Rescue Teams Get Ready for The Big One

Two cars lay crushed beneath an 80-ton section of a collapsed highway bridge at UC San Diego as part of an unusual drill Friday in which rescue workers practiced how to free victims like those killed and injured in the 1989 Bay Area earthquake.

The simulation showed what might happen to drivers passing under highway bridges during a major earthquake and how rescue teams would free them.

The drill, sponsored by the San Diego Fire Department, pulled together disparate agencies with heavy-duty equipment useful in freeway disasters, said firefighter Kevin Ester, who coordinated the exercise.

“There’s no way we could have done this by ourselves,” said Ester, looking at two holes cut into the top of the bridge through which firefighters dragged out dummy victims. “It could have taken us half a day. With all the equipment and help, it only took us two hours.”

More than a hundred people showed up for the daylong drill--private contractors with diamond-edged concrete saws and house-sized cranes, workers from the city’s Public Works Department with jackhammers, and sheriff’s deputies with their rescue dogs. Firefighters from agencies throughout the county, including National City, Coronado, Camp Pendleton and Chula Vista, and rescue workers from Mexico, stood on the sidelines and watched.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to get a bridge section and some cars underneath it, and be able to work in a non-emergency situation,” Ester said.

UC San Diego’s earthquake research laboratory supplied the 60-foot section of highway, which it had been using for three years to study the effects of earthquake-like forces on cement highway structures. The section was cut from California 41 near Fresno after California Department of Transportation engineers had deemed it unsafe.

“It can’t get more real than this,” said Frieder Seible, assistant director of the laboratory. “The Loma Prieta quake had scenes that looked just like this.”

The disaster scene, staged at the intersection of Old Miramar Road and Voigt Drive on campus, prompted one student to call 911 and report two cars trapped under a bridge, Seible said.

Researchers from the laboratory, one of a handful of earthquake research centers in the world, helped Caltrans study sections of the Nimitz Freeway after it collapsed during last year’s Bay Area quake, caused by the Loma Prieta Fault, that killed 42 people.

The laboratory will help Caltrans review all state highway bridges for a retrofitting program Caltrans hopes to complete in 1993, Frieder said. It has just begun reviewing bridges in Southern California.

The laboratory had been working with the city Fire Department for several years researching equipment and methods for rescuing victims surrounded by concrete or other heavy structures, typical of what would be found in urban areas after a disaster, Frieder said.

The exercise gave firefighters a chance to learn how to cut concrete, crib, or stabilize the structure with wood planks, and excavate pathways to reach and retrieve victims entombed in concrete and steel, Frieder said.

The Fire Department’s heavy rescue unit is planning to form the volunteer contractors and agencies into a task force that could respond quickly to emergencies, Ester said.

“Everything went like clockwork,” said Capt. Perry Peake of the department’s heavy rescue unit. “It really shows that we are on the right track.”