By Kristin Bender and Sean Maher
The Oakland Tribune
OAKLAND, Calif. — With the sunlight dimming, Dr. James Betts climbed a firetruck ladder, made his way through the crawl space beneath a collapsed freeway overpass, reached into the flattened red Ford and prepared for a lifesaving surgery amputating a 6-year-old boy’s leg.
Julio Berumen had been tossed forward from the back seat of the car when a 500-ton cement crossbeam landed on the front of the car. His left leg was trapped beneath the driver’s seat, his right leg crushed beneath the passenger’s seat.
Dead at the steering wheel was his 27-year-old mother, Petra Berumen. Julio’s 9-year-old sister, Cathy, who had been sitting beside him, had been pulled from the car.
The violent shaking from the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake had collapsed the upper deck of the Cypress Structure, killing 42 people. Caltrans workers were urging Betts to hurry, worried the entire structure soon would collapse.
Using a fire department chain saw, Betts and a fellow surgeon split front-seat passenger Yolanda Orozco’s body enough to free one of Julio’s legs.
In shadows cast by emergency halogen lamps, Betts, chief of pediatric surgery at Children’s Hospital Oakland, lay on his belly in the back of the car and began cutting off the leg at the knee.
“Everything depended on getting his leg off without killing him, then,” Betts said. “And I thought, not only can I not let this boy die, I can’t let down everyone who’s been up here risking their lives. We’d all come together to save this life.”
Betts and a fellow surgeon were on their bellies in the back seat of the dark car.
“I cut through his knee and reached in with my hand to grab his artery so he wouldn’t bleed out,” Betts said. “We pulled him out, put clamps on all his open blood vessels and took him down the firetruck ladder to the hospital.”
Twenty years later, Cathy and Julio Berumen declined to be interviewed for this story, but Betts, now 62, said he thinks of the ordeal every day.
He is not alone.
The first good news
Hundreds of doctors, nurses, firefighters, paramedics and emergency personnel were on duty at 5:04 p.m. Oct. 17, 1989. Some were involved in dramatic rescues and lifesaving procedures. Others had to think on their feet and go about business as usual delivering babies, treating heart attack victims and dealing with the emergencies and traumas they faced every day.
No matter what their role 20 years ago, emergency crews were the backbone of rescuing and saving countless lives after the earth shook and forever changed the Bay Area’s consciousness about quakes.
The sound of a jackhammer or the smell of motor oil can bring back the memories of the six days David Burns spent working as a paramedic supervisor for Allied Ambulance in Oakland after the Loma Prieta earthquake.
“Anytime I hear a hydraulic jack, it instantly takes me back to those times,” said the 47-year-old who now works as director of emergency management for UCLA. “I dealt with the post-traumatic stress disorder for about a year and a half. I had the long sleepless nights, shakes and tremors, got therapy and recovered. I’ve been working in the field ever since.”
He spent six days overseeing 25 ambulances and as many as 100 rescue workers at the Cypress Structure. Within the first 24 hours, the ambulance company had several thousand calls, compared with several hundred on a regular day.
Then a Caltrans worker drove off the Cypress Structure because he did not see the road ahead. He wasn’t hurt badly, but “that really reinforced safety up there,” Burns said.
Burns was there when Julio and Cathy Berumen were rescued from their crushed car and had just returned to the structure from a break when a Caltrans worker spotted a vehicle trapped underneath the collapsed freeway. Inside, 89 hours after the quake, longshoreman Buck Helm, 57, was still alive.
“I got a call about 3 a.m.,” Burns said. “Six or seven hours later, you had the crane lifting him out of there.”
It was Burns who lifted Helm onto the gurney and handed him off to a team that would rush him to the trauma center. It was the first good news the emergency medical workers had received since the freeway collapsed.
“We were very frustrated,” he recalled. “We knew there were some survivors in there, but we could not find them. We went in there three, four, five times with everyone on their bellies, searching. The military sent in satellite technology, and we had cameras that we sent in.
“They tried every little electronic gadget that they had at the time, and we could not find anything. When the Caltrans worker located Buck moving around, it raised everybody’s morale.”
Sadly, nearly a month later, Helm became the 67th death from the earthquake. The quake also injured 3,000 people and caused an estimated $7 billion in damage.
Twenty years later, Burns said he still has fears of being under a freeway overpass. “If I am driving and I get under an overpass and I see a red light, I am almost tempted to go through it,” he said.
