Los Angeles Times Special Quake Report: One Year Later : Still Shaken / Challenges : The Comeback Trail / Twists and Turns on the Road to Recovery : Workplace Change Is Mostly Talk
After the Northridge earthquake rattled Amgen Inc.’s headquarters and manufacturing complex in Thousand Oaks, the company stopped dawdling and started hustling to ready itself for future disasters.
The company set up teams of employees responsible, in case of a calamity, for providing emergency medical care and for handling “search and rescue” needs. The biotechnology concern also bought stretchers to carry off the injured, tents to provide temporary shelter and extra power generators to keep the facilities humming.
Greg Chambers, the company’s emergency preparedness manager, said he was hired by Amgen in June, 1993, to expand and coordinate the company’s preparations for handling disasters. When the earthquake struck, he said, “it speeded the process up. . . . We got done in one year what it would have taken us two years to do.”
The past 12 months have not brought significant changes in many other workplaces across the Southland. But many firms have started investigating ways to improve their emergency preparedness.
A large number of firms and government agencies also have considered whether they could arrange for some of their workers to telecommute--work from home or other remote locations, with the aid of computers and fax machines.
For the most part, however, experts say there has been more talk than action over the past year. That has particularly been true among large employers, where the internal bureaucracies often need lots of time to change direction.
For instance, shortly after the quake, the Los Angeles City Council expanded the city’s pilot project for telecommuting, and officials set a goal that as many as 15,000 city employees would telecommute at least one day a week. So far, however, fewer than 1,000 city employees are telecommuting, and the City Council has yet to approve the proposed “action plan” for expanding telecommuting efforts.
Many people, particularly in places such as the Antelope Valley, where traffic conditions suffered the most immediately after the quake, initially gave telecommuting a try. But as roads were repaired, bosses started telling their staffers to “get back into the office,” said Jack Nilles, a telecommuting consultant.
Still, more top managers are looking into telecommuting. One good sign, Nilles said, is that employers are raising more sophisticated issues, such as how telecommuting can be used to cut corporate real estate costs.
Karen Kukurin, spokeswoman for the Employers Group, a California business association, agreed. “It takes companies awhile to actually get something up and running,” she said. Still, Kukurin said, the quake did “awaken them to the possibilities.”
