Hurricane Offers Lesson to Quake-Wary Officials : Disasters: They cite Florida chaos as a warning that people may have to sustain themselves for up to a week.

To Ben Nottingham, manager of the Los Angeles County disaster office, the chaos left by Hurricane Andrew in South Florida holds a clear lesson for earthquake country.

“We’ve been telling people to prepare to sustain themselves--water and food and security--for 72 hours” in the aftermath of a destructive California quake, Nottingham said. “But we’re not going to be talking hours any more--we’re going to be talking days. Maybe a week.”

People in California should stockpile water and food that is easy to prepare without a kitchen, he said--”so they don’t have to stand in emergency lines and get very irritated.” He also urged people to have charcoal or a cooking system that uses butane or propane. “And they have to have it filled and ready to go,” Nottingham said.

Nottingham is not the only California disaster official who has been looking from afar at the hurricane aftermath in south Florida and reaching the conclusion that plans in this state for dealing with a great earthquake or some other emergency need to be revised.

“We have to recognize that government services may very well not be available every place for a longer period of time,” said Richard Andrews, director of the state Office of Emergency Services. “The overwhelming lesson of Andrew is that catastrophic events do happen and that worst case scenarios can occur.”

For Kent Paxton, the emergency management director in San Mateo County, the utter ruination left by Hurricane Andrew suggests people will have more immediate needs than food and water after a comparable quake.

“A first aid kit and a fire extinguisher are vital, and you must be trained in their use,” Paxton said. “Storing food is fine, but I don’t think we’re going to have a lot of deaths from starvation and lack of things to drink. In an earthquake, we’re going to have a lot of injuries that emergency rooms won’t be able to deal with, so people have to learn to take care of themselves. . . . A good extinguisher can be purchased for $20 to $40.”

Three years ago, after Hurricane Hugo hit the Carolinas, some of the same points were made by California authorities. But after Andrew, their mood seems even more somber.

“Andrew shows us that in a major disaster, the cavalry doesn’t ride in right away,” Paxton said. “It’s going to take a while to get the assistance people need in place, and the most important preparation we can do relates to reducing the loss of life and property.”

Some disaster coordinators suggest that homeowners get together to defend their neighborhoods against looters and to pool their supplies in the first days after whatever trouble strikes.

“You’re seeing it in Florida, where people had to arm themselves to protect property and loved ones,” said Nottingham. “A lot can be done to secure houses, from having generators on hand to light them if the power fails, to gathering with neighbors.”

Nottingham said he does not feel people need to arm themselves. “The protection comes from banding and bonding together,” he said.

Phil Bernal, emergency preparedness manager for the Southern California Gas Co., observed, “There has always been a fear of civil disturbances and looting in such situations. We hope it won’t take place, but we’ve seen in Florida, and in L.A. for that matter, that some people will take advantage of the situation.”

Bernal agreed with officials that citizens should prepare to be on their own for longer than 72 hours after a big disaster. But not everyone favors changing the 72-hour guideline.

Fausto Reyes, director of emergency management for Orange County, cautioned, “If you go beyond that period and it doesn’t strike people as a common-sense approach . . . you might even discourage many from doing anything.

“Even with the 72-hour standard, there are a lot in the community who aren’t prepared. We need to get people to that level first.”

Some California disaster experts, meanwhile, take exception to the criticism widely voiced in south Florida that it took the federal government too long to come to the area’s assistance after Hurricane Andrew passed over.

They say people must realize that even with very careful preparation, it takes some time to assess damage, establish communications and get forces and supplies on the scene.

“I was a little irritated when I saw the coverage on Andrew, because I don’t see how the government could come in, in the best of possible worlds, and make it whole instantaneously,” said Jan Bradford, chief of administration at the California Specialized Training Institute, a state facility in San Luis Obispo that trains disaster workers.

At the state Office of Emergency Services, Andrews said the aftermath of the hurricane is adding to knowledge officials gained in the disaster response to the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the devastating Oakland Hills fire last year and last spring’s riots in Los Angeles.

“One of the things very clear to us in Loma Prieta, the Oakland fire, the L.A. riots, as well as Andrew, is that when a local area is faced with a large emergency, almost inevitably there is a tendency to underestimate the seriousness of the situation,” Andrews said. “And there’s a delay in assessing what needs are going to be.

“The lesson is the need for the state to be very aggressive and move very quickly. If you don’t . . . it becomes impossible to regain the momentum quickly.”

Several officials said that they feel California has put too much emphasis on preparation for the disasters themselves, or on mitigation tactics such as bolting houses to foundations to protect against quakes, and too little on preparing for what may be a protracted recovery.

“Most of us have spent a good deal of time and training for how to deal with the emergency,” said Ken Miyoshi, assistant chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Now, we have to study how to deal with the problems of the recovery, how to deal with all the agencies, how to reduce bureaucratic red tape.

While trying to restore power during the riots in Los Angeles, for instance, coordination between the DWP and police “wasn’t as good as we had hoped,” Miyoshi said. “We found it was a little bit of a hang-up trying to get the escorts from the police to go back into the neighborhoods.”

Now, in the wake of Andrew, Miyoshi said the DWP plans to meet with various other agencies to develop a plan for recovery coordination in the event of a big earthquake or other disaster.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block has sent two emergency operations officers to Florida to observe the recovery efforts, which he said could offer more key lessons for California.

“There’s nothing you can do to prevent natural disasters,” Block said, “and of course your emergency response is pretty much dictated by the nature of the disaster. . . . But the thing that has, I believe, the long-lasting impact on the people in the area is the recovery, and our officers are compiling their reports on that.”

Ronald Baldwin, coordinator of emergency services for San Joaquin County, agreed, “We need a lot more work on the recovery,” he said.

“Loma Prieta and now Andrew has really woke me up. I felt before that the whole concept of trying to get food and supplies into the affected areas was taken care of. It’s kind of shocking to see that we do have complete breakdowns in the distribution system.”

Both Baldwin and Shirley Mattingly, emergency management director for the city of Los Angeles, said they had been struck by how hard it has been to entice even suffering people out of their homes and into shelters in south Florida.

“Andrew is unprecedented in the numbers displaced from homes,” said Mattingly. “This could well happen here. The magnitude of the disaster points out to Los Angeles the (scope) and complexity of finding ways to shelter people quickly, and of encouraging them to use the shelters.

“Later on, I’m sure we will see a problem of getting them out of the shelters into interim and permanent housing,” she said.

Baldwin said he had been struck also with the impact of “psychological factors, specifically the need people feel to stay close to their houses.”

In California, Bradford said, a dispute arose after last April’s Humboldt County earthquakes when the Federal Emergency Management Agency proposed moving residents of Rio Dell out of that community for up to a year during reconstruction.

Residents and community leaders objected. Finally, house trailers were located in Rio Dell and the residents stayed there.

Concerns that FEMA, the Army and other federal agencies that have played an increasing role in disaster recovery efforts may usurp local authority ran through comments made by a number of California officials.