O.C. Quake Plan Money Mostly Unspent

The Board of Supervisors in 1987 adopted a $3-million plan to improve Orange County’s “woefully inadequate” earthquake preparedness, but most of the money was never spent. On Friday, two supervisors charged that county administrators had failed to comply with a direct order.

In the wake of the earthquake Tuesday in Northern California, Board Chairman Thomas F. Riley and Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder said, they have learned that the emergency plan they approved and had assumed was in place had actually--for the most part--been shelved.

As a result, they said, they are concerned about the county’s ability to respond to such an emergency, and they said they will examine the emergency plan again with an eye to its funding.

“Once you take an action, you assume that action is going to be taken unless somebody comes in and says there has been a change,” Riley said. “I assumed everything was being done.”

The complaints were directed mainly at County Administrative Officer Larry Parrish, but Riley said the board shares some of the blame.

Parrish said Friday that the county was in a budget crunch in 1987 and that he assumed--despite the board’s voting 4 to 0 for the plan--that the supervisors understood that the county could not afford to spend the $3 million on earthquake preparedness.

The plan approved that February directed county agencies to absorb the $3-million cost in their normal operating budgets. If the agencies could not, Parrish was to return to the board during the July budget hearings. Parrish said the cost was not absorbed, adding, however, that he did not raise the issue at the budget hearings.

“I think it might have been presumptuous on Larry’s part to think that” the board did not want to reconsider the earthquake plan, Wieder said Friday. “That’s an assumption on Larry’s part that was wrong.

“I think we have to come back to this,” she added. “We’re fortunate that no (earthquake) has happened.”

The board’s 1987 decision was in response to a study concluding that the county’s emergency “preparations are woefully inadequate to cope with the damage and casualties from a catastrophic earthquake.”

The report was prepared by the Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project, a committee of top county officials. It contained 39 recommendations for improvements whose cost was estimated at $12 million, according to county officials. In February, 1987, the board voted to spend $3 million on the “first phase” of implementing the report’s recommendations.

About half the $3 million was to go for emergency equipment--such as electric generators and lights--for key government buildings, which the county does not have. Another $125,000 was to go for chain saws that could cut through steel and concrete, and for portable generators, sandbags and air filtration masks.

Another recommendation called for a study of the ways in which a major earthquake would affect important highways, bridges, airports, railroads, and sanitation and utility stations. The report suggested that the county either fortify those facilities found to be vulnerable or identify alternatives to those facilities

James W. Williams, director of the county Environmental Management Agency public works design division, said his office was responsible for implementing that recommendation but that he has been unable to follow through on it.

“We’re waiting for funding,” he said. “It may be we’re responsible, but we don’t have any funding.”

The supervisors, however, had voted to spend $140,000 for that particular study in their 1987 decision.

One of the recommendations that the county did implement was to do a survey of the structural integrity of all of the government’s buildings. The survey, which cost $220,000, was required by state law, and it is included in a study to be released soon.

This survey identifies possibly catastrophic problems that could occur in a major earthquake.

It says that five Orange County fire stations probably would not survive a serious earthquake.

It also concludes that the county’s emergency communications center on The City Drive in Orange is on ground likely to liquefy in a major earthquake. County officials plan to move the communications center by 1991.

The communications center is the central radio link among all agencies during emergencies. Should it fail, rescue response and coordination would be “extremely difficult,” said Marcia Thompson, chief of support services in the General Services Agency communications division. Hugh Wood, head of the county Fire Department Emergency Management Division, says that the county is better prepared now for an earthquake than it was in 1986, but, he said, “we’re talking in degrees.”

“Could we be more prepared? Yes. (But) it’s as much preparation as we can afford,” he said. “Obviously, you’re always vulnerable; you’re never without risk.”

Although the preparedness plan was to be coordinated by the Emergency Management Division, Wood, the division chief, could not identify which of the 39 recommendations had been implemented and which had not. He said that it was up to individual departments to follow through on the plan.

“That may or may not have happened,” he said. “We’re not going out and making sure they’ve done it. We can’t do their job. I can’t say they have or have not put those things in effect. I just don’t have that kind of certainty.”

Christine Boyd, a county disaster response planner who handles earthquake preparedness for Wood, also said that each county department is responsible for its own part in implementing the preparedness-report recommendations.

Officials in some of those county departments, however, referred questions back to Boyd.

Boyd also said that the county is better prepared to respond to an earthquake than in 1986.

“Drilling is one of the most important things a county can do, and this county drills,” she said. “There are a lot of little fronts that we’re advancing on that add up to a far-improved picture of disaster preparedness than the one we had in 1986.”

In not funding the preparedness plan’s recommendations, Parrish stressed that the county had to balance its limited resources against other more immediate needs, such as health care for the poor, new roads and jails.

“I’m not critical of any elements of this (earthquake preparedness) plan,” said Parrish, who recently resigned from his position and is scheduled to leave the county next month. “But what we continue to have to do is balance known needs and known obligations against that sort of defensive measure.

“If you think I’m going to say that if we get that earthquake that we are as ready as we’ll ever be, I won’t say that,” he said. “If a week from today we were in the situation that the people in Santa Cruz are in tonight, there would be a lot of criticism that we hadn’t spent it.”

The minutes of the 1987 supervisors’ meeting on the earthquake plan show that Supervisor Roger R. Stanton urged that it be implemented despite the county’s budget problems.

“(Former) Chairman Stanton noted that although agencies/departments have limited resources, the county must continue its efforts in this area,” the minutes read. Stanton was not available for comment Friday.

But Parrish said he met with the supervisors informally before the July budget hearings and “assumed” that the supervisors were aware that the earthquake plan would not be funded because of the county’s difficult financial situation.

“We didn’t have any money,” he said. “They knew we didn’t have enough money.”