Taking the Government to the People in Trying Times

Wednesday morning, some of the children who’d spent their second night in a Reseda park were sneezing and coughing, their colds made worse by sleeplessness.

Their parents, waiting for free food and water, asked Councilwoman Laura Chick for help. “My little boy is sick with a cold,” said one mother. Others told Chick similar stories as she walked down the line of refugees. They had camped in the park adjacent to the West Valley Municipal Center after being forced from their San Fernando Valley apartment houses by Monday’s earthquake.

They asked for aspirin, cough medicine and other simple, over-the-counter medicines. A woman with a cold said she was allergic to aspirin. “I can only take Tylenol,” she said.

I tagged along, recording what they said in my notebook, but wondered to myself, why don’t they go to the drugstore? They’ve got cars. Aspirin is cheap.

Then, as I listened to the tension in their voices and looked at the lines in their weary faces, I thought I understood. They were paralyzed by the week’s events. So they stayed in the park.

Or as Councilwoman Chick said a few minutes later, “We are so used to life going on that when Mother Nature gets the upper hand, we are in a daze.”

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They were in such a daze, Chick said, they could not get themselves together to go to a drugstore, much less navigate their way through the procedures needed for admittance to a hospital emergency ward.

In normal times, Chick told me, these were people who coped with the mechanisms of life, with store clerks, hospital admitting desks and government bureaucrats. They are working-class men and women, white and Latino, who, for the most part, lived in the comparatively inexpensive apartments that line the Valley’s main boulevards and many of its side streets until they were forced onto the streets.

Chick turned to two staff members following her as she walked along the line. Get Tylenol here, she snapped. Get cough medicine. We need medical personnel in the park, not the hospitals. Why can’t we get military medical staff here?

“I am absolutely determined,” she said, “to get medical help out here.”

Chick, whose own home was badly damaged by the quake, is a small, impatient person who seems perpetually wound up for action. She showed her impatience in the last election. An aide to City Councilwoman Joy Picus, Chick decided she’d like to serve on the council. But instead of waiting patiently for her veteran boss to retire from the council, Chick violated City Hall tradition, ran against Picus and beat her.

She said the lack of medical care in the park encampments illustrated a weakness in the city relief system.

It’s based on the theory that victims will go to shelters and hospitals for housing, food and medical aid. “This is not what most people do,” she said.

In shock from the earthquake, they have sought safety and security from those they know. “I’m staying with my friends,” a woman said, “over there in the green tent.”

The people had complaints about businesses and bureaucrats.

One victim told Chick that she hasn’t been able to connect with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “I try to get through,” she said, “but I lose them on the line.” Chick said FEMA representatives would be on the scene in a few days.

A woman said a nearby convenience store was charging $5 a bottle for water, and the same for flashlight batteries. Two others in the line told their stories of price-gouging merchants. Chick had an aide take down their names and complaints.

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The park we stood in was an example of bringing services to the people, instead of making them travel to some distant relief spot.

Working with Chick, the Shell Oil Co. put up a large relief tent and stocked it from the warehouses used by its service station convenience stores.

By late Wednesday, more than 2,000 victims were given food, bottled water, cleaning products, paper goods and other necessities.

National Guard troops and Los Angeles police stood by, keeping order, to avoid a repeat of the panic rushing of a food distribution center at another park the day before.

These people were like the pioneers who, in settling the frontier more than a century ago, created communities based on family, friends and neighbors. It’s an old American tradition.

The grass-roots relief system being created in Laura Chick’s West Valley district is part of that tradition. The city should do whatever is necessary to see that these hard-working, hard-hit people can regain their self reliance.