EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : City’s Emergency Stage Giving Way to Recovery Phase : Operations: Attendance at temporary shelters wanes. Extra police deployments will be limited to the Valley and the LAPD West Bureau.
Los Angeles city officials struggling with the earthquake’s aftermath shifted from an emergency footing to a recovery mode Tuesday, consolidating shelters, cutting hours at the main operations center and returning police to their regular shifts in all but the severely damaged areas of the San Fernando Valley.
“We’re hopefully winding down this emergency stage,†said Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, “although it won’t be fully wound down until everybody is in homes and shelters.â€
The head-count at more than 34 Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters--including four encampments of Army tents in the Valley--had dropped to 7,675 Monday night from more than 12,000 the night before, according to city officials, Red Cross and Salvation Army executives and National Guard officers.
At the 17 transitional shelters being operated by the city, attendance continued to fall steadily, and was down by about 500 people to 405 Monday night, said Frank Catania, director of planning and development for the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.
“We are . . . trying to get people into long-term shelter or back into their homes,†Catania said.
Police Chief Willie Williams said that the city’s emergency operations center, which has bristled with activity around the clock since the quake hit last week, will ratchet down its hours, operating instead from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., seven days a week.
Williams said his troops will now pull back into a modified mobilization, with extra deployments limited to the San Fernando Valley and the LAPD West Bureau.
Commander Dave Gascon, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said police in the Valley will remain on emergency status, with officers working 12-hour shifts. The Valley also will receive extra support from a temporary deployment of 160 officers from the downtown Metropolitan Division and about 20 extra traffic officers.
The Valley’s West Bureau will return to regular eight-hour shifts, Gascon said, but it will be buttressed by an extra layer of 80 to 100 supplemental officers who will remain mobilized on 12-hour shifts.
Gascon said the redeployments will provide welcome relief for exhausted police, who have been working 12-hour shifts throughout the city since the quake.
Despite the scale-backs, the displaced quake refugees on Tuesday continued their weary quest for a restoration of something approaching normality.
Faye Washington, general manager of the city’s Personnel Department, said her workers had received countless demands for assistance. Particularly pressing, Washington said, is the demand for Armenian translators for quake victims in the Hollywood area and for infant formula for the hundreds of babies whose families were uprooted by the calamity.
The Department of Water and Power reported that Monday night’s rainstorm cut off power to 4,000 customers, mostly in the Valley, but service was fully restored by Tuesday afternoon.
Water-line repairs were continuing however and parts of the West Valley were still under a directive to boil all water before drinking. The directive is expected to remain in effect until Thursday morning, said DWP General Manager Dan Waters.
Waters said that nearly 900 leaks have been repaired in DWP lines since the quake. He said crews have reduced the backlog of unrepaired leaks to 21 in the valley and about 15 on the West Side.
“But aftershocks continue to rock us,†Waters said, noting that about 2,000 customers in the Granada Hills area still are without water.
“I’d be very surprised if we have a tremendous problem because our water was not sewage contaminated,†said Dr. Shirley Fannin, director of disease control for the county Department of Health Services.
The county is conducting a survey of private physicians and medical clinics to determine whether they have been treating an unusually high number of gastrointestinal complaints since the earthquake, Fannin said. Drinking contaminated water can lead to nausea, cramps and diarrhea, which can lead to dehydration and other medical complications if left untreated.
Fannin and other public health officials warned residents of Valley areas where the boil order remains in effect that they should not brush their teeth with tap water. They also noted that unless fruits and vegetables are cooked, which kills bacteria, they should wash their produce in boiled or bottled water.
When the boil order is lifted, they should let faucets run for 15 to 20 minutes to cleanse pipes of impure water, they said.
Warren O’Brien, head of the city’s Building and Safety Department, said he expects housing inspections to be completed by the week’s end. So far, a whopping 15,552 housing units have been declared unsafe, he said.
Next week, inspectors will begin resurveying “red-tag†buildings that this week were declared unsafe for occupancy, in the hopes that repairs will allow upgrades of many to “yellow tag†status--meaning that limited occupancy has been approved. The upgrade would mean that residents can enter the buildings and retrieve belongings.
The overall death toll from the quake climbed to 60 Tuesday with the death of a Reseda woman injured in a car crash about 20 minutes after the initial magnitude 6.6 quake.
Marzia Raziye, 22, died at Kaiser Foundation Hospital-Woodland Hills at 2:46 a.m. Tuesday, according to Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
Raziye was severely injured when her car crashed into another vehicle at Saticoy Street and Mason Avenue in Canoga Park at 4:50 a.m. on Jan. 17, police said. Officers said the crash was considered earthquake-related because it occurred at an uncontrolled intersection at which the street lights and traffic signals had been knocked out by the quake.
The woman’s death was listed as the 57th fatality in Los Angeles County connected to the temblor. A Rancho Cucamonga woman in San Bernardino County also died. In addition, the overall toll now includes two men who died in a helicopter crash in Kern County while checking for earthquake damage to a pipeline.
As of Tuesday, county hospitals had treated more than 9,200 people injured in the quake. For 1,495 of them, the injuries had been serious enough to require hospitalization.
The hospitals said there was an increase in patients who have been living in parks.
