STATE OFFICIALS RUSH TO BEAT DEADLINE FOR FEDERAL DISASTER AID.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

California officials raced against the clock Tuesday to meet a federal deadline to submit catastrophic response plans - making the state eligible for some of the $2.5 billion in homeland security grants to prepare for the next disaster or terrorist strike.

The state report, which was still in draft form Tuesday and was expected to be sent later in the day, is part of President George W. Bush's new plan to ensure that states and large cities are ready for large emergencies.

Bush asked for the plans after the destruction and evacuation of New Orleans as a way to get states and cities to focus on assessing their strengths and weaknesses, identifying their needs and improving their ability to prepare for and respond to a disaster.

The reports focused mainly on new mass-evacuation plans.

``It's difficult to envision a situation in California where we would see mass evacuations on the scale we saw in Houston and Louisiana,'' said Eric Lamoureux, spokesman for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. ``But there is a potential when you look at a terrorist event or bioterrorism situation where there may be a need to move a large amount of people.''

Lamoureux said officials were tinkering with the report as the deadline approached.

``In the next couple of hours it will be formally submitted,'' he said.

He said the report looks at opening up both directions of major highways to speed evacuations; identifying emergency shelters in advance and setting up communication between counties and other government agencies.

While the report praises some of the state's readiness plans, such as evacuating people along the coast ahead of a tsunami, it raises a number of questions. The area's major shortcoming is its hospital emergency medical system, which can barely handle the day-to-day flood of sick patients and those injured in car crashes and violent incidents.

Ellis Stanley, general manager of the city's Emergency Preparedness Department, said plans have been developed on how to evacuate people from near the ocean in the event of a tsunami and from localized areas in the case of a large earthquake, detonation of a ``dirty bomb'' or a chemical release.

``How do you evacuate for a tsunami?'' That's kind of easy because everybody is going to be going in one direction, away from the ocean,'' Stanley said. ``It's not as complicated as doing a high-risk area evacuation.

``As far as a plan that would dump 4 million people out of a 5,000-square-mile city - no, we don't have that. We have to evacuate according to our hazard profile. And you can't just look at the city boundaries, but you have to look at the 10 million people in the Los Angeles County area, too, and apply those same evacuation decision-support profiles to the whole area.''

Casey Chel, the disaster management officer for Long Beach, said officials don't have a plan to evacuate the whole county.

``I don't think anybody in the Los Angeles Basin can honestly plan to evacuate the whole basin,'' Chel said. ``That's kind of what this federal requirement is.''

Randolph Hall, founder of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events at the University of Southern California, said the Los Angeles area is well-prepared for a conventional terrorist attack and has developed excellent agreements with nearby jurisdictions to come to its aid in the event a disaster overwhelms local resources.

But Hall said local officials have not put much thought into what should be done in the event terrorists detonated a small nuclear bomb somewhere in the county.

``There was a time in the 1950s and '60s when civil defense was a major area of focus - how do we shelter people in the event of a nuclear attack? But we've since decided it wasn't an important expenditure because the casualties would be so large there wasn't much we could do about it.

``But in looking at a terrorist attack using a nuclear weapon that would not destroy the entire city of Los Angeles, but a portion of it, it would cause nuclear fallout and radioactivity in a wider area. And we really haven't planned how we would respond, either at the individual level or the medical-care level in such an event.''

The submission of the reports is also designed to help federal officials invest funds into the communities facing the greatest risk of a disaster or terrorist attack.

This follows complaints from officials in the largest states and heavily populated areas that smaller states and rural areas received more funding per capita.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the federal government has doled out $8.6 billion to first-responders, including $1 billion in California.

Earlier this month, the federal Homeland Security Department announced it would provide $765 million in direct funding to high-threat urban areas.

James Carafino, a homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said the risk-based formulas have become more sophisticated and that he expects larger cities, such as Los Angeles, to get a larger share of the money.

In terms of how well officials have spent the money, Carafino said it's been a ``mixed bag'' nationwide.

``I put California in the middle of the pack,'' Carafino said. ``They initially spread the money out willy-nilly, but they have also done some regional planning. California gets in the solid B grade range. I wouldn't call them the best, but I certainly wouldn't call them the worst.''

Cmdr. Mark Leap, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau, said the city will compete with 35 other large urban areas for the $765 million in funding.

``The Department of Homeland Security will look at our capabilities, measure our risks and score our grant proposals,'' Leap said. ``The grant proposals that come out with the highest scores will receive the most money.''

Troy Anderson, [phone]

troy.anderson(at)dailynews.com