Earthquake: Diaster Before Dawn : Healers Respond With Mission of Mercy : Medicine: Doctors, nurses and others from UCI Medical Center rush to the aid of overwhelmed Granada Hills hospital.

Dr. Antoine Kazzi, a professor of emergency room services for the UCI School of Medicine, returned last week from war-torn Bosnia, where he helped treat hundreds of wounded Moslems, Serbs and Croats.

On Monday, he was back on the front lines, tending to the wounds of victims of another kind.

Answering pleas for help from overrun Granada Hills Community Hospital, Kazzi led a group of 10 emergency room physicians, nurses and emergency medical technicians from UCI Medical Center in Orange on a mission of mercy.

“One disaster is like another disaster,” said Kazzi as the group began its two-hour sojourn to the earthquake-ravaged San Fernando Valley. “We don’t know what we’ll expect. But I am sure we will be able to help them.”

To that end, the mobile emergency room team loaded up a van with hand-held heartbeat regulators, syringes, sponges, morphine, tetanus boosters, sterilization chemicals, linens, ice packs, splints and other emergency room paraphernalia. Their goal: to fill in the cracks left by a harried and overworked hospital staff inundated by hundreds of injured residents.

“It’s the same kind of procedures when you are dealing with any emergency situation,” Kazzi said.

Indeed, when the UCI crew got to Granada Hills Community Hospital, they found what looked like a war zone. Dozens of bloodied and frightened patients sat in hastily erected chairs and beds outside the small hospital. The remnants of a destroyed Kaiser Permanente administration building across the parking lot provided a vivid reminder of the nightmare many had just encountered.

Inside the hospital, staffers rushed to mop up water, which flowed freely from a broken pipe to flood the emergency room corridor. Makeshift emergency rooms were set up in the lobby and in other treatment rooms on the first floor. The telephones were out, the water was turned off and there was no electrical power for most of the day.

“We lost everything,” said Richard Gold, chief executive officer of the small community hospital. Unshaven and wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants, Gold raced from ward to ward, directing medical assistance where needed. “But right now we seem to be doing rather well.”

While others of the UCI team were led into the operating room, Dr. Mike Ritter quickly made his way into a darkened exercise room that was littered with roll-away beds. One the wall of the room, a clock read 4:31, the time the first temblor hit.

Ritter’s first patient was Charles Harper, 67, who had broken his ankle when a heavy dresser toppled onto him. Nevertheless, he felt lucky. A fire that ravaged more than 50 mobile homes in Sylmar was brought under control just yards from his own twisted mobile home.

“At least I didn’t lose my house,” Harper said as Ritter, holding a flashlight, probed the patient’s ankle and asked a series of questions before ordering a splint for the man.

Next to him, Kazzi treated a woman’s foot that had been gouged during her escape from her ruined home. At another bed, Dr. Steven Cullen sewed up the hand of 19-year-old Susanne Dwyer of Granada Hills, who grimaced and panted with fear. “I feel it, I feel it,” she protested as he inserted the sutures.

Several minutes later, the dark scene, which was punctuated by the eerie beams of flashlights, became all the more grave when a woman was wheeled in, crying and screaming in pain. It was then that Ritter met Dr. Robert Olvera, an Orange County Search and Rescue Team physician and head of the Costa Mesa branch of Irvine-based Bristol Park Medical Group Inc.

Between the two of them, it was determined that the woman, an Ecuadorean named Yolanda, was probably suffering from a ruptured kidney. As Ritter and UCI nurse Meryle Olivier worked to insert needles into her arm and search for telltale signs of the extent of her injuries, Olvera soothed her in Spanish: “ Tranquilo, senora. Tranquilo ,” he said. Calm down.

Olvera was used to disaster situations: He had most recently spent 48 hours in Laguna Beach, treating fire victims during the October conflagration. “You really have to give back something to the community,” Olvera said hours later

UCI nurse Kristine Dahlquist agreed.

She and others on the team had volunteered to receive disaster training earlier in the year under the County’s Medical Disaster Response program. The program teaches medical personnel how to handle disaster situations in a way that is counter to hospital procedures.

“This is what we were trained for,” she said. “It’s a different concept entirely from what we do in a hospital.”