Despite millions of dollars spent in crisis management drills and dozens of plans to deal with earthquakes and other calamities, Southern California emergency preparedness agencies have done little to plan for mass displacement and destruction across a broad swath of the region on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, according to interviews with state and local authorities.
Because the region is so huge and most damage from earthquakes and fires typically is relatively localized, most of the region's planning is based on the assumption that damage will be confined to one or two areas, several officials said.
Detailed plans to deal with a massive emergency -- one that displaces more than 300,000 people -- have not been developed since the end of the Cold War, said Stephen Sellers, head of Southern California operations for the state Office of Emergency Services.
Sellers and others say a tragedy on that scale goes beyond many worst-case scenarios and would include a chemical or nuclear attack, or a catastrophic earthquake on one of the faults that run directly under Los Angeles, such as Newport-Inglewood or Puente Hills.
Computer models released in May by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Southern California Earthquake Center found that a magnitude 7.5 quake along the Puente Hills fault could kill as many as 18,000 people, injure up to 268,000 and displace as many as 735,000 families. A study by the state Division of Mines and Geology found that a 7.0 temblor on the Newport-Inglewood fault would block freeways, sharply curtail flights at LAX, reduce the number of hospital beds by a third and knock out major power plants for days.
The difficulty of dealing with the volume of displaced people and downed services after Hurricane Katrina has caused some officials of emergency response agencies to think anew.
Katrina "just shattered all of our planning assumptions," said Sharon Grigsby, who heads bioterrorism response for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "We certainly should be planning for a larger-scale event than we have focused on up to now."
If major portions of the city have been damaged and huge numbers of people displaced or hurt, it could take several days -- perhaps up to a week -- for government and charitable agencies to respond, several officials said. For that reason, it is all the more important that residents keep survival kits at home, said Constance Perett, director of the Office of Emergency Management for Los Angeles County.
