L.A.’s Disaster Officials Gather to Build on the Past

Los Angeles disaster response officials are a battle-scarred bunch. This decade, they have faced the worst riots in modern American history, a slew of wildfires and mudslides and the largest, most costly natural disaster of all, the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

So when 130 of those officials gathered for their annual conference this week along the piney shores of Lake Arrowhead, they brought plenty of experience.

There was Bernard C. Parks, who was a street cop during the 1965 Watts riots and who ran the emergency operations center in the early hours after the 1994 earthquake; he now serves as the city’s police chief. There was William R. Bamattre, a Fire Department battalion chief during the 1992 riots and now chief engineer of that department. And there was Mayor Richard Riordan, a private citizen during the riots and a restless problem-solver during the earthquake--when he bypassed state and local rules to speed relief and ordered up breakfast from the restaurant he owns to keep top disaster relief officials fed.

Friday, those three were joined by dozens of high-ranking city officials charged with preparing the city for its next disaster. Their mission: to draft a five-year plan to keep residents from harm. Broken into working groups and brought back together for presentations, they produced a host of suggestions, from streamlining communications to improving technology to capitalizing on the subtle lessons that only a disaster-weary city would know.

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“We’re better prepared,” Chief Parks said at the meeting’s conclusion. “I think we’re in good shape.”

Among the lessons of the past:

* In 1994, rescue workers discovered that some people were reluctant to go to city shelters because the shelters did not allow pets. The solution: Install kennels alongside shelters.

* In both the earthquake and 1992 riots, the Department of Water and Power was forced to manage electrical systems without knowing precisely which areas were hit hardest. The solution: Include the DWP in the city’s developing computer systems so that power officials can assess damage and try to limit blackouts.

* The traditional focus of disaster relief on police and fire operations has obscured the potentially important contributions of smaller city departments. The Department of Aging, for instance, has extensive knowledge of the area’s older people, many of whom are fragile enough to be put in grave danger by any disaster. The solution: Include those department officials in the city’s emergency response and use them to try to target relief efforts to residents who may be in the most peril.

“We have an Aging Department that is called on nationally,” said Ellis Stanley, the city’s newly appointed assistant city administrator for emergency preparations. “But they’re not well plugged in to our systems. Not yet.”

Based on what they learned this week, Stanley and other conference participants said they hope to expand the city’s emergency computer systems to include information on the elderly so that rescue workers can better serve them in the wake of a disaster.

The conference is normally off limits to the media and public, but this year, Riordan allowed a reporter to attend the final session. In it, the city’s top officials and their most trusted aides focused on disasters both natural and human-made. Although earthquakes remain the city’s most feared natural peril, increasingly ominous is the threat of terrorism, whether at Los Angeles International Airport or elsewhere.

This year, however, the most topical of the potential calamities facing the disaster-prone city was El Nino, the warm ocean phenomenon that has generated waves of weather anxiety.

On that front, the conference participants got a jolting but welcome presentation from a representative of the National Weather Service.

Many of the forecasts of a torrential rain year are based on “stretched truths or statistically improbable conclusions,” said Tim McLung, warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service.

“We’re going to get more rain than normal. I’m convinced of that, I’m not trying to pooh-pooh the whole thing,” he added. “But I’m really, really concerned and actually bothered by the fact that we’re not getting the real story.”

In contrast to some meteorologists who have suggested that El Nino could cause Los Angeles to get as much as 600% of its normal annual rainfall, McLung said the likely precipitation is far less. He produced charts of the past eight known El Nino years, and noted that not one produced that much rain.

The likely amount, he said, is 50% to 100% above normal, enough to produce a wet year but not necessarily a dangerous one.

Nevertheless, talk of floods brought with it some poignant reminders of the damage that rain can inflict. At one point during Friday’s session, for instance, Emergency Preparedness Coordinator Bob Canfield reminded participants that Los Angeles’ most devastating recent floods occurred in 1969, which was not an El Nino year.

“Is that right?” Riordan asked.

“It was not,” Canfield repeated, noting that, El Nino or no El Nino, scores of people died in those floods.

Riordan nodded, then added: “Right. My brother was killed in that.”

For a moment, the 100 or so participants sat silently. A few near the back of the room glanced at one another in surprise, while others awkwardly gazed at the floor. Then McLung continued his presentation.

Although El Nino was on the minds of many at the conference, technological improvements were highlighted as possible solutions to many of the city’s disaster-preparedness shortcomings.

Participants saw demonstrations of high-tech systems--some already available, others being developed--that would allow rescue workers to send live images from disaster scenes to the city’s downtown Emergency Operations Center, provide instant electronic translations of documents and conversations and monitor shifting buildings with sensitive motion detectors.

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In addition, a private consultant demonstrated a system designed for the military that allows police, firefighters or rescue workers to send instant map images of an area to a central location, helping to direct response.

As the session concluded, several top officials urged adoption of the technological advances. The mapping systems used by military and National Guard units, for instance, struck Parks as a potentially invaluable addition to the city’s disaster response arsenal.

Riordan agreed that new equipment will help disaster relief, but he stressed, as he often does, the need for strong systems of authority and accountability.

Although the five-year plan for disaster readiness will not be finished for months, Riordan added that the city today is far better prepared for a disaster--whether an earthquake or any other type--than it was in the days that saw much of the city go up in flames because police were ill-equipped to handle the 1992 riots.

“I think it’s 50% better than it was then,” the mayor said. “And it’s going on 100%.”