Although communication was a challenge with the various agencies involved, the quake was “one those memorable events you never forget,” Burns said. “It’s also a constant reminder that we all need to be prepared.”
‘Trained to fight’
On Oct. 17, 1989, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center engineers Victor Moreno III and Rudy Aguilera already had put in a full day’s work: Two cars had crashed on hospital grounds, one breaking a parking lot gate and the other careening through the automatic emergency admissions doors, driven by a 10-year-old child who had been left alone in the car.
Moreno, now 57, and Aguilera, now 60, finally were sitting down for a cup of coffee when the emergency generator roared into action, signaling that normal power had been lost.
Next, the fire alarm went off, and then the boiler alarm. Then the walls moved as the earth shook.
The men fled the building and turned to see bricks falling from its walls and large cracks snaking across the outdoor stucco.
“I’m thinking, do I go back in there and the building comes down and I get trapped, or do I stay outside, regroup and move back in?” Moreno said. “We’re trying to figure out, is the building going to fall in the direction where we’re standing? Will it be like in the movies and it just collapses in?”
When the rumbling stopped, Moreno and Aguilera rushed back inside and began checking for dangerous gas leaks or structural damage. Within 30 minutes, 60 off-duty engineers had arrived at the hospital to help.
“In the work we do, you make sure your family’s taken care of, then you come help,” Moreno said. “Because that’s what we do. We’re a hospital.”
Running back into the building was a hard choice, Aguilera said, but one he had prepared himself to make.
“It was terrifying,” he said. “You’re trained to fight. But your body says, get the hell out of here. I remember years later, when 9/11 happened, I thought of all those firefighters and police, the guys who go into something that critical, and a lot didn’t come out. That’s what we were trained to do.”
Rising to the occasion
Patricia Munson was also trained to work under pressure. A nursing supervisor at the Berkeley campus of Alta Bates, she had returned to work her 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift after a few days off with a migraine headache.
Munson had been at the hospital for 20 years in 1989, and was accustomed to dealing with fights, police and media on scene for major incidents, questions from subordinates, and making sure that everyone from expectant mothers to patients who had been in bar fights got treatment.
“Never a dull moment,” said Munson, now 62.
She was sitting in her office when the shaking began. When it stopped, she ran to the operator booth, where she saw panicked hospital visitors running out the doors onto Ashby Avenue. She also saw every administrator on duty streaming toward her at the booth.
“There were seven or eight of them, and they all asked, me, ‘What do you want me to do?’” she recalled. So she gave them orders, dividing the administrators into pairs and sending them to check with the staff on each of the five floors, to look for damage and to make sure patients weren’t injured.
After they reported back, she called in off-duty nurses and doctors and readied the hospital to take in additional patients.
“By this time, I had already spoken to the emergency room, and the manager said, ‘I think we need to call a disaster.’ We had heard the Bay Bridge had collapsed,” Munson said. “I did not know if people would be coming in bleeding or with broken bones.”
Meanwhile, Munson got a call from a nurse manager at Herrick Hospital who told her there was structural damage at the psychiatric facility and that patients had been evacuated to nearby Berkeley High School. “She said, ‘I need help. I really need some help over here,’” Munson recalled.
So Munson had the hospital operator call a “code gray,” which is hospital-speak for a big-time problem. “Immediately I must have had 20 people down there,” she said.
She put them on shuttle buses, and they headed to Herrick to help out.
At the same time, Munson was trying to get through to her own husband and children to make sure they were all right. “Finally, my husband called to say that they were together and we’re OK,” she said. “That’s all I needed to hear. Then I could do anything.”
Luana Shiba-Harris, now the director of outpatient services for behavior health, was on duty at Herrick when the earthquake hit and the walls split apart, as they were designed to do in a major quake. No one was injured, but there was a chance the psychiatric patients were not going to handle the stress of a major earthquake. Surprisingly, patients who were severely depressed or suicidal that morning were calmer after the quake, she said.
“Somehow all their thoughts and fears about themselves went into the background, and they were really cooperative,” Shiba-Harris said.
Shiba-Harris credits the staff for staying calm under pressure. “Just looking back, we were really lucky. It could have been far worse,” she said. “With 9/11 and the Oakland hills fires later on, we have learned how we respond in disaster and calamity.
“I’m really proud that there is something in human nature that does allow us to rise to that occasion.”
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