Convoy of Patients to Awaken Memories for Quake Survivors

On the morning of Feb. 9, 1971, the 97 Olive View Hospital employees evacuated 615 sick and injured patients from a twisted, crumbling hospital building after an earthquake that measured 6.6 on the Richter scale.

Twenty of the employees who were there that disastrous morning will be back at the site late next month, reporting for work in a resplendent new Olive View Medical Center. Several told what it was like then and how they feel now about returning:

Donna Robinson is unusually qualified to be in charge of next month’s big move from Mid-Valley Hospital in Van Nuys to Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar.

“If I could evacuate 600 patients from a crumbling building in less than four hours, I can surely move 125 in one day after months of planning,” Robinson said.

Robinson was the nursing director in charge of the original Olive View’s emergency room at the time of the quake. As one of the first hospital officials to arrive at the scene, she immediately set up an emergency treatment area on the grass, running back and forth into the building to get supplies and to lead patients to safety.

Now Robinson is associate director of nursing for the entire new Olive View hospital and again finds herself responsible for the safe transfer of patients. This time, however, her goal is much simpler:

“We plan to feed them breakfast in Van Nuys and lunch in Sylmar,” she said.

The move, slated for a Saturday in late April, will entail a convoy of about 15 ambulances, a bus, several vans, possibly a police escort and helicopter airlifts, and constant radio communication between facilities.

If all goes well, she said, the number of Mid-Valley patients will have been reduced to about 85, because non-emergency patients and those awaiting elective surgery have been rescheduled.

Robinson says she’s well aware of the priorities in transferring patients after having dispatched hundreds to hospitals throughout Los Angeles County on the morning of the Sylmar earthquake. What she remembers most is the patients’ fear about what would happen to them or where they would be sent.

This time, she said, patients will will be fully briefed. Their morning nurses will travel with them, and their afternoon nurses will greet them at Olive View.

“When you think of a hospital patient, you think they all have to be transported flat on their backs in an ambulance,” Robinson said. “Well, I remember the only thing available that morning was an RTD bus. I realized then you can safely take care of about 50 mental health patients on a bus.”

She said only the sickest of patients will be transported in ambulances. Others will be driven in county vans equipped for the handicapped, or in buses.

Carolyn Wooley said she felt strange recently when she toured the rebuilt Olive View.

Wooley, a nurse who led 34 mentally ill patients down four crumbling flights of stairs, no longer feels secure with the simple arrangement of four walls, a floor and a ceiling. Returning to the site of disaster brought back vivid memories, she said.

“When I walked through the new Olive View, I got a real eerie feeling. I wondered if I would be as calm if it happened again.”

On the morning of the quake, Wooley, who was the overnight psychiatric head nurse, was thrown against the nurses’ station. When the trembling stopped, she and the other nurses began shouting.

“We yelled at the patients to grab the hand of anybody near them and just stand still,” she said. “We started leading them down the stairwell, but the stairs were cracked and crumbling. In places, you didn’t even have the full width of the stair.”

Wooley decided to run back to check the condition of the stairwell at the opposite end of the ward.

“When I got to the end of the hallway, the door to the stairwell was 10 feet away from me,” she said. “The wing had broken away and I could look five stories down.”

Wooley’s staff and 34 patients did make it down the disintegrating stairs, and, within three hours, her patients were on a bus to another county hospital.

“Now, I look at the outside of buildings and wonder if anything can fall off,” said Wooley, who is now assistant nursing director of mental health at Olive View.

“I’ve seen walls crumble and steel bend,” she said. “I know that no building is 100% safe. Not this one. Not any one.”

Margaret Mishima does not describe crumbled hospital wings, jagged plate-glass windows and bizarrely twisted doors when she talks about the earthquake. Instead she recalls total darkness--being trapped alone in a pitch-black operating room for three hours.

Mishima, who at the time was an operating room nurse, had just taken in a tray of instruments when the shaking began. It threw her to the floor and into darkness. She heard two young nurses scream and “a deep-pitch squeaking” inside the walls.

“I knew it was an earthquake and I knew I had to get out,” she said. “But I couldn’t see a thing around me. Nothing.”

Mishima groped about the room to find the door. She said she felt crunching, crackling glass beneath her feet. When she pushed the door, it was jammed shut. She tried to get to an outside door through a maze of lockers in the doctors’ washroom.

“When I felt around the lockers, they must have shifted, because I couldn’t find my way,” she said. “I thought one would fall on top of me, and no one would think to look for me in there.”

Back in the operating room, she tapped on the door, calling, “Hello, hello! I’m in here!”

After three hours the door was pried open.

Mishima, now a nurse anesthetist, said she carried a flashlight in her pocket for months after the earthquake. But, because of her hours in the darkness, she does not carry back to the new facility the memory of devastation that many of her co-workers do.

“I wasn’t afraid of what I couldn’t see,” she said. “I’m not at all afraid to return.” But she jokes that the theme of darkness continues.

In the new hospital, with its panoramic views, Mishima’s laboratory ironically will be out of the sunlight on the hospital’s only subterranean level.