COLUMN ONE : Dispatches From the War Room : How did L.A.’s emergency system respond to its biggest challenge ever? A log from City Hall’s command post shows what went right--and wrong--in the first frantic 24 hours.

Less than half an hour after Monday’s earthquake tore through Los Angeles at 4:31 a.m., a cadre of emergency workers, their skills honed by the city’s all too regular stream of catastrophes, descended on a subterranean City Hall bunker to manage the crisis.

They would spend the next 24 hours frantically sifting through thousands of calls from law enforcement agencies in the field. During those crucial hours, they would face three disabled police stations, hazardous materials spills, broken gas mains, more than 100 fires, a jail riot, sporadic looting, a downed computer system and a dizzying array of urgent requests for help--including a call from President Clinton asking how congressman Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) had fared.

Interviews and a minute-by-minute log of the Emergency Operations Center’s activities obtained by The Times reveal the enormity of the emergency response to the earthquake. And they dramatically illustrate the obstacles encountered by city leaders as they tried to assess damage and dispatch thousands of police, firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and National Guard troops to the hardest hit areas.

“The city government, the state government, the federal government, and the tens of thousands of citizens of this city all came together starting at about 4:32 Monday morning,” Police Chief Willie L. Williams said Wednesday. “There were no egos involved.

There was just a dedication to get the work done.”

EARLY HOURS

When the quake struck Monday morning, it left key links of the region’s emergency response system in tatters. Parker Center, headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, was badly damaged: Water mains burst, flooding its computer operations. Power was out, as it was for most of the city.

But even as Los Angeles groped about in the early morning darkness, city leaders rushed to the emergency center, four floors below City Hall East in a room designed to resist the strongest earthquake. There, dozens of harried workers scrambled to gather bits of information, working the phones, scanning banks of television sets, posting every report on computer screens.

At first, the silence from the city’s police stations was alarming. Many telephone lines and computer systems were down. As the center received updates, things looked grim:

* 6:30 a.m.: Los Angeles International Airport had been closed.

* 6:50 a.m.: Three sewage treatment plants were down and 34 others were operating on emergency power. Landslides were reported throughout the city.

* 7 a.m.: Two hospitals in the San Fernando Valley were closed.

* 6 to 7:30 a.m.: At least three LAPD stations--Van Nuys, Devonshire and West Valley--were a wreck, some without phones, some being evacuated. Others had no power.

Mayor Richard Riordan was at the emergency center within about 45 minutes of the earthquake, but Chief Williams, who lives in Woodland Hills, had a harder time getting in. He had narrowly escaped being pinned under a heavy armoire in his bedroom. After finally getting out of his house, he made it to the nearest police station and was flown Downtown by helicopter.

Firefighters took to the streets to search for damage, some hampered by the loss of electricity. Garage door openers were disabled, so station doors had to be wrenched open by hand.

An unconfirmed report said the Valley’s Foothill LAPD station had been evacuated. At first, frustrated center officials could not confirm the information. Their fears would later be confirmed: The temblor rippled through the aging station, causing severe damage. Anxious officers abandoned it as soon as the shaking stopped. Outside, the parking structure was destroyed.

At the Van Nuys station, the situation also was bleak. Gas leaks were erupting throughout the area, a few looters had been seen, and a chlorine leak sparked concerns. The station was so damaged that an evacuation was under way by 7:15 a.m.

Another log entry from that time discloses an especially difficult decision that officers were forced to make: “Valley jail may be releasing misdemeanor suspects 10 at a time.”

Damage to the station left them no choice; the police opened the cell doors and sent their misdemeanor offenders home.

One of the chief concerns of the LAPD was the fear that looting could break out, an anxiety rooted in the 1992 riots, when thousands of looters overwhelmed the Police Department and ran virtually unchecked for more than a day. The riots were one of the LAPD’s darkest episodes, and this time police were determined to respond aggressively.

The first report of looting came to the center at 6:45 a.m. Officials from the Southeast area reported some looting and said they already had sent out patrols. At 7:30 a.m., when Van Nuys requested six squads to deal with any possible looters, police officials sent elite LAPD Metro officers within minutes.

That morning, LAPD Cmdr. David J. Gascon, sitting between rows of computers and eyeing the updates on a screen above his head, sternly reiterated the Police Department’s determination to strike hard at looters. “There is no way that we will tolerate any looting in the wake of this event,” he said.

GAINING CONTROL

By about 9 a.m., the emergency center was a swirl of energy: Riordan moved from table to table, looking at computer screens and urging the staff to keep up its work. Top officials from every city department descended on the adjacent board room for briefings.

Outside, emergency crews scrambled to get into the field. Updates to the center made it clear that fire crews, police and other emergency workers were desperately needed in Hollywood and the Valley. The city’s far-flung resources were tapped.

