Southland Struggles to Dig Out : Quake Toll Rises to 40; Services Still Down : Disaster: Aftershocks from 6.6 temblor continue. Many turn neighborhoods and parks into campgrounds while others seek refuge in shelters and hotels.

As waves of aftershocks continued to jolt quake-ravaged Southern California, life was anything but back to normal Tuesday for vast swaths of the region, which was struggling to dig out from the rubble, maneuver over a crumpled freeway system and assess the devastation without full benefit of power, gas or phones.

A day after a magnitude 6.6 earthquake rumbled violently under the San Fernando Valley, tens of thousands of frazzled and displaced residents turned their neighborhoods into sprawling campgrounds, burning tree limbs for warmth, boiling water against contaminants, stocking up on batteries and wondering when--or if--they will be able to return home.

“At least if I die here, they’ll find me quick and not have to search for me in the rubble,” said Silvia Martinez, 25, who was camped out at Echo Park Lake, where she had set up a frayed mattress under a makeshift tent of black garbage bags strung between two shopping carts.

The day’s major developments:

* The death toll climbed to 40. Among the latest fatalities was the 16th body to be pulled from the three-story Northridge Meadows apartments, which became the focus of a grim rescue mission after it collapsed into two floors. Four other deaths in the latest tally were attributed to heart attacks. One other died in a traffic accident on Monday.

* Medical officials said that 530 people had suffered injuries serious enough to be hospitalized, while another 2,333 injured were treated and released. Hospitals remained swamped across the Valley, doctors performed triage in parking lots and kidney patients scrambled to find dialysis treatment.

* Unable or unwilling to venture back to their homes, as many as 20,000 people had set up camp in at least 70 city parks. Thousands more were holed up at emergency shelters or were checked into hotels.

* As top federal officials met to discuss how best to bring emergency aid to the region, President Clinton announced he would visit Los Angeles today. Insurance industry officials estimated that insured damage from the quake and aftershocks will exceed $1 billion.

* With scores of employees staying away from work, traffic on the region’s fractured roadways was remarkably light. Already, demolition crews were busy tearing down crumbled and debris-strewn stretches of the Santa Monica and Golden State freeways.

* Nearly 82,000 customers were still without power, at least 50,000 had no water and 28,000 were without natural gas. Although telephone service was largely restored, officials said lines remained congested and urged residents to limit their calls.

* Mayor Richard Riordan extended the curfew through Tuesday night, saying the continuing need for one would be evaluated each day. He did, however, change its start from dusk to 11 p.m. Los Angeles police, meanwhile, reported minimal looting and curfew violations. If fact, Monday night was so quiet that only 73 people were arrested in the entire city, a fraction of the average tally.

* While some comfort could be taken in Tuesday’s blue skies and warm winter sun, forecasters predicted rain by the weekend, hastening efforts to board up and repair damaged structures.

“I don’t think it’s hit everyone here yet,” said Connie Buchanan, 65, whose one-bedroom apartment in Sherman Oaks was squashed to about half its original height. All along her block on Murieta Avenue, an almost festival atmosphere prevailed as residents evacuated buildings, filling the sidewalks with furniture, clothes and paintings.

“We’re all sort of going around not knowing what to feel,” she said.

Do You Cry?

On the Day After, disaster maintained its persistent grip. While many survivors were able to reflect on the good fortune that Monday’s earthquake had struck so early in the morning, the full extent of its deadly punch grew increasingly clear.

At the Northridge Meadows apartments, where nearly half of the quake’s dead had been unearthed from the submerged first floor, search dogs discovered a 16th body surrounded by pots and pans, wedged under heavy pillars in a three-foot void.

Officials did not immediately identify the victim, but it was believed to be Pil Sook Lee, a 47-year-old mechanic who had been preparing to go to work when the quake struck. Lee’s wife, Hyun, a nurse, managed to crawl from the rubble with a 12-year-old son. But within hours of the quake, she learned that her 14-year-old son had been killed and her husband was presumed dead.

After 24 hours of desperate searching that riveted TV viewers nationwide, Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Bill Burmester said he was confident that no one--alive or dead--was left in the 160-unit structure that has become an emblem of the quake’s deadly muscle. During the final sweep, rescue teams used high-tech listening devices and a tiny fiber-optic camera that was lowered into narrow crevices.

