The First 15 Minutes After the Big One

"I think there will be looting and rioting right after it happens," Gooday predicts.

With streets in the Spring Street area filled with rubble and crushed cars, and no way to call for aid, word spreads among those trying to help victims: The California Hospital Medical Center, the only hospital in downtown proper (White Memorial Medical Center is in Boyle Heights, across the L.A. River, and County USC Medical Center is three and half miles away), is 12 blocks away, close enough to go for help.

ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK FARICY

PHOTO BY STEVE APPLEFORD

Brett and Renee Asolas, disaster volunteers in Norwalk

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• Peggy Gooday
• Anthony Perez
• Alexandria (Virginia)
• Accidents and Disasters
• 2011 Japan Disaster

7:06 p.m., six minutes after the quake:

Little do they know that California Hospital Medical Center is ground zero for its own disaster. Figueroa Street, Pico Boulevard and Grand Avenue near the hospital are at a standstill, with some 20,000 fans converging on the area for a 7:30 p.m. Katy Perry concert at Staples Center when the quake hits. That panicked mass has merged with thousands of people fleeing the Convention Center next door, where they were attending the L.A. Auto Show. A short distance from the disorder, one old hospital tower in the CHMC complex, a group of concrete structures faced with red brick and constructed between 1964 and 1987, is now mostly a pile of burgundy rubble.

Some patients, doctors, nurses and other staff are crushed or trapped under the rubble.

In 2010, the 316-bed hospital owned by Catholic Healthcare West was advised by the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (Cal-OSHPD) to perform seismic retrofits of the 1964 tower that houses dozens of patients. But David Jarrett, Catholic Healthcare West director of construction, said in a letter to Cal-OSHPD that the hospital could not comply because of financial constraints due to the recession. Catholic Healthcare West spokeswoman Tricia Griffin tells the Weekly that the tower retrofit will begin next summer, with completion expected in 2015.

According to an OSHPD 2010 report, 78 other medical facilities in Los Angeles County lack retrofitting. Some may be unable to help anyone but themselves.

Back at the Alexandria on Fifth and Spring, an off-duty paramedic who has responded on-scene is shouting that California Hospital Medical Center is in trouble, and the next closest is Good Samaritan — just outside downtown in the Pico-Union District.

The paramedic isn't sure how well Good Samaritan fared, but luckily the hospital is fine, having completed all structural retrofits sought by Cal-OSHPD. Gooday decides to stay indoors, believing it's safer in the badly damaged, 100-year-old hotel than in much of downtown.

7:08 p.m., eight minutes after the quake:

In Los Angeles County's southern suburbs, a family screams, "Our house is on fire!" as fire engines zoom past, their sirens fading to silence. The simple truth is, the L.A. County Fire Department and municipal fire agencies have more important places to be.

Brett and Renee Asolas, volunteer Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members in Norwalk, tell hysterical neighbors that the fire trucks are needed where lives are in imminent danger, like from disasters involving boxy "dingbat" apartments.

Some so-called dingbats — a classic California 1950s style with overhanging rental units built above open-air parking — have tilted or fallen, crushing cars and trapping residents.

At first, Southern Californians, regardless of education or intelligence levels, will have trouble understanding how the fire trucks can rush past their blazes. Many disaster victims go through a process called the "illusion of centrality," believing it is only happening to them.

"When you're in trauma, the mind says this is a very local problem," Elia Zedeño, who survived the 1993 bombing at Lower Manhattan's World Trade Center, says in her book The Unthinkable. "[The mind] can't afford to say that everything outside is horrible," too.

The USGS conservatively estimates that 1,600 fires will spread to 130,000 individual buildings — a checkerboard-like conflagration unseen since much of San Francisco burned to the ground as a result of the 1906 earthquake.

Fires will blaze in the Inland Empire, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, Santa Monica and Los Angeles. But the worst hit will be southeast L.A. County, according to Kyoto University professor Charles R. Scawthorn's fire study in the ShakeOut Scenario. It singles out for the worst blazes the sector south of the 10 freeway and east of the 110 freeway, including Downey, Compton, Bell, South Gate, Watts, Huntington Park, Whittier, Montebello, Bellflower, Lynwood, Pico Rivera, Commerce, Paramount, South-Central and Central-Alameda.

Many of their wood-constructed homes and apartments are densely packed on small, post–World War II lots that housed returning soldiers and their families. Fires will spread with ease, and many areas will burn freely.

Unthinkably, "if the Santa Ana winds are blowing," as they often do in late autumn, says L.A. County Fire Department battalion chief Larry Collins, "all bets are off."

In the first 10 minutes after the quake, falling lamps and candles set furniture ablaze, while sparks from electrical shorts touch off natural gas spewing from snapped-off lines that fed heaters or stoves.

Blazes in Greater Los Angeles will overwhelm local police and fire departments. Even mutual-aid forces from elsewhere, who won't arrive immediately, will put only a dent in the relief effort, according to Collins.

Lucy Jones of the USGS says, "Bottom line, fires will double the amount of losses."