Officials Assess Plans for ‘Big One’ : Disaster: Ventura County is better off than San Francisco, but a major quake would cause extensive damage, they find.

The frantic, sometimes scattered response of Bay Area firefighters and police immediately after last week’s earthquake told Ventura County emergency teams where they will succeed and where they may fail when the “Big One” strikes Southern California, an event seismologists say is probable in the next 30 years.

Scores or hundreds of people may be injured or killed in the county, and its supply of ambulances and paramedics would quickly be exhausted, drawing firefighters away from burning homes and businesses. Bridges and highways could buckle and any of the four major area dams whose waters would course through county riverbeds could fail.

The old unreinforced masonry buildings of downtown Ventura, Ojai, Santa Paula and Fillmore may crumble into piles of rubble like the remains of structures in Santa Cruz. Homes in Ventura County’s older neighborhoods might slide off their foundations.

And the county’s fertile sandy soil, long an asset in this productive region, could become a deadly liability. As in Santa Cruz, the areas with shallow water tables near the coast or along river beds would shake with up to 10 times the intensity of more stable areas. In some regions, the turbulent water beneath the earth would shake so hard that the soil would become like quicksand.

“We’re looking especially at the Oxnard Shores area because it is sandy soil and fill-in,” said Karen Guidi, assistant director of the county’s Office of Emergency Services. The Ventura Keys and other marina areas will also be exceptionally vulnerable, she said.

Nevertheless, Ventura disaster officials believe that their preparations over the 17 years since the Office of Emergency Services was created will stand them in good stead when an earthquake hits.

“I feel confident that we will be equally as capable or more so than the Bay Area to respond to a major disaster,” said Ventura County Fire Chief Rand-Scott Coggan.

Coggan was part of a four-man team that toured San Francisco and Santa Cruz following the Oct. 17 temblor that registered 7.1. He assessed Ventura County’s state of readiness before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

Despite the county’s preparations, reactions by Bay Area emergency crews showed Coggan that more work is needed here.

For instance, better provisions must be made to transport the injured, he said.

In Ventura County, 12 to 15 calls will use up the available ambulances, and firefighters will have to fill in for paramedics and ambulance drivers. Even that may not be enough.

“We saw the San Francisco Fire Department, as big as they are, using taxis to transport people to the hospital,” he said. Water mains will break here as they did in the Bay Area, decreasing water pressure in hoses, Coggan said. In San Francisco, the Fire Department pumped 9,600 gallons of water an hour from its special fireboat in the bay to douse the Marina District fires.

But no such expensive tool is available to Ventura County, and firefighters will have to save homes at the expense of businesses, Coggan said.

“From the standpoint of residential fires, we can rely on swimming pools and aerial tanker relays, but from the standpoint of commercial fires, they will not do us a whole lot of good,” Coggan said.

A strong earthquake along the San Andreas Fault, which touches the county near Tejon Pass, could cause failure at major dams, including Pyramid or Castaic, pressuring the smaller Bouquet and Bard reservoirs and Santa Felicia dam at Lake Piru.

If all were full and all failed, a worst-case scenario that officials say is unlikely, the quake could unleash up to 551,000 acre-feet of water, according to county figures. The 15,000 people in Fillmore and Piru would have less than 30 minutes to find higher ground, and Oxnard would have only two hours to prepare for a three- to six-foot wall of water, Guidi said.

Although the dams have passed recent state inspections, and both of the larger Pyramid and Castaic dams were built to withstand major earthquakes, Guidi said, residents still need to be informed of the possibility that the dams could rupture.

“There are thousands of people who are living in the flood plain and dam inundation areas, and they need to know that they would have to evacuate quickly,” she said. Failure at the 30-year-old Casitas Dam below Ojai, with a capacity of 254,000 acre-feet, could flood the Casitas Springs area in 30 to 40 minutes and the Ventura Avenue area in an hour.

Bridge and road failures could make evacuations more difficult, especially in mountain areas. Heavily traveled California 33 in the western part of the county and Grimes Canyon Road in the east would move with the fault-fissured earth beneath them, officials said.

“The roads are only as stable as the country they go through,” said Jack Hallin, state Department of Transportation project design manager for Ventura County. He acknowledged that there are faults beneath county roads, just as there are faults beneath the state’s major highways.

