Los Angeles Gets Ready

Los Angeles County likes to talk about its orange-juice joints, tabernacles, oil wells and graving docks, keep a stiff and silent upper lip over its floods and earthquakes. Nevertheless, to deal with such occasional unpleasantnesses, it has a Major Disaster Committee. Last week, just before Japan loosed its bombs on Pearl Harbor, an expanded version of this committee was preparing to grapple with the bigger unpleasantness of war. Now that it has to go into action, it is expected to do all right. Civilian Defense Chief Fiorello H. LaGuardia rates its setup "the first and best in the nation."

Headman of the Los Angeles County Defense Council is Sheriff Eugene W. Biscailuz. He can call into almost instant action some 200,000 operatives. His force includes regular cops and 15,000 emergency deputies, Legionnaires, Boy Scouts and air-raid wardens, Red Cross doctors and nurses, an air squadron of civilian flyers, who furnish their own planes.

The sheriff used to have a rescue unit of 25 station wagons, assembled under the direction of Cinemactor Lewis (Judge Hardy) Stone, but the unit has now been absorbed in the State Home Guard. If the regular telephone service is cut off, the Defense Council can employ two shortwave radio channels, a statewide teletype hookup, U.S. Forest Service lines, a private outlet of the Southern California Edison Co., five other wires that are kept secret.

It is the Council's theory that, in case of an attack, everybody in the county should stay put. Apart from the fact that the Army will need all roads in case of emergency, the business of evacuating Los Angeles County would take, at the minimum, 16 days. Another Council theory is: no blackouts. Instead, it plans to try out a system of changing light patterns. Thus, in case of trouble, traffic on Wilshire Boulevard (from the air, a steady band of light) would be shifted to other streets. Similar shifts are in order for other major arteries, but precise details are another secret.

A month ago the Council's setup got an all-out test when a fairly severe earthquake shook up the town of Torrance, 15 miles from Los Angeles. The civilian defenders were there almost as fast as the sheriff's men. They patrolled wrecked buildings, directed traffic, administered first aid, set up soup kitchens.

On display in Los Angeles last week was one of a half dozen air-raid shelters built by a Glendale contractor named Victor J. Nelson. The Nelson shelter was an above-ground type, attracted gapers, no buyers. But Nelson has plans for underground shelters, too, which the Defense Council has tentatively approved. Meanwhile in Hollywood Cinemactress Deanna Durbin is already building a house with a bombproof shelter. Miss Durbin said she didn't order it; the architect just put it in of his own accord.

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