EARTHQUAKE / THE LONG ROAD BACK : Grace Under Pressure : Workers: As buildings fell and fears rose, the ones who patch us back together kept a steady focus on their jobs.

In the hours after Monday’s temblor, when the shaking ground had many people badly shaken, some were able to keep their cool.

A desk cop soothed worried callers. A utility worker left his battered home to report for work. An emergency room nurse, not knowing if his family had survived, remained at his post.

“I don’t have the type of job where I can go screaming out the door and run home,” said Richard Paige, who works the night shift at Northridge Hospital Medical Center. “I have to keep focused on what I’m doing.”

Operating somewhere between heroism and paralyzing fear, Paige and others performed their jobs, maintaining a professional front while all hell broke loose around them.

When the quake struck, Paige’s first thoughts centered on his safety and that of his wife and two daughters at home in Valencia. But his attention quickly snapped back to matters at hand. The emergency room lay dark in a shambles all around him.

“I knew we were going to get massive amounts of people in here,” he said. “I knew we had to get ready.”

It was Paige’s task to organize the skeleton crew of nurses on duty at that hour. They checked the physical condition of their building and decided to set up tables and chairs in the parking lot. Paige called the supply room for more bandages and equipment. Then he gathered the nurses to remind them of the disaster plan. It was not a pleasant task.

“We had already decided where the morgue was going to be,” he said. “The people who were severely injured, who would require lots of help, we weren’t going to be able to help them. We would have to put them aside and help the ones that could be helped.”

And in the moments before the first injured arrived, he tried to call home. The lines were busy.

A few miles from the hospital, Ron Nielsen was surveying his Winnetka home. Cracks shot through walls and chunks of stucco had broken loose. Nielsen’s wife and son were unharmed, but his daughter had spent the night at a girlfriend’s house and he had no way of knowing if she was safe. Still, he hurried to work.

The scene at his Department of Water and Power yard was chaotic. Nielsen and his crew spent the first hour clearing debris to get at equipment and trucks. Once they were on the road, the enormity of their task became apparent.

“There were a lot of main breaks and street separations, a lot of water running everywhere,” he said. “On an average day, we might report to one or two emergency incidents. On that day, we were looking at 50 or 100.”

They began just after sunrise, digging up broken pipes at Van Norman Reservoir.

Certain people excel in stressful situations, said Mark Mallinger, a management professor at Pepperdine University. These types are usually serious about their work and take satisfaction in helping others. Disasters, Mallinger said, are when they shine.

At the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division in Northridge, most of the off-duty officers arrived by midmorning. Officer Roger Ruggiero manned the front desk, dealing with panicked callers. People wanted to know how to locate family members or retrieve personal items from damaged apartments. For Ruggiero, working the phones became more difficult as the day brought more aftershocks.

“This building is all brick and concrete,” he said. “Every time it shook, we had a couple of guys fighting for the doorway. It was real scary.”

The officers could not always hide their fear from callers. Nor could the counselors at the West Valley Mental Health Center in Van Nuys, who also fielded calls.

“We decided that it was OK to let our clients know that we were feeling it too,” said Ron Klein, a district chief at the center. “In some ways, it makes the person calling understand that you know how they are feeling.”

Mallinger said that workers who are pressed into such duty can help themselves while helping others.

“It’s a stress-coping device,” the professor said. “They can pull back from their own feelings and focus on a task at hand. Some people deal best with stress when their attention is diverted in this way.”

Terry Crisp nodded her head. “I’m one of those people. A disaster addict.”

Crisp is an official of United Animal Nations, a sort of Red Cross for animals in Northern California, providing advice and manpower to animal shelters during disasters. When Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida, Crisp was there. Same with the Midwest floods. She arrived at the West Valley Animal Care and Control Center in Chatsworth on Monday afternoon.

“For some people, pets are as important as children,” she said. “They call in a panic.”

Crisp offers sympathy and, more important, the wisdom of experience. She knows that cats usually hide close to home for several days and return unharmed. Dogs run, so she advises that owners check at a shelter each day.

Of course, Crisp has the advantage of arriving from elsewhere, working without concern for her own family and home. People such as Paige and Nielsen had to work all day before learning that their loved ones were safe. And after backbreaking shifts, they returned to damaged houses.

“Everyone else got to spend the day picking up,” Nielsen said. “Those things were still waiting for me when I got home.”