Mayor Richard Riordan, in his first ground tour of the earthquake damage, crossed police lines and walked so close to the damaged Northridge complex that authorities warned him to stay back. “It’s just scary how quickly life can be put out,” he said after he stared at the rubble.

At one point on Riordan’s tour, a sobbing woman threw her arms around him and virtually pulled him into her Granada Hills home. Water had ruined her living room, mud was caked on her rug and a plastic tarp covered what was left of her possessions. “I don’t know what to do,” she cried.

Art Ginsburg, whose motto is “Every Sandwich Is a Work of Art,” knew exactly what to do. A fire, apparently the result of a quake-related gas leak, ripped through his namesake deli in Studio City early Tuesday morning, caving in the roof and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

But after 37 years serving up roast beef, pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwiches, Ginsburg was not about to throw in the towel.

“I was sick when they called me,” he said. “I cried. I think we all cried. But the sign has been up there since 1957, it’s still up there and it’s going to stay up there.”

In Santa Monica, where some residents expressed concern that a barrage of reports from the Valley had overshadowed severe damage of their own, 83 buildings were deemed unsafe for occupancy and access to 111 other structures was restricted.

Officials said hundreds of gas leaks had been detected in the city and one house exploded during Monday’s quake. On Tuesday, broken glass and dislodged bricks kept businesses along Wilshire and San Vicente boulevards shuttered. The popular Third Street Promenade pedestrian mall was bandaged in plywood. At the landmark Santa Monica pier, cars were banned as inspectors tried to assess foundation damage.

Sandra Campos showed up with her husband and four daughters at a Red Cross shelter at Santa Monica Community College after their eight-story oceanfront apartment complex was evacuated.

“I want to find out--is there someone I can talk to about finding a place to live?” Campos asked. “My daughters want to go home. I tell them, ‘What home do we have to go to?’ ”

Piero Selvaggio was feeling particularly battered. Just 2 1/2 months ago, the 47-year-old restaurateur lost his hillside home in Malibu to wind-whipped wildfires. On Tuesday, his voice grew tight as he described the damage to his prized wine collection at Valentino in Santa Monica.

“In my wildest dream, in my worst scenario, I always felt if anything like this would happen there would be a river of wine running from my restaurant to the beach,” he said. “When I drove in, the red river that I had thought in my dreams many times was reality. The wine was flowing through my driveway, across the parking lot, on the way down to Pico Boulevard.”

Selvaggio estimated that about 30,000 bottles were destroyed in his 100,000-bottle cellar--the largest wine list, he says, on the West Coast. After sorting through the shattered glass, looking for fragments of labels and corks, he calculated the loss at about $250,000. But he said many of the vintages, which he had collected over the last two decades from old vineyards in France and Italy, do not exist any more.

“What do you do?” he asked. “Do you continue to cry? Do you continue to scream and say, ‘Why me?’ ”

In Ventura County, damage estimates rose to at least $400 million and injury totals climbed to 800 Tuesday as officials said they expected to soon join the San Fernando Valley as a federal disaster area.

At least half the damage was reported in the historic railroad town of Fillmore, where dozens of aging masonry shops collapsed and between 600 and 1,000 houses were damaged, officials estimated. Building inspectors indefinitely closed the 40-unit Arundell Circle apartment complex and a two-story residential hotel that was home to more than 100 field laborers.

“We didn’t get anything--not even shoes,” said Pedro Barajas, 53, who was left homeless with his eight children after their apartment at the Fillmore Hotel was damaged.

But it was in the newer eastern Ventura County communities of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark that the estimates of devastation rose most sharply.

The Moorpark College library and gymnasium suffered so much damage that officials said they may never be repaired. Thousand Oaks’ large new library lost part of its roof. The Simi Valley courthouse and City Hall both had major water damage. Structural damage at Simi Valley High School was so severe that officials said they could not guess when students might return.

And parts of Simi Valley’s famed Bottle Village, a one-acre enclave made of glass bottles, came crashing down.

Like Gold

Much of Tuesday was devoted to the gritty task of survival, as residents hit hardest by Monday’s disaster struggled to adapt, improvise and overcome.

The quake left many without the barest necessities: 82,000 homes and businesses were without electricity, 50,000 were without water, another 50,000 had only intermittent water and 28,000 were without natural gas.