The LAPD’s training division quickly assembled more than 160 officers and recruits, and they hit the road. Officers working the night shift were held over. The entire Sheriff’s Department was mobilized. Communications units were dispatched to the Valley so emergency commanders could get better information from the field.

One television report featured footage at 8:18 a.m. of cars passing beneath a badly buckled overpass along the Simi Valley Freeway. An emergency operations worker saw the report on a center TV set and sent word that the road needed to be closed, lest it fall in an aftershock.

The Sheriff’s Department rushed to the aid of overwhelmed police officers, offering assistance in earthquake ravaged communities. At the same time, however, the Sheriff’s Department was hit by a crisis of its own: a jail riot.

The Pitchess Honor Rancho in Saugus, long plagued by tension between black and Latino inmates, ignited in the chaos after the earthquake. Scores of deputies were needed to put down that insurrection, which left 19 inmates injured.

The LAPD was experiencing jail problems of a different sort. “Jail division accepting felony arrests only,” the log entry for 8:45 a.m. reads. “The jail might be evacuated due to flooding.”

City jails managed to hold onto their most serious offenders, but by day’s end petty criminals had become some of the earthquake’s few beneficiaries. All misdemeanor suspects ultimately were released from city custody.

That morning, however, it was fire that most preoccupied emergency center officials. New reports of blazes arrived by the dozen, and television crews broadcast vivid pictures of gas fires erupting throughout the West Valley.

“We’ve got our hands full,” Fire Chief Donald Manning said as he emerged from a Monday morning briefing. “But we’re moving.”

Meanwhile, scores of wounded people were seeking medical help, putting pressure on the operations center from yet another front.

At 10 a.m., the damaged Veterans Administration Hospital in the Valley said it needed buses to transport 331 patients to another hospital. The emergency center immediately asked the Metropolitan Transit Authority for assistance. Fifteen minutes later, buses were at the VA, loading patients.

The Fire Department rushed six patients on life support to other hospitals.

Even as officials began to get the upper hand on the danger, massive logistics problems cascaded into the emergency center: How to restore power and water to thousands of people? How to get medical attention to those who were injured when several nearby hospitals were barely able to function? How to house and feed police officers and firefighters, many of whom had been working for 12 hours or more without a break?

In the heat of so much activity, agencies cooperated with remarkable ease.

In Santa Clarita, for instance, some of the many police officers who live out there reported to a sheriff’s station so they could call the emergency center to ask where they should report for duty.

At first, the center advised them to head to their regular work assignments. But road closures made that impossible. So the Sheriff’s Department pressed them into service and provided the LAPD with a like number of deputies to assist in the Valley.

Officials also wasted no time in summoning the National Guard. During the 1992 riots, the city had been ablaze for hours by the time city leaders agreed that the Guard was needed to help restore order. This time, Riordan, Williams and Sheriff Sherman Block called on Gov. Pete Wilson to supply the Guard as quickly as possible.

Before nightfall, hundreds of troops were stationed in armories throughout the city and would later be deployed to protect gun stores, shopping centers and other buildings considered especially vulnerable to looting.

Across the region, other city and county agencies chipped in to help. When the state Department of Transportation was trying to figure out how to remove debris, the emergency center alerted them to a supplier with hefty amounts of explosives. When LAPD cars in the Valley were running out of gas, the city Department of Water and Power, stretched thin by outages, offered assistance.

“Re: Your 13:55 (1:55 p.m.) request for fuel at DWP yards: You want it, you’ve got it,” DWP officials told the LAPD just before 2 p.m., according to the log.

NIGHTFALL

As the sun set Monday, thousands were without shelter--their homes in ruins or so damaged they were uninhabitable. Some took to parks, where officials waived rules against camping. Police were armed with a curfew measure imposed just as night fell, but they used it sparingly, only arresting people who they believed were up to no good.

Directed by the emergency center, city personnel workers shuttled supplies to communities most in need. They delivered food and water to the Valley and supplied police officers and residents with flashlight batteries.

Yet even as the panic of early morning subsided, new crises were erupting.

At 9 p.m., officials were told the Pacoima Dam was in “imminent danger of giving way,” an event that emergency crews feared could unleash a 12-foot wall of water. Officials rushed to investigate.

At 10:35 p.m., engineers concluded there was not enough water behind the dam to pose an immediate threat. “They found small cracks in the dam, but no leaks,” the log reads. “No need for an evacuation.”

As dawn approached, thousands of people were hunkered down in parks and National Guard troops were still deployed throughout the city. The early hours of Tuesday’s log include reports of water leaks and occasional fires, but fears of catastrophic chaos had largely passed.

Exactly 24 hours after the quake struck, the log reveals how far the city had come. The update from 4:30 a.m. Tuesday: “Central Bureau, no activity; West Bureau, no activity; South Bureau, no activity; Valley Bureau, no activity. All quiet in all bureaus, no new information.”