Federal Officials Praise Earthquake Response : Preparedness: While reviewing the Northridge temblor, they also stress a need for improvement.

Federal officials who gathered here Monday to discuss their effort to help Southern California recover from the Northridge earthquake praised themselves for responding rapidly and cohesively but stressed the need to improve on nearly every front.

Underlying their discussion was anxiety that the next challenge may be far tougher.

“This was a great experience,” William E. Clark of the Department of Health and Human Services said of the relief program. “But the Big One scares the bejeezus out of us.”

He called the Jan. 17 temblor “not the Big One, but the big warning.”

For many of those who met for 3 1/2 hours in a hotel ballroom here, the devastating quake in a dense urban area represented high-pressure, on-the-job training less than a year after taking office. One participant called the effort “the civil equivalent of Operation Desert Storm”--without the benefit of six months of preparation.

Federal, state and local officials and private relief agencies received high marks overall from James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena and other leaders of the federal response. “We established a new standard of performance,” Pena boasted.

But others emphasized that the quake’s toll would have been far more serious had it not occurred before dawn on a Monday morning, and during a holiday at that. And several speakers noted that a much more severe quake--with projections of tens of thousands injured and up to $80 billion in damages--could loom ahead.

“We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to be ready,” said Witt, who quarterbacked the federal relief effort and was host of Monday’s symposium.

The participants said there is an urgent need for improved preparedness, training, coordination, communication, public education and construction and safety measures to limit future injuries and damage. Some expressed concern that as soon as a crisis passes it becomes difficult to marshal the public and political will to take such necessary, sometimes costly, steps.

Among the missteps that federal officials promised to avoid in future calamities were:

* Disaster assistance centers--some of which opened only four days after the Northridge earthquake--were initially plagued by long lines, slow processing, lack of bilingual staff and confusion over emergency housing programs provided by different federal agencies.

* An early rash of false and inflated claims stemmed from suspension of standard screening procedures in an emergency food stamp program that parceled out $68 million.

* Repair costs for freeways damaged by the Jan. 17 temblor were overestimated by California transportation officials, to the tune of $500 million.

Witt and Cisneros acknowledged there had been confusion over the eligibility requirements for FEMA’s short-term housing grants and HUD’s 18-month rental vouchers for low-income victims. Cisneros said he would make disaster housing assistance available again, but with some modifications.

He also referred to speculation that the HUD program had prompted Congress to crack down on earthquake aid to illegal immigrants. But Cisneros insisted, “This issue would have come up no matter what because this is California, it’s a hot issue there, and it’s a political time.”

Oleta G. Fitzgerald, executive assistant to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, said a recent workshop held to assess problems with the emergency food stamp program determined that advanced planning with states is necessary to prevent fraud and that information about eligibility criteria and penalties for fraud should be circulated through the news media.

Witt said he’s seeking to develop three regional “situation assessment” teams of federal, state and local officials to make quick, reliable determinations of damages and costs.

Caltrans told federal transportation officials that the cost of repairing major arteries would be $1.35 billion--which Congress appropriated. Earlier this month, Caltrans reduced the figure by $500 million because several damaged bridges and overpasses originally scheduled for demolition and replacement will be repaired. A spokeswoman emphasized that the estimate had been “super-preliminary.”

Among the other goals that officials cited at the post-mortem were that:

* Efforts should be intensified to construct and retrofit buildings and take safety measures to prevent future damage.

* A stable, long-term funding source to pay for disaster relief and recovery costs is needed to end the process of asking Congress to fund these efforts by adding to the federal deficit. A Clinton Administration task force and lawmakers are looking at this issue.

* State and local officials must be brought into the process early and often. Federal officials said that this was done after the Northridge quake and, Pena said, was essential “to send the message that we were operating as a team.”