EARTHQUAKE: DISASTER BEFORE DAWN : Crews’ Swift Response Wins Praise : Disaster: System was found wanting in the 1992 riots and last fall’s fires. This time, reaction was quick and well-coordinated, officials say.

Los Angeles’ emergency response system--tested and found wanting during the 1992 riots and challenged again during last fall’s fires--reacted in force to Monday’s earthquakes, winning accolades even as residents and officials braced for the long recovery to come.

Thousands of police officers, firefighters, paramedics and others fanned out through the region within hours of the 4:31 a.m quake. From an emergency operations center beneath a City Hall annex, three dozen officials spearheaded the massive city, county and state response, deploying forces amid damage reports that arrived from across the city and region.

“There is damage everywhere,” Police Commission President Gary Greenebaum said shortly after arriving at the emergency center early Monday. “My sense is that the worst is in the Valley, but everyone was hit.”

Emergency crews ran into snags from the start: Buckled highways made it difficult to get workers to some locations; extensive damage and power failures forced the closure of hospitals and the evacuations of 600 to 700 sick and injured patients; ruptured gas mains sparked scores of blazes; a downed communications system hampered health care coordination.

But this time, according to officials monitoring the work of emergency crews, the initial response was swift and well-coordinated.

The Los Angeles Police Department declared a tactical alert about 5 a.m., even before the department’s chief, Willie L. Williams, could dig himself out from the damage in his Woodland Hills home; a heavy armoire fell in Williams’ bedroom, missing the chief “by about an inch,” he said later.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department acted about the same time, mobilizing all its deputies and ordering them to work 12-hour shifts.

The moves by the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department meant that thousands of additional law enforcement officers were working within hours of the quake’s first jolt.

Mayor Richard Riordan declared a local emergency at 5:50 a.m., and Gov. Pete Wilson was on hand by noon, bringing with him the authority to dispatch 500 National Guard troops to posts across the city. By nightfall, 500 National Guards were stationed at armories in and around Los Angeles. Between 1,500 and 1,800 troops are scheduled to be on duty within 24 hours.

With dozens of blazes erupting throughout the region, firefighters called on neighboring departments for help, especially in the devastated areas of the San Fernando Valley. Some firefighters were temporarily delayed early Monday because they had to manually open garage doors to get their trucks out. But by 1 p.m., those firefighters, joined by 20 strike teams from the county, were battling blazes, and help was pouring in from across the state.

Seven out-of-town urban search and rescue teams of about 50 people each joined local firefighters to check rubble for survivors. Three were immediately deployed in the Valley, while the other four waited for their assignments at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center.

By late afternoon, officials said they had turned the corner.

“We’ve got a pretty good handle on the fires,” said Fire Battalion Chief Claude Creasy. “Everything is contained. Our concern now is the aftershocks and the continuing collapse of structures that are in jeopardy.”

Early reports of looting were met aggressively by police determined to thwart illegal activity before it could overwhelm them, as it did during the 1992 riots. The LAPD reported half a dozen arrests for looting early Monday, some Downtown and others in the Valley. Officers from the LAPD’s elite Metro Division were dispatched to some of those areas, and commanders requested assistance from the Sheriff’s Department, which supplied 60 deputies as part of an anti-looting force.

That deployment was accompanied by tough rhetoric.

“We will not tolerate looting in any way,” LAPD Cmdr. David J. Gascon said at midday. “We will have maximum enforcement.”

While the city’s police and fire crews rushed to emergencies, the health care network was struggling under the load.

At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, doctors received “a tidal wave of walking wounded,” spokesman Ron Wise said. UCLA Medical Center treated more than 100 patients, most for minor cuts on their hands and feet, but several were seriously injured. Other hospitals were similarly deluged.

The death and injury toll mounted throughout the day, and hospitals were forced to grapple with an array of difficulties. Many were operating on generators, and emergency rooms were overflowing. Doctors sutured some cuts in hospital hallways.

Moreover, the evacuations from earthquake-damaged hospitals redoubled the pressure on those that were receiving patients. So many patients were moved--more than at any other time in the area’s history--that Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses and helicopters were pressed into duty.

The largest evacuation occurred at Olive View Medical Center, where all the patients in the 377-bed hospital were transferred because of serious water damage, gas leaks and power outages. Some went to private hospitals, but most were driven to other county hospitals. The hospital was built on the site where another county hospital was destroyed in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

Across the Valley, 23 infants from the Northridge Hospital Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit were evacuated by helicopter because of damage to the ward. The babies were flown to UCLA Medical Center and to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

All 198 patients were also moved out of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Sepulveda. They were transferred to the veterans hospital in Long Beach.

David Langness, a spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California, said dozens of other hospitals suffered severe enough damage to force partial evacuations or the shift of large numbers of patients from one floor to another or one ward to another.

At Psychiatric Hospital, part of the County-USC Medical Center, a broken water tank forced officials to close the facility and transfer 65 to 75 patients to other hospitals.

“The water came down the elevator shafts, through the ceiling, into hallways,” said Harvey Kern, a hospital spokesman. “It was everywhere.”

Despite the damage, Langness and other hospital officials said they were pleased overall with the way the countywide emergency response system worked. After the disastrous 1971 Sylmar earthquake, hospitals developed emergency networks that were pressed into duty Monday. The two systems, a radio network using a hospital-only channel and a microwave network, were slow in getting started up because of earthquake-related problems, but both kicked in about 9:30 a.m. and ran without problems.

“Everybody was scrambling,” Langness said. “But basically everything was in place, the systems worked, and we didn’t lose any patients.”

On the streets, emergency crews were welcomed warmly by residents, some still badly shaken by the earthquake and its aftershocks. But even an earthquake could not break some habits: Police officers posted near the fallen Santa Monica Freeway at Fairfax Avenue tried to steer cars around the severed roadway, which lay like a broken bird’s wing across the street below.

Most motorists turned around, but some were defiant. One motorist sped by officers trying to detour traffic off the freeway and crashed into a chunk of concrete thrust into the air by the earthquake, an officer at the scene said. The man was taken to the hospital, his face badly cut.

“You just can’t stop these people,” Officer Richard Blankenship said. about an hour after the quake struck.

Monday’s response was the result of long soul-searching by Los Angeles leaders about the city’s readiness for a disaster. After the 1992 riots, a commission appointed to examine the city’s response expressed “grave concern” about the city’s preparedness and urged officials to step up their planning for a future disaster.

In the wake of that report, the LAPD launched a comprehensive emergency training program for its officers, and the city retooled its emergency operations procedures to improve coordination.

On Monday those new procedures were in evidence at the Emergency Operations Center. Representatives of state, county and city agencies worked hand in hand from before dawn until long after dark, regularly updating one another on the efforts being undertaken by their workers. Riordan, dressed in jeans and a Los Angeles Lakers sweat shirt, patrolled the bunker-like, windowless command post early Monday morning, asking staffers for updates as they poured in from around the city. He treated the staff to a midmorning breakfast, and he commended officials from each of the various agencies.

“I’ve been impressed by everyone,” Riordan said later. “The response has been overwhelming.”