Emergency, Seismic Safety Posts Filled

California has two new top officials to help handle disasters.

Henry Renteria, for 19 years director of Oakland’s Office of Emergency Services, was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as director of the state Office of Emergency Services.

Renteria, 55, succeeds Dallas Jones, former Gov. Gray Davis’ appointee to the post, which reports directly to the governor and is responsible for disaster planning, response, recovery and mitigation programs.

The office normally has a staff of about 450, but it expands considerably with temporary workers to respond to such disasters as earthquakes, floods and wildfires. It often works in such situations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the distribution of aid to victims.

Renteria assumed his new job, headquartered in Sacramento, Monday.

Two days later, Lucy Jones, well-known in the Los Angeles Basin for her 20 years as the U.S. Geological Survey’s lead earthquake spokeswoman in the Southland, was elected to a one-year term as chairwoman of the state Seismic Safety Commission.

The job is part time. Jones, 49, will remain in her present post as scientist-in-charge of the Geological Survey’s Pasadena office.

The commission meets 10 times a year. Jones succeeds Stan Moy in the leadership post.

Renteria said that he had been interviewed by Schwarzenegger before being named Emergency Services director and that the governor had emphasized how important it would be to maintain good communications at all times with local government as well as report to him immediately on any disaster in the state.

The Emergency Services director has traditionally been the governor’s right hand in disaster response.

On the day of the Northridge earthquake, Jan. 17, 1994, Richard Andrews, then chief of the office, flew with Gov. Pete Wilson to Los Angeles within hours and initiated reconstruction of fallen freeways in the metropolitan area.

Renteria had a 10-year career in suicide prevention and crisis intervention in Houston before taking an emergency services job in Contra Costa County, northeast of Oakland. A graduate of the University of Houston, he is married and has three grown children.

Jones is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Brown University. She has a doctorate in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is married to Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson, a native of Iceland. They have two teenage children.

Jones emphasized in an interview that the Seismic Safety Commission was a safety, not a scientific, panel and that only two of its 17 members were scientists.

The commission has a budget of less than $1 million a year, and, like other state agencies, is undergoing a performance evaluation ordered by Schwarzenegger.