A freshly conscripted army of homeless--often dazed, ill-clothed and barely able to find words to describe their plight--sought safety in city parks and parking lots and unused patches of urban greenery. Tents, lean-tos and family vehicles were used for shelter; meals were cooked over portable barbecue pits and makeshift ovens.

Many of the 20,000 who slept under Monday’s starry skies had fled their unsafe homes after ceilings collapsed and buckled walls sent possessions flying willy-nilly. But some chose the outdoors simply because it seemed less confined in a world that was caving in.

“I was afraid to be here,” conceded Gladys Contreras, 32, who was camping beside the Echo Park Lake with her three children, ages 2 to 16. “But it was preferable to dying in my apartment.”

For many of the new homeless, however, the seismic threat was soon replaced by by the prospect of urban danger. Worried about confrontations with the hard-core homeless or other nighttime menaces, some campers tried to find spots near police stations or National Guard outposts; others made their own security arrangements.

Olga Gonzalez, who slept in a tent near the Los Feliz Boulevard entrance to Griffith Park, said her husband and another man stayed up all night to protect the children in their band of a dozen families. At about 3 a.m., she said, two coyotes came within 30 feet of their tent, but the men prepared to do battle with sticks. Later, a homeless woman with a dog trundled by and cursed at her new neighbors.

“We’ll stay 72 hours,” said Gonzalez, 29. “They say that’s when the earth should stay still.”

The steady rocking of aftershocks sent many other anxious residents out in search of the bare essentials, triggering long lines at automated bank teller machines, gas pumps and hardware stores, where the repentant hastily stocked up on survival supplies.

At Granada Hills High School, people lined up for hours to get five-gallon jugs of water, courtesy of the city Department of Water and Power. One woman, criticized for going directly to the front of the line, yelled back: “My husband has had open heart surgery!”

Dozens of others formed a long line at a Northridge hardware store, many of them seeking one particularly hot item--an 18-inch piece of flexible copper tubing used for hot water heaters.

“I called around to 10 or 12 stores, and there’s probably only about four plumbing stores open in the whole Valley, and most of them are totally sold out of them,” said 46-year-old Don Wyatt of Chatsworth, who stood near the head of the line. “Today, these things are like gold.”

Diapers were also worth more than their weight. “All day yesterday, I had to use napkins because none of the stores were open,” said Maria Cisneros, a 25-year-old Northridge resident who had spent two hours cradling her 2-year-old daughter outside a supermarket in North Hills. “Napkins don’t work so well.”

“Yes, I know,” said Peggy Brister, who stood several places away in line with a baby of her own. “I’m down to tissues.”

With supply low and demand high, reports of price-gouging began to surface. The son of Rose Castenada, an aide to Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City), went out Tuesday to buy one of those copper tubes for the family’s water heater. He was told the item, which usually goes for less than $10, was being sold for $30.

When he asked why the store was charging so much, a merchant replied: “Earthquake prices.”

Police Chief Willie L. Williams called for residents who encounter such practices to contact officers immediately. But if there was meanness and profiteering, there was also charity and goodwill.

Lynnette Hargraves, 46, and her cousin, Jackie Johnson, 42, were frantically calling relatives on the East Coast from a pay phone after their apartment building on Reseda Boulevard was leveled.

“We don’t have nothing. We lost everything. We need money,” said the pajama-clad Hargraves, pleading for her relatives to send money by Western Union.

“We need water,” Johnson said to a passerby. “We’re staying in a park. We don’t want to do that, but at least it’s near a police station.”

As she walked by, Patricia Story heard the two strangers crying. Without a moment’s hesitation, she handed them $25 and a slip of paper with her phone number. “If you need a place to stay, I have a three-bedroom house,” she said soothingly.

‘Bust Our Butts’

Even as officials continued to take stock of the damage wrought by Monday’s earthquake, the rebuilding efforts began throughout Southern California, hurried in part by the forecast of rain by Saturday.

Reconstruction of the junction of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways was Caltrans’ top priority because of its role as a commercial umbilical cord linking Northern and Southern California, said Dean Dunphy, state secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing.

“We’re going to bust our butts to get this done as fast as possible,” Dunphy said.

Cleanup crews will work around the clock to clear the rubble--an exercise that should take at least a week, Dunphy said. Meanwhile, a nearby road will be resurfaced to provide a detour during the construction.

