anaheim office, even as another aftershock hit. “This was my first like this. . . . I could hardly see what I was doing, but with the help of the flashlights, we made it.”

Peter Szekrenyi, chief executive officer at Anaheim General, said the emergency generator failed to kick in for 17 minutes and had to be activated manually. The failure was reported to the state as required, he said.

The dark wasn’t the only problem.

Scheerer said she was bothered that the three nurses on hand at the time of the quake left her and Nelsen alone in the dark for the 30 seconds or so that it lasted, leaving the delivery table to take cover.

The nurses could not be reached for comment, but Szekrenyi said this appeared to be standard hospital protocol.

While he was not familiar with the details of the delivery, the administrator said that in general medical staffs are trained to ensure their own safety first during an emergency.

“They have to be safe in order to save the patients,” he said, likening the situation to that of flight attendants taking air first for themselves from oxygen masks during an emergency before offering aid to passengers.

As frightening as the birth had been, Scheerer and Nelsen joked about the ordeal hours later as they talked with some friends and neighbors who had come to see Nikki. Occasionally, they spoke of the quake as a sort of blessing, and Scheerer said she suspects it may have even sped up the birth.

“It was like some kind of sign that we were having a baby,” said Nelsen, a foreman for an industrial painting crew. “God made something special today.”