Residents Evacuated Amid Confusion, Concern

Clutching clothes, bags and pets, scores of West Los Angeles residents abandoned their homes Thursday afternoon in a police-ordered evacuation designed to remove them from harm’s way while specialists disarmed a powerful car bomb.

“This is like living in Lebanon,” said Ichiro Yamanaka, a landscape designer, as he and his wife, Sachiko, piled into their black Maxima.

“Like a war,” Sachiko Yamanaka added. “I wonder what’s going to happen if it explodes? Is my house going to go pffft ?” Their cat, Hoges, meowed plaintively from an animal carrier on the back seat of the car. Then they roared away from the 2100 block of Colby Avenue, just yards from where a burned truck, loaded with explosives, was parked. The Yamanakas planned to spend the night in a Red Cross shelter set up at the Westwood Recreation Center on Sepulveda Boulevard.

Helmeted motorcycle police officers walked in pairs from house to house along Colby Avenue and other streets in the 16-block area that had been ordered cleared. They knocked on doors, telling people they would have to leave immediately.

“Several thousand” people would ultimately be affected by the evacuation, Los Angeles Police Lt. Fred Nixon said. Many, though, were not in their houses and apartments during the day and would not learn of their displacement until they returned home Thursday evening to find their streets blocked off.

“I feel terrible,” said Mary Hunt, 71, who put away a few breakables in her small apartment before leaving. “I can’t imagine someone doing such a terrible thing. Think what it’s costing taxpayers, let alone the horror of it.”

Packing a change of clothes and her toothbrush, Hunt planned to go to Oxnard to stay with her 91-year-old mother. As did many others, Hunt bemoaned the uncertainty of not knowing when she would be allowed to return. Residents, however, were finally allowed back in their homes at 6 p.m.

Yet even as Colby Avenue was rapidly emptied, mail carrier Robert Baca was not letting rain, hail, snow, dark of night or bomb keep him from his appointed rounds. He crossed police lines and--very quickly--scurried from home to home, delivering Thursday’s mail.

“I’m a Vietnam vet. I’m used to this,” Baca, 51, said. The police “told me not to let any grass grow under my feet. . . . They told me not to tarry.”

For others trying to reach work or other offices in the section of the Olympic corridor that was cordoned off, obstacles were plentiful. Traffic, diverted from Olympic, snarled side streets and jammed alleyways.

Greg Eyre, a 28-year-old law student, sat in his wheelchair on Olympic, eerily deserted of cars, buses and trucks, and contemplated the dangers at hand.

“It’s kind of interesting,” he said. He had intended to pick up tax forms at the Internal Revenue Service offices in a building near the explosives-laden truck.

Lee Friedman, who runs a private legal arbitration service in the same building, rued the cancellation of several hearings scheduled for Thursday. For the parties involved, he said, justice would have to be delayed.

Linda Howell, a paralegal, could not reach her offices in the Trident Center on Olympic when she came into work Thursday morning. Desperate to reach her desk in time for an important call to a client in Japan, she parked her car on a side street.

But Thursday afternoon, clad in high heels and diamond earrings, she wandered the side streets unable to find the car.

“What a mess,” she said. Finally, a police officer located the car for her.

The evacuation was slow in getting started, making for odd scenes early in the day. For example, cars were stopped from driving onto Olympic between Barrington Avenue and Sawtelle Boulevard. Yet not all places of business on that stretch were closed: At a Greek fast-food restaurant near Olympic and Barrington, 2 1/2 blocks from the explosives, the kitchen help stood in the front door watching as helicopters flew overhead.

Doctors from a medical building at Olympic and Barrington, workers from a plating factory and other workers milled about in the street, sharing the latest rumors and asking each other and reporters what was really happening.

And, at a convenience store on the corner of Olympic and Barrington, walk-in traffic was brisk.

“It looks like a movie out there,” said a security guard in the store’s parking lot.

“Yeah,” manager Tom Kell said. “I never liked those bomb movies.”