OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Elite Squad from Southland Brings Grit and Expertise to Rescue Efforts : Aftermath: Officials praise crew’s skill in extracting people from building. Members say they’ve learned lessons that will pay off back home.

In the disaster business--where gain is often preceded by great pain--a horror story like the bombing of the federal building here can be a textbook.

“We’re learning so much that we might otherwise never know,” said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. John Lenihan, a member of the department’s elite urban search and rescue squad.

The specialized team was one of the first to answer the call to assist the Oklahoma City Fire Department in the daunting task of picking through a nine-story tower of rubble to find the dead and the living.

And while team members have stressed the amount learned here, the squad’s reputation as one of the most knowledgeable in the country at extracting people from collapsed and damaged structures had preceded it.

“This is tornado country, and we know what to do when a tornado takes after some houses or a trailer park, but this was all new to us,” said Oklahoma City Fire Lt. Carroll D. Roberts. “The guys from L.A. were a godsend to us in getting in there and getting it done.”

The Los Angeles County urban search and rescue squad is one of 26 nationwide--formed under a Federal Emergency Management Agency plan--that can be called on to assist when the horrors of nature or demented mankind strike. Ten of the teams were summoned to Oklahoma City.

*

For the Los Angeles contingent, the collapse of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was both reminiscent of the worst of the Northridge earthquake and also a foreboding of what could happen if the next Southern California quake is more malevolent in strength and epicenter location.

“This is good experience in getting ready for what may happen in Los Angeles, maybe not a bomber but the next earthquake that we all know is coming,” said firefighter Tod Mitcham.

There were lessons of equipment, coordination and communications to be learned.

The “snake cam,” a fiber-optic camera that can be inserted behind the tiniest of crevices to see what--or who--might be just out of sight, was judged a success under virtual battlefield conditions.

The decision to toughen up the pads on the bottom of the search dogs’ feet by training on the rubble left at Fontana’s defunct Kaiser Steel Plant was vindicated.

But communications proved more dicey, with cellular phone signals bouncing off nearby high rises and possibly being ping-ponged by the scrambled messages sent by law enforcement agencies with a need for secrecy.

And then there is the grit factor, testing which of the 62 men and women and six dogs from the Los Angeles squad are truly cut out for work that is risky, frustrating and not for the faint of heart or stomach. Two physicians were with the squad in order to make that evaluation.

The efforts of the Los Angeles County squad, which arrived with more people and equipment than any other team, were judged a success by those who worked with them.

“Those guys from Los Angeles have no quit in them,” said Oklahoma City Fire Cpl. Paul J. Akins Jr., who like many others lost friends in the explosion. “They came here, they went to work and they showed us respect. Pretty soon, they had our respect.”

Aware that regional pride and interagency rivalry can scuttle the best-intentioned mutual aid plans, FEMA has a strict rule: Regardless of how many outside teams are summoned, the chief of the department in the city where the emergency occurs remains the boss.

The 26 special search and rescue teams are ready to respond anywhere in the country. Local agencies--such as the Los Angeles County and Los Angeles City fire departments--provide the manpower and training, while the federal government provides some funding for equipment, with a budget this year of $1.8 million.

Developed in response to the massive 1989 earthquake in Armenia, where rescue efforts were late and inadequate, the plan’s philosophy is that no one city has the resources to single-handedly respond to a disaster in which destruction is immense and the number of missing people is high.

When the bomb exploded just after 9 a.m. on Wednesday of last week, the first urban search and rescue teams called were from Phoenix and Sacramento. The next wave, those with more equipment to assemble or longer distances to travel, came from Los Angeles, Montgomery County, Md., Virginia Beach, Va., and New York City.

Squads from Florida, Virginia and smaller areas like Menlo Park, Calif., and Puget Sound, Wash., came in later.

The Los Angeles contingent assembled within six hours at March Air Force Base. Crates of equipment were loaded onto a C-141 transport plane, along with the personnel and dogs.

*

Although most of the Los Angeles firefighters had responded to the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments, in which 16 people died, they had never seen this kind of destruction.

“Nobody in L.A. has seen anything like this,” Lenihan said. “Nobody at FEMA had seen anything like this. It’s a great way to study what happens when concrete collapses.”

Much of what was learned, firefighters said, involved how to strike a balance between safety and rescue, how to know when it is too dangerous to venture farther into a building that is shaky and unpredictable.

Of five disasters in which the FEMA plan has been used to provide urban search and rescue assistance, the Oklahoma bombing is the largest, in terms of numbers of personnel and amount of equipment. More than 600 firefighters, technicians and other personnel responded from the 10 teams.

Bruce Baughman, director of the operations division at FEMA headquarters in Washington, said an extensive “after-action” report will be done on all aspects: dogs, equipment, logistics, communications, medical response, the work of structural engineers, new techniques of shoring up structures and old techniques of getting firefighters to work 12-hour shifts for days on end.

As a preliminary assessment, Baughman said, the system appears to have worked. “This is what we’ve been getting ready for, and it seems we did it right,” he said.

But firefighters already have formed their own assessments of the Oklahoma City effort.

“America is finally getting serious about this, and it’s coming together,” said Craig Shelley, co-leader of the team from New York, just as he and his 52-person, four-dog crew headed for home.

And Oklahoma City firefighters were particularly grateful for the Los Angeles crew, which has stayed the longest.

“If you all have any problems out there, just let us know,” said Oklahoma City Police Officer Don Bingham, a member of the emergency response team. “We owe you one.”