THE COUNTY BUDGET CRISIS : Disaster Scenarios at Local Hospitals : Health: For uninsured and poor, Sylmar’s Olive View and Lancaster’s High Desert are last resort. Both may close.

The emergency room’s waiting area was overflowing with the sick and wounded, the triage area held twice its capacity, and doctors and nurses hustled frenetically between patients, desperately trying to lighten their load.

All in all, a typical day at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center.

“We’ve had three runs from paramedics in the last hour and they’re probably going to keep coming,” said Leila Wasson, clinical director for surgical nursing at the hospital.

“We’re not a designated trauma center, but we get the shooting victims and the other serious cases because many of these people are uninsured, and we’re one of the few hospitals in the Valley that will take them. We’re the county hospital.”

But as crucial as its function is, Olive View may be closed as part of Los Angeles County’s attempt to address a $1.2-billion budget deficit--amputated to save the patient. Indeed, under a plan unveiled earlier this week, Olive View and Lancaster’s High Desert Hospital may be among the ailing county’s six hospitals to be sacrificed to reduce the Health Services Department’s $745-million budget gap.

Yet for many of the San Fernando Valley’s low-income and uninsured residents, Olive View is the only place they can turn.

“It’s very sad for the people who don’t have enough money,” said Berta Martinez, 24, of Sylmar, who has received prenatal and other care at Olive View.

Dr. David Talan, chief attending physician at Olive View’s emergency room, predicted an overwhelmed 911 system and a deluge of patients at private trauma centers such as Valley Presbyterian and Northridge hospitals. Ultimately, all emergency facilities throughout the Valley could be affected, Talan said.

“If this hospital closed it would lead to a destructive domino effect,” Talan said.

Similar dismal scenarios were painted by officials at High Desert Hospital during a special health task force meeting Tuesday. Closing the hospital would leave the Antelope Valley without sufficient medical services and would in turn overwhelm the area’s three private hospitals with nonpaying patients and possibly lead to their closure, said William T. Fujioka, High Desert’s administrator.

High Desert administrators offered a broad plan to cut $7 million to $8 million from the hospital’s current operating costs of about $30 million per year instead of closing the facility. Details were not discussed Tuesday but a report explaining how that would be accomplished is due today.

Olive View administrators plan to submit their own report to the task force later this week on how their hospital, and the area it serves, would respond to significant cuts.

Olive View’s emergency room handles about 72,000 visits a year, with patients coming from as far as Valencia and the Ventura County line. It also has the busiest maternity ward in the Valley, delivering 4,600 babies a year, many of them to uninsured mothers who have high-risk pregnancies.

For Martha Morales of Valencia, whose son was born two months early and will have to return for frequent checkups after he is released, traveling farther than the San Fernando Valley for her son’s care is next to impossible.

“I have no transportation and I wouldn’t take him on a bus” to go to Childrens Hospital or Harbor-UCLA, she said. “I will have to think about something else if this happens.”

Also in jeopardy are the livelihoods of Olive View’s staff of roughly 2,500 employees. As a teaching hospital, Olive View is one of the few facilities in the area where medical school residents can receive training in their specialized fields.

“This is an ideal place for teaching because it has a high degree of patients,” said Dr. Nancy Pusser, who did her residency in neonatalogy at Olive View. “I learned more in a day here than I would have in a month at UCLA. And the cases here are serious. This is real-world medicine.”