TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Rescue Teams Labor in Tedious Search for Survivors : Bombing: Using trained dogs and high-tech devices, members work on their hands, knees and even bellies to look for signs of life in the rubble.

They do the dirty work, literally.

On their hands, knees and sometimes their bellies, about 300 members of search and rescue teams brought in from around the country have gone about the grim and tedious task of sifting through the rubble of the federal building here, looking and listening for bomb survivors.

“Our team hasn’t found anybody alive yet,” said Capt. Erik Heyer of the Phoenix search and rescue squad. “Just one would make us feel a lot better.”

Six urban search and rescue teams were dispatched to Oklahoma City--including one from Los Angeles County that spent all day Friday in the bomb-shattered Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Some team members had been on hand at the collapsed Northridge Meadows Apartments, where 16 people died in the 1994 earthquake, but they said they had never seen anything as bad as the devastation here.

Capt. Don Roy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said: “This is more devastating than the Northridge Meadows. . . . This is totally different from an earthquake. All the debris came down in one big mass. It’s very tedious and pretty grueling. The Los Angeles County search and rescue team of 58 members spent 12 hours in the building Friday, finding several victims. But none was alive.”

There are 26 of the elite squads nationwide, established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The California Office of Emergency Services developed a network of eight teams statewide, and in 1990 the federal government modeled a national program after California’s.

The teams in Oklahoma City--from Los Angeles, Sacramento, Phoenix, Virginia Beach, Va., Montgomery County, Md., and New York City--were joined by dozens of volunteer emergency workers and firefighters from across the country, from Santa Monica and Torrance to Lyndhurst, Ohio.

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Each team has about 50 members, ranging from engineers who have been active here in shoring up the pancaked building to searchers who use heat-sensing equipment, listening devices and fiber-optic cameras to look and listen for survivors. They also can use the “search cam,” as the camera is called, to talk to trapped victims. Some teams have female members, and at least one team includes a chaplain.

The squads are capable of providing emergency medical care and dealing with every kind of crisis, from a nuclear reactor leak to a volcanic eruption. Even though the teams carry 23,000 pounds of equipment, they can be on the scene of a disaster within six hours.

When they arrived in Oklahoma City on Wednesday, the teams first sent in their dogs. “It’s upsetting to the dogs too” when they find a dead human, said the 49-year-old Heyer, who, like many team members, is a firefighter. “When they find a live human being in the rubble, you can tell. They’ll dig real hard. They’ll even sometimes start to try to pull stuff out with their mouths.”

Heyer, a K-9 specialist, said that his German shepherd Tonto had found about 20 bodies, “but all we could do is mark it and go on” because they were too deep under the rubble. Heyer said that he spray-paints such areas with a “B” and an arrow pointing to where the body was found.

Once the dogs had gone through the wreckage, team members entered with TV monitors strapped to their chests to see what the cameras were showing inside the rubble. They also had high-tech devices to listen for breathing or tapping within pockets of debris. A half-inch-wide fiber-optic lens with lighting systems was dropped down holes to look for open spaces.

Some team members were working 36 hours without sleep under difficult circumstances, with a 4,000-pound slab of concrete hanging overhead and the building swaying in the wind.

“The whole building is unstable,” Heyer said. “Because of that, we can’t work very fast.”

“What we’re finding is people in the basement who had been on the second and third floors,” said Rob Cima, a Sacramento team member.

Some team members appeared exhausted and emotionally drained Friday. Blood splattered much of the debris, a rescue worker said. Another team member paused while talking about the dead children, too choked with emotion to continue.

“Firemen like to be macho,” said Don Schroder of the Sacramento team. “But things like this still bother each of us. We may not even think about it until we get home and see our own children.” Crisis counselors have been made available to all emergency workers.

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John Wilson, a professor of psychology at Cleveland State University and director of the Center for Stress and Trauma, said that rescuers are at high risk for developing post-traumatic stress as a result of their experience.

“What is real important for them is that they have support and debriefing after they are through with their duty,” he said, adding that “No. 1 on the-most-difficult-to-handle encounters is coming across dead, injured or mutilated children. They have a tough time because it seems so unfair.”

Team members working here have been wearing dust masks, helmets with goggles, rubber gloves and kneepads and carrying equipment ranging from hand drills to jackhammers.

One early problem was the lack of kneepads. “We spent a lot of time crawling around,” Cima said. “The guys’ legs were kind of getting torn up.” But word of the need went out over a local TV station and a large supply of kneepads were donated.

The teams planned to remain on the job at least through the weekend, and said they were still hopeful.

“We think there may still be some survivors,” Heyer said, “because there are a lot of pockets” in the debris.

Times staff writer Marlene Cimons in Washington contributed to this story.