EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : City’s Emergency Stage Winds Down : Operations: Officials begin to shift into recovery mode. Mayor Riordan says transition won’t be complete till ‘everybody is in homes and shelters.’

City officials shifted from an emergency mode to a recovery mode on Tuesday, consolidating shelters, cutting hours at the main operations center and returning police to their regular shifts in all but those areas most severely damaged in the earthquake.

“We’re hopefully winding down this emergency stage,” said Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, “although it won’t be fully wound down until everybody is in homes and shelters.”

Frank Catania, director of planning and development for the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks, said the head count at the 23 Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters--including four encampments of Army tents in the San Fernando Valley--had dropped to 7,675 Monday night, from more than 12,000 the night before.

He said that at the 17 transitional shelters being operated by the city, attendance continued to fall steadily and was down by about 500 people, to 405, Monday night.

“We are . . . trying to get people into long-term shelter or back into their homes,” Catania said.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams said that the city’s emergency operations center, which has bristled with activity around the clock since the quake hit last week, will ratchet down its hours, operating instead from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., seven days a week.

Williams said his troops will now pull back into a modified mobilization, with extra deployments limited to the San Fernando Valley and the LAPD’s West Bureau.

Commander Dave Gascon, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said police in the Valley will remain on emergency status, with officers working 12-hour shifts. The Valley also will receive extra support from a temporary deployment of 160 officers from the downtown Metropolitan Division and about 20 extra traffic officers.

The Valley’s West Bureau will return to regular eight-hour shifts, Gascon said, but it will be buttressed by 80 to 100 supplemental officers who will remain mobilized on 12-hour shifts.

Gascon said the redeployments will provide welcome relief for exhausted police, who have been working 12-hour shifts throughout the city since the quake.

Amid the scale-backs, quake refugees Tuesday continued their weary quest for a restoration of something approaching normality.

Faye Washington, general manager of the city’s Personnel Department, said her workers had received countless requests for assistance.

Particularly pressing, Washington said, is the demand for Armenian translators for quake victims in the Hollywood area and for infant formula for the hundreds of babies whose families were uprooted by the calamity.

The Department of Water and Power reported that Monday night’s storm cut off power to 4,000 customers, but service was fully restored by Tuesday afternoon.

Repairs to water lines were continuing, and DWP General Manager Dan Waters said the boil-water edict is expected to be lifted in parts of the West Valley by Thursday morning.

Waters said that nearly 900 leaks have been repaired in DWP lines since the quake. He said crews have reduced the backlog of unrepaired leaks to 21 in the Valley and about 15 on the Westside.

“But aftershocks continue to rock us,” Waters said, noting that about 2,000 customers in the Granada Hills area still are without water.

Warren O’Brien, head of the city’s Building and Safety Department, said he expects housing inspections to be completed by the week’s end. So far, 15,552 housing units have been declared unsafe, he said.

Next week, inspectors will begin re-surveying “red-tag” buildings that this week were declared unsafe for occupancy, in the hopes that repairs will allow upgrades of many to “yellow tag” status--meaning that limited occupancy has been approved. The upgrade would mean that residents could enter the buildings to retrieve belongings.

The overall death toll from the quake climbed to 60 Tuesday with the death of a Reseda woman injured in a car crash about 20 minutes after the initial magnitude 6.6 quake.

Marzia Raziye, 22, died at Kaiser Foundation Hospital-Woodland Hills at 2:46 a.m. Tuesday, according to Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Raziye was severely injured when her car crashed into another vehicle at Saticoy Street and Mason Avenue in Canoga Park at 4:50 a.m. Jan. 17, police said. Officers said the crash was earthquake-related because it occurred at an intersection at which the street lights and traffic signals had been knocked out by the quake.

The woman’s death was listed as the 57th fatality in Los Angeles County connected to the temblor. A woman in Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County also died. In addition, the overall toll now includes two men who died in a helicopter crash in Kern County while checking for earthquake damage to a pipeline.

As of Tuesday, county hospitals had treated more than 9,200 people injured in the quake. For 1,495 of them, the injuries had been serious enough to require hospitalization.

The hospitals said there was an increase in patients who have been living in parks.

“Last night’s rain just exacerbated the health problems seen in these tent cities,” said David Langness, spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California. “Without proper sanitation, refrigeration and food preparation, we expect to see more admissions.”

One worry of health authorities is an outbreak of communicable diseases, particularly chicken pox. But they cautioned that the incubation period for chicken pox is 13 to 21 days.

“Any child that acquired exposure in the camps won’t get their pox until 13 to 21 days later,” said Dr. Shirley Fannin, director of the county’s disease-control program.

State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, declaring that she would be a “friendly banker” to earthquake victims, proposed a state package of $1.3 billion to rebuild public structures, including damaged schoolrooms. She said she envisioned her plan as part of a “team effort” to be combined with President Clinton’s proposed $7.5-billion federal aid plan.

Most of the state money, about $1 billion, would come from state investment funds that could be loaned to school districts at 4.3% interest, Brown said. She described it as “a bridge loan” that would be repaid from future earthquake-repair bond issues.

Another $234 million could come from the sale of bonds approved by California voters in 1990 to retrofit public buildings after the Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California in the fall of 1989, she said. The rest, about $74 million, is in unsold school bonds, Brown said.

“This represents California beginning to step up to the plate to match the federal effort,” Brown said.

On Tuesday, local, state and federal officials released the latest figures on the scope of the damage and ongoing recovery efforts.

Among the 26 county facilities closed by the quake are four courthouses, Beverly Hills Municipal Court, Van Nuys Municipal and Superior courts and a San Fernando courthouse; three Department of Social Services offices, on Vermont and Canoga avenues and on West Pico Boulevard; five Health Services facilities, a mental health facility in Santa Monica and the downtown Hall of Justice.

Sheriff Sherman Block said damage at the Hall of Justice has rendered the department’s data systems there--from computers to automated fingerprint systems to criminal history information--at least temporarily useless. He said the cost of repairing the building--estimated at $100 million--is so high that the structure probably will be permanently vacated.

At a morning news briefing Tuesday at the disaster assistance center in Hollywood, federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said that the more than 15,000 dwelling units declared uninhabitable in the city of Los Angeles represent “a fair-size small town that has to be rebuilt . . .

“It’s not a simple task to get people into housing; there’s money involved,” Cisneros continued. “But without housing, peoples’ lives are destabilized. So it becomes one of the most critical things we have to do.”

Times staff writers Paul Feldman, Doug Shuit and Bill Stall contributed to this story.