“Last night’s rain just exacerbated the health problems seen in these tent cities,†said David Langness, spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California. “Without proper sanitation, refrigeration and food preparation, we expect to see more admissions.â€
One worry of health authorities is an outbreak of communicable diseases, particularly chicken pox. But they cautioned that the incubation period for chicken pox is 13 to 21 days.
“Any child that acquired exposure in the camps won’t get their pox until 13 to 21 days later,†Fannin said.
Elsewhere, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced that it would open a new Metrolink station in Sylmar today, about six weeks ahead of schedule.
No parking is yet available at the station, at Hubbard and First streets. A 403-car lot will not open until Feb 21.
For the second day in a row, ridership topped 25,000 Tuesday, the majority coming from the Antelope Valley, a Metrolink official said--causing the rail service to borrow additional passenger cars from Toronto, Canada and the San Francisco Bay area to handle the growing demand.
State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, declaring she would be a “friendly banker†to earthquake victims, proposed a state package of $1.3 billion to rebuild public structures, including damaged classrooms. She said she envisioned her plan as part of a “team effort†to be combined with President Clinton’s proposed $7.5-billion federal aid plan.
Most of the state money, about $1 billion, would come from state investment funds that could be lent to school districts at 4.3% interest, Brown said. She described it as sort of “a bridge loan†that would be repaid from future earthquake-repair bond issues.
Another $234 million could come from the sale of bonds approved by California voters in 1990 to retrofit public buildings following the Loma Prieta Earthquake in Northern California in the fall of 1989, she said. The rest, about $74 million, is in unsold school bonds, Brown said.
“This represents California beginning to step up to the plate to match the federal effort,†Brown said.
Among the 26 county facilities closed by the quake are four courthouses, including Beverly Hills Municipal Court, Van Nuys Municipal and Superior courts and a San Fernando courthouse; three Department of Social Services offices on Vermont and Canoga avenues and on West Pico Boulevard; five Health Services facilities, a mental health facility in Santa Monica and the downtown Hall of Justice.
Sheriff Sherman Block said damage at the Hall of Justice has rendered the department’s data systems there--from computers to automated fingerprint systems to criminal history information--at least temporarily useless. He said the cost of repairing the building--an estimated $100 million--is so high that the structure probably will be permanently vacated.
At a morning news briefing Tuesday at the disaster assistance center in Hollywood, federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said that the more than 15,000 dwelling units declared uninhabitable in the city of Los Angeles represent “a fair-size small town that has to be rebuilt, almost--in terms of the housing stock--immediately to provide housing for people. . . .
“It’s not a simple task to get people into housing, there’s money involved,†Cisneros continued. “But without housing, peoples’ lives are destabilized. So it becomes one of the most critical things we have to do.â€
Under HUD’s housing-voucher system, 4,500 people already have certificates in hand “and are now looking for apartments in the San Fernando Valley or other areas that they choose,†Cisneros said. “And families are now moving in daily.â€
The Los Angeles City Council moved to prevent the eviction of tenants who do not pay their rent for apartments that have been rendered uninhabitable. Under the proposed law, tenants would not have to pay rent on unusable units at least through February.
The council earlier acted to forbid landlords from using earthquake damage as an excuse to evict tenants.
The lawmakers also voted to send a notice to landlords notifying them that within three weeks they must refund rental and security deposits for housing that is no longer habitable.
City housing officials said “unused†rent, for the period from the quake to end of the month, should also be refunded within three weeks. But representatives of an apartment owners group said the law is unclear on that point and that rent refunds would be difficult, because the money has already been spent. The council is expected to take up that question some time this week.
Richard Andrews, director of the state Office of Emergency Services, said that as of 6 p.m. Monday, 64,674 people had registered for disaster assistance. About 40,000 had registered by phone and the remainder at the 16 disaster assistance centers that have been set up across the city.
Federal Small business Administration officials said they have thus far issued 40,000 applications for home loans, 3,200 for business loans and 1,400 for economic injury loans.
So far, garbage contractors have collected 3,000 tons of debris in the San Fernando Valley since the quake struck.
The Red Cross announced it is opening 15 service centers from Fillmore to Los Angeles where quake victims can meet with a counselor who can help them obtain beds, linens, groceries and other items necessities to get their lives back to normal.
Centers in the Valley are located at the First United Methodist Church of San Fernando, the Woodland Hills Church of Christ, Our Lady of Perpetual Hope in Santa Clarita, and the Masonic Temple in Reseda.
At Cal State Northridge, campus President Blenda Wilson gave a 45-minute presentation to state trustees Tuesday on the extent of damages, which she said had turned the campus into “a money sieve.†A team of asbestos-removal experts alone, working around the clock, costs $20,000 to $25,000 a day, she said.
CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz said there was little that could be done to prevent such damage in a quake as severe as this one.
“When a building is sitting on the epicenter of the 6.6 earthquake, it doesn’t matter what you do to it, how much money you put into it,†he said. “It’s going to go down.â€
A humorous note was struck when trustees inquired about a portion of a damage report, distributed by Wilson, which stated that at Building 5 of the University Park Apartments: “All snakes to be removed prior to occupancy . . . “
“Some student in the building had pet snakes, we know not what kind,†she replied. “At each briefing, I asked if there were volunteers to remove them and I haven’t had one yet. We will find the snakes some day.â€
Times staff writers John Johnson, Leslie Berger, Paul Feldman, Hugo Martin, Doug Shuit, Ralph Frammolino, James Rainey and Bill Stall contributed to this story.
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