“Interstate 5 crosses the San Andreas right at Tejon Pass,” Hallin said. “If that fault moves, the highway will be damaged.”

Major bridges, such as the structures that span the Santa Clara and Ventura rivers along the Ventura Freeway, passed their semiannual inspections for structural integrity, Hallin said. Caltrans plans to replace the 50-year-old truss bridge across the Santa Clara River in Fillmore in the next five years. Ten small bridges on California 33 above Ojai will also be rebuilt in the next five years, Hallin said.

Coggan also found reason for encouragement in his Bay Area tour.

In the Bay Area, it took hours to set up a coordinated incident command to supervise all elements of the response effort, Coggan said. In Ventura County, he said, procedures delineating duties and a chain of command have been in place for years.

“We have been in the process of evaluating an incident command system,” said San Francisco Fire Department Lt. Paul Fuhrman. “But we didn’t have it in place then.”

Where the San Francisco Fire Department had only limited ability to contact off-duty employees, Ventura has 200 pagers and plans to buy more. San Francisco put out its call for off-duty employees through the media, Fuhrman said. When the off-duty men and women did arrive, there was not enough reserve equipment ready to go into action, according to San Francisco fire officials. Ventura, on the other hand, maintains 31 equipped reserve engines, Coggan said.

The San Francisco Fire Department’s computerized communications system failed almost immediately. “The system went up and down throughout,” Fuhrman said. “It was state of the art 15 years ago.” The department is evaluating and trying to upgrade its dispatch system. In Ventura, the new system that the Fire Department hopes to purchase has back-up provisions to keep it operational in a crisis, Coggan said. But while the system may survive, Coggan questioned the 37-year-old building housing it, the department’s headquarters in the old hospital building at Camarillo Airport, formerly the Oxnard Air Base.

The extensive planning probably will not go to waste, according to forecasts from federal and independent scientists.

A 1981 report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency forecast an earthquake registering 8.3 or greater along the southern half of the San Andreas Fault before the close of the century. In a 1987 report, scientists at the U. S. Geological Survey had forecast the Oct. 17 Northern California earthquake with a 30% probability within 30 years.

Along the southern portion of the San Andreas Fault, which runs about 70 miles from Ventura roughly parallel to the coastline, scientists are calling about the same odds, said Lucile Jones, a seismologist with the USGS who is based at Caltech at Pasadena.

Scientists use three factors to forecast earthquakes. They determine the annual movement in the area, use geological evidence to determine how often earthquakes occur and determine the year of the last event.

In the case of the Mojave segment of the San Andreas Fault, which is nearest to Ventura County, earthquakes occur on the average of every 130 years, Jones said; the last event was about 130 years ago.

“We’re due,” she said.

In addition, Ventura County has its own set of faults capable of causing major damage, Jones said. The Oak Ridge Fault, a predominantly east-west fault that cuts south of Fillmore and almost beneath Santa Paula before it fractures into smaller fissures as it reaches Ventura, could cause a 7.5 earthquake, according to a study by a scientist at the University of Oregon.

Jones and county officials also point to the San Cayetano Fault, which also runs east-west but skirts Fillmore to the north and continues to the ocean. The Big Pine Fault north of Ojai is the county’s third major fault, said officials at the county Office of Emergency Services.

Officials continue to prepare county services for the day the big earthquake strikes, but they admonish residents to be ready in their homes with their own stashes of water, food, medical supplies and a plan to reunify the family.

Officials worry that people will lose their interest in earthquake preparedness as Oct. 17 becomes more distant in their minds. Gillespie and Guidi are working on public education programs to keep that from happening.

“Now, while the iron is hot, is the time for us to strike,” Gillespie told the supervisors.

The county continues to finance preparations for a major disaster, but will be less able to pay for the damages one would cause, said Richard Wittenberg, the county’s administrative officer.

The Bay Area had the world’s attention--and is receiving rapid state and federal aid--because of the World Series and San Francisco’s standing as one of the world’s great cities, Wittenberg said.

“I know that would not be the case here,” he said. “If it were like in 1969 after the floods, we would be fighting with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for four or five years. We are in no shape to pay for that kind of disaster.”