To expedite the freeway repairs, Caltrans is short-circuiting the bidding process and expediting construction permits so contracts can be awarded within weeks instead of months, said Caltrans chief bridge engineer Jim Roberts.

Further greasing the skids, U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena--dispatched to Los Angeles by President Clinton in advance of his own visit here today--said four contracts, totaling $3.4 million, were immediately awarded to help clear freeway debris.

“Anywhere along the line where we can cut red tape, we will do that,” said Pena after touring damaged areas.

Caltrans also announced it would ask an independent panel of engineering experts to review the state’s program of retrofitting highway bridges to resist earthquake damage. The panel was established after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake collapsed a double-decked section of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland and damaged part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

“What we are trying to do is get the very best science, get the best structural engineers to review our work so we are not sitting here thinking we know everything,” said Caltrans Director Jim Van Loben Sels.

Already, work crews were out before dawn taking aim at the crumbled stretch of Santa Monica Freeway, where a 200-foot concrete bridge collapsed onto La Cienega Boulevard. In a task that seemed as daunting as breaking apart an iceberg with an ice pick, workers used two hydraulic hammers, mounted on large trucks, to begin chipping away at the concrete.

The scene attracted hundreds of spectators--and catering trucks to feed them.

Although the region’s celebrated freeway system lay in shambles, there was good news for subterranean commuters. After a one-day closure, the Red Line subway reopened Tuesday with reduced service and officials said the tunnels sustained no visible earthquake damage.

As aftershocks from the quake’s destructive punch continued to ripple across Southern California, the cleanup campaign also was being waged on an environmental front. Near Newhall, crews scrambled Tuesday to contain a 15-mile-long slick of crude oil that spilled into the Santa Clara River after a nearby Arco pipeline ruptured.

Booms were put into the river to stop further flow toward the ocean, while workers attempted to remove the oil from the water surface with vacuums and pads. Still, more than 1,000 barrels of oil had spread from Santa Clarita to Piru, triggering concern about the impact on the river and its wildlife, including two federally endangered species--a fish known as the unarmored three-spined stickleback, and a bird, the least Bell’s vireo.

To the south, Anaheim city officials--hoping for state and federal disaster aid--mapped plans to repair Anaheim Stadium, where the 35,000-pound message board and instant-replay screen crashed down and the landmark “Big A” atop the stadium was bent backward at a 45-degree angle.

“We’ve had significant damage--several million dollars damage,” said city spokesman Bret Colson. “Obviously, it’s dwarfed by what’s happened in Los Angeles County, but we’ve taken a pretty big hit too.”

Preliminary estimates on the cost of the earthquake’s damage varied greatly. Richard Krimm, associate director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said it would exceed the $1.1 billion remaining in FEMA’s disaster fund, already depleted by last summer’s Midwest floods and last fall’s wildfires here.

The federal government was the target of widespread criticism for slow and inadequate response to disasters before Clinton’s watch--most notably Hurricane Andrew--and the President clearly wants to send a strong signal that his Administration is compassionate and efficient when it comes to providing emergency aid.

Even as bureaucracies sprung into action, individual response efforts emerged on various fronts--sometimes in frustration.

Moz Dhanani, reservations manager for El Monte RV Center, said he offered to FEMA about 25 motor homes for use during the week, but the agency has expressed no interest in his offer.

He complained that despite having left numerous messages, officials had not returned his calls. The motor homes are heated, can accommodate six and have cooking facilities.

“We see small children sleeping in parking lots . . . yet we have all these motor homes just sitting around,” Dhanani said Tuesday. “We feel very frustrated.”

Local charities said that, with Tuesday’s improved telephone service, offers of help have begun to stream in from individuals and small groups.

“The shock is beginning to wear off and now we’re getting a tremendous number of calls from people who want to help,” said Susan Weight, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, the social service arm of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

“We’re asking for non-perishable food items, paper diapers, baby formula, new blankets and especially cash. Cash is absolutely what we need the most, because it can be converted into whatever is needed,” she said.

Despite the early promise of public outpouring, Weight admitted concern for meeting everyone’s needs, given the enormity of the disaster.

“I’m a little concerned, because this is the largest disaster to ever hit Los Angeles, in terms of the number of people needing help,” she said. “This is going to take all of us, everyone, coming together.”