Sleepless Nights Among Disaster’s New Bedfellows : Shelters: Thousands get fitful moments of rest punctured by snoring and babies’ cries.

One woman dubbed it the “Cot Concerto,” a grating chorus of squeaks--something like rubbing two balloons together--that fills the shelter in the night’s small hours as hundreds of bodies shift and roll on thin metal-and-nylon beds.

Also amplified through the dark, chilly Van Nuys High School gym--last week “Home of the Wolves,” this week home of the newly homeless--are piercing wails of infants in misery, the unnerving echo of neighbors’ coughing and sneezing.

But there also is the reassuring shuffle of silhouetted guardian angels--the Red Cross volunteers and nurses who float through the narrow aisles bringing a comforting word, an extra set of cradling arms, a small beam of light.

“I wake up in the night, maybe four times, and they are there,” said 13-year-old Kristin Chamakyan, who stirred at 5 a.m. and stood at the entryway of the cavernous hall, taking some fresh air. “I say: ‘Am I dreaming?’ And they say, ‘Do you need water, or juice or something.’ I feel very safe here.”

A night spent at the gym Friday in the shoulder-to-shoulder confines of a major quake shelter offered a taste of the strain of human compression and the salve of human compassion being repeated at dozens of emergency housing sites across the city.

Thousands of displaced Angelenos are being urged to move to such facilities. It is here that many odd bedfellows of disaster--blue-collar immigrants, older people and the disabled who have lost a tenuous grip on affordable housing--have been marooned and must try to fit into the close-quarter rhythm of total strangers.

Virtually all emphasize their gratitude to the volunteers, and many say the shelter is infinitely better than the outdoors.

But shelters also take a toll. “The privacy thing? There is none,” said Della Hindan, 36, who is scheduled to deliver her second child Monday and was spending her fourth night at “Casa Van Nuys,” as one relief worker called it. Bleary-eyed, 48-year-old Ibtissam Ramadam, stranded at the shelter with her family since Monday, said achingly, “I can’t sleep. The noise.”

*

At 8 p.m., the Van Nuys High main gym--one of two emergency shelters operating on the campus, along with an unofficial tent city of about 100 people in the parking lot--is abuzz with activity.

The nightly showing of a Walt Disney film in an adjacent room has ended, and children are everywhere--dancing, running, hitting balloons into the air.

“Whose child is this?” shouts volunteer shelter worker Rob Mills, hoisting up a wayward toddler who is quickly snatched by the mother.

Hindan, the expectant mother, and her husband have fled their North Hollywood apartment which has no utilities. Through the luck of the draw, they are close neighbors of a woman with four active young boys who have decided to wrestle on the cots next to the pregnant woman’s head.

“They do get out of hand,” she said. “But I know those little Buster Browns have got to play. Thank God, she puts them down early.”

Reaching the lights out point is a major milestone. Officially, it’s 10 p.m., but in reality “it’s as soon as we can,” said Harlow Johnson, a retired Claremont engineer who was wrapping up a shift as volunteer manager of the center. “Last night we got them out at 11.”

Tonight will be better. “Good night . . . buenas noches, “ Red Cross workers call out as the lights dim at 10:38.

*

Within minutes, even before the ambient rustling and shifting has begun to quiet down, a heavyset man against the wall has broken into a stunningly loud and anguished-sounding snore.

A nearby man quietly rises to summon help, apparently sincerely concerned that something must be wrong. Volunteer Red Cross nurse Anita Rose wakes the man, who apologizes and says doctors have said it’s just his normal snore.

Achieving anything close to quiet, at least for more than a few minutes, is nearly impossible. The irritating, stretching sound of bodies shifting on the nylon cots seems to come in waves. Someone will roll over, letting out a resonating squeak. That wakes a neighbor who also shifts, and soon there is a chain reaction of squeaks skipping back and forth across the gym. “Near me it’s a very loud noise,” said Ramadam’s husband, Robin Abdul, who after hours of tossing and turning was up and in the lobby at 3 a.m. for a cup of coffee.

*

Through the night, the lobby serves as a refuge for the restless, the troubled, the insomniacs. “We’ve got little night owls. . . . There’s always someone who wants to talk,” said Sandy Rizowsky, the graveyard shift volunteer shelter manager, surveying the small sea of bodies under her charge. “So we just have little round-table talks.”

It’s the 27-year Girl Scout in her that makes her to do this, says Rizowsky, an Ontario purchasing agent who has been juggling her work, a family and the nighttime shelter duties.

This night will see a parade of lobby visitors, talking about everything and nothing. Among those in and out several times are three older women, whose senior citizen apartment complex was damaged. “It’s always better in daylight,” said 81-year-old Alice DeFreitas who was lingering in the lobby about 3 a.m. “I woke up about an hour ago hoping daylight will come.”

She worried about the coughing, which seems to be increasing each night. “If we get a flu going around here, that’s all we’ll need,” she said.

*

It’s usually around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., said Rose and the other overnight volunteer nurse, Patti Marks, that they get “The Cry.” The babies--there must be at least two dozen, some as young as a few months--all seem to wake up crying and hungry about the same time. And tonight they’re pretty much on schedule. The nurses, when not treating stress and stomach ailments, try to rock the babies so the weary mothers can get some sleep, and the disturbance to others is at least reduced.

“This is one of the fun things we get to do,” Marks said with no hint of sarcasm, as she bounced a cranky, runny-nosed 11-month-old named Fernando. Soon, Rose’s and Rizowsky’s arms also would be full, and other mothers would come and go from the locker-room nurse’s station lending a hand.

*

After a few relatively calm hours, except for a toddler who rolled with a thud off a cot, and the man against the wall whose stem-winding snores have drawn the nurses back twice more, dawn is approaching.

As the first light breaks over the trees in the outside courtyard, DeFreitas says: “Dawn is pretty isn’t it? Maybe it will be a peaceful day.”