A Child’s Touch, and Rescue Hope Is Revived

OAKLAND —  After discounting the possibility of finding anyone still alive in the mangled remains of the collapsed Nimitz Freeway, rescuers on Wednesday received fresh hope when they discovered a child survivor trapped in a car under piles of rubble.

Mayor Lionel Wilson, who in the morning said he was assured no survivors would be found, announced at an evening news conference that workers had heard a voice about 6 p.m. from a vehicle and confirmed the child was alive by touch.

Officials said 13 bodies were recovered from the site but feared many more would be found when 150 to 250 vehicles, including buses, are finally extricated from the rubble. Rescuers predicted it could take several days to untangle bodies trapped in the wreckage of vehicles.

The earthquake slammed the upper deck of Interstate 880 onto the lower level on a half-mile section not far from the approach to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Poor lighting and the wobbly condition of the collapsed portion forced officials to halt excavation efforts at 11:15 p.m. Tuesday.

Daylight didn’t help much Wednesday. Work resumed at a painstakingly slow pace, with officials warning that sound, movement or the “slightest aftershock” could send the freeway section tumbling to the ground.

Citizens who went to the site to volunteer stood by, frustrated and saddened that they were not allowed to look for survivors. But official searchers working with dogs had said in the morning they were virtually certain no more survivors would be found.

“We’ve done everything possible to be assured there are no people up there alive,” Wilson had told reporters. It was not immediately clear how the discovery of the survivor would alter search and rescue efforts.

The section that collapsed was built in the 1950s. It had been reinforced after the 1971 Sylmar quake in Southern California, but it would not meet today’s earthquake standards, said Kyle Nelson, a spokesman for Caltrans. Officials differed as to whether the technology exists to make such multi-columned freeways earthquake safe, and they were uncertain why the section collapsed.

The temblor trapped motorists between the freeway’s two decks, crushing many of them in pockets ranging in height from one to four feet. Shortly after the jolt hit, dozens of workers and residents from the largely industrial neighborhood raced to the site with flashlights, ladders, ropes and fire extinguishers. One man drove a forklift from a nearby warehouse, tearing down a fence to reach the freeway.

Side by side, firefighters, police and citizens raised ladders against the freeway walls and helped victims down, tying ropes around the waists of many of the injured to prevent falls. Rescuers were able to walk on small sections of the lower deck but had to squirm along much of it.

“It was really eerie,” said Don Rich, 47, a volunteer who rescued victims Tuesday night and returned Wednesday to offer help. “Some cars were smashed flat and others were in perfect condition.”

Throughout the long evening, silence was occasionally pierced by a cry. At one point, Rich said, he heard a child weeping, but he could not find the child. He said he pulled one man out of a car and started to drag him away before he realized the man was dead.

“There was literally blood running in the streets,” said Rich, an Oakland sculptor. “It was all over the ground level, running down the pillars, down into the gutter.”

The Oakland Fire Department used yellow and blue paint to spray codes on the freeway walls to indicate the location of victims and cars. William McElroy, 52, a boilermaker who helped rescue victims, said dust and smoke from small car fires obscured rescuers’ vision. “It was pitch black,” said McElroy, who lives two blocks from the freeway. “We went in there with flashlights and lanterns.” The stunned victims were mostly silent.

“When we pulled them out, they were all dazed,” he said. “All they knew was that somebody was rescuing them. They weren’t saying anything. They were in shock. The people who could went down ladders themselves.”

By 11 p.m, McElroy said, “We started losing hope. There was not a sound. We kept calling out, but no one answered.”

Heavy equipment that was removing debris shut down for the night 15 minutes later, but firefighters and others continued to shine flashlights and probe metal rods into the wreckage throughout the early morning hours. Dogs used in the Mexico City earthquake crawled among the rubble sniffing for survivors before the canine search was called off on Wednesday afternoon.

Cranes, bulldozers and other heavy equipment brought to the site by iron workers, carpenters and construction workers stood idle Wednesday as Caltrans officials tried to figure out how to extricate the victims and the cars without sending the freeway section to the ground.

“It is possible that if a piece of concrete is moved, the rest will come down like a domino,” said Craig Kocian, Oakland’s acting city manager. “Caltrans is making the decision how and when to move the blocks. Right now, it is like a deck of cards.”

By late afternoon, workers had begun reinforcing the freeway with steel and wood pipes to prevent another collapse, and a huge Navy helicopter lifted a tractor that could be operated by remote control on top of the upper deck. The tractor was to be used to remove concrete burying the vehicles.

Many of the volunteer rescuers were exasperated by their inability to do more. “Hey, if there are people alive up there, why can’t we get them out?” asked Dwain Tolbert, 32, a construction worker. “We are volunteering. If we get killed, it’s our own business.”

As volunteers grumbled about their uselessness, Caltrans officials expressed similar frustration about their inability to understand why the freeway collapsed. Greg Bayol, a Caltrans engineer and its San Francisco spokesman, said the freeway might have tumbled either because the sections pulled apart or because the columns holding the upper deck twisted. Twisting might have been prevented by jacketing the concrete columns in steel, a “minimal” project, he said.

“Are we doing soul searching? Of course we are,” he said. “The idea that a highway had the potential of killing 300 people--it’s horrible.”

William Schaefer, Caltrans’ chief engineer, disputed Bayol’s contention that the collapse could have been prevented. He said researchers at UC San Diego are now trying to devise ways to make multi-columned freeways earthquake-safe but they probably won’t have any answers for another year. Although engineers know how to design such safe structures, they do not know how to retrofit existing freeways, he said.

The Nimitz section was retrofitted in 1977 to prevent it from pulling apart latterly in an earthquake under a $54.2-million statewide program. Schaefer said that the retrofitting appears to have prevented the freeway from falling laterally off its support systems but obviously didn’t resolve other problems that caused the collapse.

“We don’t know why it collapsed,” he said. “We’re trying to find out.”