EARTHQUAKE / THE LONG ROAD BACK : Bay Area Drivers Say It’ll Be a Long Haul : Transportation: Four years after Loma Prieta quake, not a single damaged freeway has been completely reopened. But Caltrans says the task in L.A. isn’t as daunting.

Bay Area commuters have this advice for Los Angeles drivers fretting about post-quake traffic congestion: Get used to it.

Since the Loma Prieta quake in October, 1989, not a single damaged freeway here has been completely reopened. Of the four battered freeways in San Francisco and Oakland, one has been demolished and obliterated from route maps while work on the other three double-decked highways is years from completion.

“From a traffic standpoint, this city is still recovering from the effects of Loma Prieta,” said Stuart Sunshine, an assistant to San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan. “We don’t have one freeway that is 100% operational four years after the earthquake.”

Caltrans officials, however, predict that they can repair the Southland’s damaged freeways in a year, having learned seismic and political lessons from the Loma Prieta temblor.

While Monday’s quake knocked down portions of five Southern California freeways, officials say they will be easier to repair than the complicated viaducts in San Francisco and Oakland. Furthermore, unlike the Bay Area, all Los Angeles freeway reconstruction will occur in the footprint of the collapsed structures.

“San Francisco and L.A.? They are light years (apart),” said Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago.

Another factor Los Angeles officials have already begun to exploit: This is an election year. No politician wants to take the blame for slow repair work, especially Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who is up for reelection on Nov. 8.

Even so, anxious Los Angeles officials have already begun an urgent drumbeat: We need our roads.

“The freeways are critical to the flow of commerce and people in L.A.--we couldn’t get along without them,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman. “In San Francisco you have a different kind of environment. There’s no question that the freeways here have to be rebuilt sooner rather than later. People are not going to take the inconvenience.”

But some experts caution that the Caltrans predictions of rebuilding Southern California’s damaged freeways in a year seem overly optimistic.

“The repairs may take longer than people might imagine,” said Stephen Mahin, a professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley who specializes in double-deck freeways and overpasses. “When something like the I-10 goes down, if portions have to be torn down and rebuilt, it will not be a matter of months, it will be a matter of years.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said Southland residents will not stand for the kind of delays that have plagued the Bay Area’s freeways.

After meeting with President Clinton and other officials about the earthquake damage, the councilman said, “We need the logistical equivalent of Desert Storm on this reconstruction, and if we do it with that kind of intensity and focus, it can be done.

“Let this be a warning to everyone in elected office: Every day longer it takes could be a nail in the coffin of their political careers,” he added. “If people think their government is failing them they will turn on their leaders.”

The magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed the double-decked Cypress Freeway in Oakland, killing 42 people. It also damaged the Bay Bridge, and three San Francisco freeways: the Embarcadero, the Central and a portion of Interstate 280--all double-deck viaducts of the same design as the Cypress structure.

Work crews repaired the damaged section of the Bay Bridge in 45 days. And within two months, Caltrans came up with plans to rebuild the four freeways.

But reconstruction hit its first snag when a panel of experts said the new design would do little to protect the structures from future earthquakes. It took three years of seismic tests to come up with a new design theoretically capable of withstanding an 8.5 earthquake.

In the meantime, Oakland residents won approval of a new route for the Cypress Freeway that will no longer divide the neighborhood of West Oakland in two. Construction of the mile-long section of Interstate 880 is scheduled to begin this month and take at least until 1997.

In San Francisco, residents who had long opposed the routing of freeways through their neighborhoods took advantage of the earthquake to win removal of the unsightly Embarcadero Freeway from the waterfront and the northernmost section of the Central Freeway. Now, the traffic that once traveled those freeways is consigned to surface streets.

In recent weeks, Caltrans crews have begun working seven days a week to repair Interstate 280, which has been open since April to one lane of traffic in each direction.

Senate Transportation Chairman Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), who represents the area, said it would have been cheaper and faster to remove the damaged section of I-280 and build a new freeway. But Caltrans feared that environmentalists would block reconstruction, he said, so the state embarked instead on a complex project of repair and retrofitting.

“What Caltrans would have done if 280 was in Los Angeles would be to tear it down and rebuild it,” Kopp said. “You can’t take a chance on doing that in San Francisco.”

For commuters traveling into San Francisco from the south or trying to make their way through Oakland, the missing sections of freeway have been the cause of horrendous traffic jams for the past four years.

Ash McNeely, who used to commute from Burlingame on the San Francisco Peninsula to UC Berkeley, said she finally quit her job because the traffic was so bad. “It was awful,” she said. “I was really relieved when I was offered another job.”

Work on I-280 is due to be completed by the end of 1995. Similar work on the remainder of the Central Freeway will start later this year and result in closed lanes and blocked traffic until 1997. And there is no telling when new surface street connectors will be built to replace the demolished Embarcadero Freeway.

To some extent, Southern California has already benefited from the Loma Prieta experience.

Because of the 1989 quake, Caltrans began an ambitious program of retrofitting bridges and overpasses and had completed work on 114 in the Los Angeles area by Monday. All withstood the 6.6 Northridge quake, said Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago.

Caltrans had been planning to begin the same retrofitting work next month on the section of the Santa Monica Freeway that collapsed. Now, repairs are likely to proceed faster because much of the design work can be adapted for reconstruction.

Monday’s earthquake closed portions of the Pacific Coast Highway and five freeways, including a 3.5-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway and the two main routes--the Golden State Freeway and California 14--linking the Santa Clarita Valley to Los Angeles. The resulting traffic backups neared monumental proportions--even by L.A. standards--as commuters attempted to drive to work Wednesday.

Workers have begun removing debris from the collapsed freeway sections, Drago said. When reconstruction begins, he said Caltrans will rebuild rather than retrofit any damaged roadways. “We will accelerate those construction jobs on an emergency basis,” he said.

Paddock reported from San Francisco, Zamichow from Los Angeles.