Like most Americans with family and friends in Southern California, President Clinton’s first instinct when learning of Monday’s earthquake was to pick up the phone and check on their well-being.
A quick call to his half-brother, Roger, found him to be all right if shaken from damage to his home near the quake’s epicenter.
Then, the president said, he “started calling folks in California in a more official capacity.”
Clinton was sleeping in after returning Sunday night from 12 days of meetings in Europe. He was briefed on the quake at about 8 a.m. (Washington time)-half an hour after it happened-by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros.
Watching the fires and devastation on TV as he worked, the president set in motion a chain of steps that concluded with his afternoon declaration of Southern California as a disaster area.
The declaration authorized a wide range of federal assistance for the people and governments of the region, said White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, whose parents live close to where two expressways collapsed in Sylmar. They were unhurt, she said, but their home was damaged.
Emergency federal assistance includes cash grants of up to $12,200 for people who lost their homes, temporary housing of up to 18 months, unemployment assistance, low-interest loans for individuals and businesses, rent assistance and crisis counseling.
Cisneros, Transportation Secretary Federico Pena and federal emergency director James Lee Witt left for Los Angeles after mobilizing the initial response from their agencies.
Witt’s office, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, set up a 24-hour emergency support team in Washington, which was in contact with the California state emergency operations center three or four times an hour.
He deployed a 20-person medical disaster team, four urban search-and-rescue teams and, from Denver, a 60-truck mobile emergency response system with telecommunications and electrical generating capacity.
U.S. Forest Service firefighting units were also sent in to help fight the numerous blazes that the earthquake caused.
“State and local governments are the first responders,” said Richard Krimm, associate director for response and recovery at FEMA, noting that California already had deployed eight search-and-rescue teams. “The federal government comes in just to supplement the state response.”
Krimm said the Army Corps of Engineers was placed on standby. “We’re concerned about the water supply,” he said.
After the California brush fires last fall and the Midwestern floods last summer, FEMA has about $1 billion in its disaster fund, Krimm said. Bills are still coming in from the two earlier disasters, and the agency may have to ask Congress for more money. Krimm said field workers already are equating Monday’s temblor with the 1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area, which cost the agency about $900 million.
Rebuilding the collapsed highways could be the most urgent and expensive need, Clinton said.
