The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Team Newsom
warning system — the testing of early warning systems in the early days — and now it’s a sophisticated statewide program along with the ‘Drop, Cover and Hold On’, the ‘Shakeout’ and more,” said Larry Collins, special operations chief with the California Office of Emergency Services and a Los Angeles County Fire Department veteran.
Today, Collins says, “Those firefighters who roll out to the next big one, they’ve had all these years of training and actual experience. It’s a systematic approach that did not exist in the 1987 Whittier earthquake and was still developing when the Northridge quake happened.“
Born out of the Northridge earthquake, the system includes eight California-based Federal Emergency Management Agency Urban Search and Rescue task forces and a group of faster, lighter and more mobile response teams in what are now called the California Regional Urban Search and Rescue task forces. There are 10 such task forces in the state in addition to the eight California FEMA forces.
The FEMA teams of 70 to 80 people take several hours to get on the road — with 60 tons of equipment. The California Regional Urban Search and Rescue teams are shaped differently, comprised of rescuers and specialty trained people who can get out the door in 35 minutes.
Greg Short is a battalion chief and program manager with both the federal FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force and the county’s Urban Search and Rescue
Team, which is known as the USA-2 team. Short explains, “We’ve been an international team for many years, deployed to Haiti, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Nepal and recently to Turkey — and been involved in various other disasters around the world.”
Fire officials say the county fire department was woefully ill-prepared to deal with the aftermath of the 1987 Whittier quake, but got it right seven years later when the pre-dawn, blind-thrust Northridge tremor shook for an estimated 10 to 20 seconds at 4:31 a.m., and several thousand aftershocks followed.
The official death toll was 57 but the toll later grew to 72 to include those who died of heart attacks during the quake. About 9,000 people were injured.
“The biggest change in terms of the fire department is the knowledge and skills that the L.A. County Fire Department gets,” Short said, describing how the county team, USA-2, is called to disasters not just in California and the U.S., but worldwide. “All of our cooperating partners are training and working in making sure they are prepared. Our people have seen it and done it recently in Turkey.”
The search and rescue teams train in Santa Clarita at a “prop” center, set up with physical obstacles that can pin victims down during a quake, or can prevent crews from getting inside a room — such as encountering a fallen refrigerator, washing machine or mattress. The term “prop” is akin to the Hollywood term for objects used onstage or on-screen.
Teams also learn to use specialized listening devices and cameras to find survivors — and the dead — in the rubble.
When the Los Angeles team went to Haiti after Hurricane Matthew struck in 2016 they found a victim trapped behind a washing machine. And in other rescues they have encountered refrigerators and mattresses blocking the way to disaster victims.
“We’ve seen some crazy parents, coaches and kids. Many attended a public hearing in the California Capitol last week wearing their football jerseys while asking lawmakers not to pass the bill.
Critics viewed the bill as a challenge to parental rights, with one parent going so far as to say it didn’t make sense for California to tell her she could decide what happens with her pregnancy but not what sport her children play.
California has regulated youth tackle football, with Newsom signing a law that things throughout these years, and we are able to replicate those scenarios in our training center and get our team members prepared for the next disaster,” Short explained. “When we have something happen here our members have seen it, done it and know their capabilities and know the capabilities of their team members.”
Collins, the special operations chief for the state Office of Emergency Services, said the Northridge temblor was a watershed moment for urban search and rescue task force operations.
In the earlier quake in Whittier in 1987 he said, “we weren’t ready for that stuff.” But when the Northridge earthquake hit, urban search and rescue task force efforts played a major role. “When the Northridge Meadows apartments collapsed, when I was the deputy task force leader, it showed us that this does work,” Collins said.
He added, “It proves what we had basically told the fire chiefs at the beginning of all this around 1987 took effect in 2021 limiting teams to just two fullcontact practices per week of not more than 30 minutes each during the regular season. That law also required youth tackle football coaches to have training on concussions and other head injuries.
Newsom, who has four children, pledged to work with lawmakers “to strengthen safety in youth football — while ensuring parents have the freedom to decide which sports are most appropriate for their children.”
“As part of that process, we will consult with health and sports medicine experts, coaches, parents, and community members to ensure when the Whittier earthquake happened. When the Whittier quake happened in 1987 there really wasn’t a formalized system for responding to those disasters.”
Collins said that after the Mexico City quake in 1985, followed shortly by the Whittier quake, fire services were not ready to respond to multiple, or even one, building collapsing.
“The (L.A. County) Board of Supervisors asked the fire chief when the swift water rescue team was forming, ‘Are we ready for big earthquakes?’ The answer for us was ‘No,’ ” Collins said. “We had that deer-in-the-headlights look when it came to big buildings collapsing. And what are we supposed to do to properly shore up, stabilize, cut through, to find that victim? There truly wasn’t a methodology formalized at that point.”
So the L.A. County Fire Department assembled a group of firefighters who had experience in various forms of rescue to develop a plan over the next few years. California maintains the highest standards in the country for youth football safety,” Newsom said. “We owe that to the legions of families in California who have embraced youth sports.”
Ron White, president of the California Youth Football Alliance, thanked Newsom for pledging to not sign the bill in a video message posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
“We collectively look forward to working with you and the California legislative body to drive the California Youth Football Act as the most comprehensive youth tackle football safety measure in the country,” White said.
Meanwhile, the 1989 Loma Prieto quake prompted the U.S. Congress to form a national response system, the FEMA Search and Rescue Task Force system. There are 28 task forces around the country composed of 80-person teams that go out the door with 60 tons of equipment. There are eight task forces in California.
California has “the most people at risk from the most widest range of hazards,” Collins points out.
In 1995, California teams spent four months conducting search and rescue operations in Oklahoma City after a domestic terrorist used a bomb-laden truck to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and injured 680 others.
“We took a system that was really developed for earthquakes and honed it for this ‘collapse exploration’ — a terrorist attack that really wasn’t envisioned,” Collins said. The searchers recovered body parts and bodies while searching for survivors in the debris.
The Los Angeles USA-2 team also assisted after the 911 terrorist attacks that demolished the World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan and damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2002, killing 2,753 people. And they showed up to help after the La Conchita mud flow disaster in 2005 and the Montecito mud flow disaster in 2018, which together killed 33 people.
Collins says the teams today “are some of the most highly trained rescuers in the world, working out of your neighborhood fire stations by design. … You are going to have exactly the opposite of what happened the morning of the Whittier quake.”