Ready to Rumble : Thousands of Volunteers Receive Earthquake Rescue Training

When Ellie Vargas of Woodland Hills feels anxious about earthquakes, she comforts herself with this image: thousands of rescue workers in pea-colored helmets and vests freeing trapped victims, fashioning splints out of newspapers for the injured and shutting off gas mains.

The battalions are no fantasy, but Vargas’ fellow graduates of a city-sponsored program that has trained 10,000 volunteers to respond to the next big disaster. The 8-year-old program, sort of the firefighters’ equivalent of the Neighborhood Watch concept promoted by police, received its first real test in the hours after the Northridge earthquake two years ago today. By most accounts, it performed well.

Since then, the Los Angeles City Fire Department has made big strides toward its goal of training “community emergency response teams” for every neighborhood and major employment center of the city. With a budget of about $1 million, the department estimates that it is training 4,500 new recruits a year, compared to 1,000 annually before the Northridge earthquake.

“It is going to work beautifully,” predicted Vargas, a retired nurse who carries an emergency supply kit in her car trunk. “If you have somebody who can stabilize patients, stop the bleeding and get the people out until the professionals arrive, I think you will save a lot more lives.”

The seven-week course covers such safety fundamentals as proper quake-proofing of homes and basic first-aid, rescue and firefighting techniques. But it also delves into the importance of setting up a triage center to evaluate the neediest patients in the event of mass injuries and the need to mark buildings that have already been searched so that firefighters do not waste precious time.

“I didn’t have a clue that someone as small and weak as myself could lift something as heavy as they said I could,” Vargas said. “But I can lift a solid piece of concrete that is 5 feet by 5 feet by doing this procedure they taught us. I know I could get a human being out from under a house if I had a piece of wood.”

After the Northridge earthquake, fire officials surveyed volunteers to determine what skills had proven most helpful during the first dark and incoherent hours of Jan. 17, 1994, and what factors inhibited their effectiveness. They learned that many members of the existing emergency teams went to work in their immediate neighborhoods accounting for elderly or sick residents, bandaging wounds, extinguishing small fires, shutting off gas lines and identifying sources of water.

“One of the things that stands out above everything is the confidence people had that they were able to do something instead of feeling lost,” said Capt. Steven M. Vizcaino, who directs one of the two training units. “It’s hard to say what kind of impact that had, but possibly it involved the saving of property and possibly a life or two.”

But the survey also showed that the teams were hampered in their collective efforts because they were drawn from wide geographic areas and did not have a central location at which to convene. The Fire Department has since attempted to set up smaller teams organized around homeowners associations and other established groups and directed team members to meet at their nearest elementary schools, which will be stocked with emergency supplies, Vargas said.

According to Vizcaino, the West Valley and Westside are the areas where the most people have received the training. The program has been slower to take hold in the eastern and southern parts of the city, he said.

Vizcaino said Los Angeles was among the first cities in the nation to recruit citizens for emergency response duty beginning in 1987. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has since published a handbook modeled after the city’s course. And city firefighters have trained disaster relief officials from other cities and countries as well, Vizcaino said.

The course has also enjoyed widespread popular support at home. When budget cuts threatened to doom it three months after the 1994 earthquake, businesses and neighborhood groups that had already been trained formed an advisory board to seek out sources for continued funding. Occidental Petroleum, which had sought training for some of its employees, printed a newsletter about the program for free and the local branches of the U.S. Postal Service, another training recipient, mailed it at no charge. The program, funded entirely by the city, was not cut.

Former trainees such as Lana Kuhlen, a Woodland Hills homemaker, rave about the course with the fervor of religious converts.

Since taking the city training, Kuhlen said, she now knows how much she did not know about responding in a disaster. Through the course, she learned about identifying hazardous materials and how to wield a loaded fire hose. And she has joined that rare breed of residents who actually remembers to rotate her emergency stash of batteries, water, food and camping fuel.

“In a way, you feel more vulnerable because you realize how many things are out of control in an emergency. But the other side of it is you realize how much more help you can be,” Kuhlen said. “You are not just doing it for yourself, you are doing it for your neighbors.”

Correspondent Steve Ryfle contributed to this story.