Wendy Greuel for City Controller

Quake thrusts Greuel into the spotlight

Councilwoman acting as mayor while Villaraigosa and Garcetti are on vacation finds herself on TV assuring residents that city is taking all necessary precautions.

By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 30, 2008

When the earthquake hit, City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel of Studio City found herself at the helm of the country's second-largest city in what could have been a life-threatening disaster.

Greuel was acting mayor of Los Angeles because Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was in London, where he is vacationing with two of his children on a trip that includes a fishing expedition to Iceland. Council President Eric Garcetti normally serves as mayor when Villaraigosa is out of town, but he was in Hawaii, where he was training as part of his service as an officer in the Navy Reserve.

So the job fell to Greuel, council president pro tem.

"It's been exciting," she said with a weary grin at an afternoon news conference about the city's earthquake response.

Greuel was presiding over a City Council meeting at which trash fees were being debated when the tremors began. She was whisked away to the city's Emergency Operations Center, which was activated six minutes after the quake hit. Once there, deep in the bowels of City Hall, she was briefed by city Emergency Management Department General Manager James Featherstone.

After taking a call from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Greuel briefed Villaraigosa by phone and updated her fellow council members. At the same time, she was paging her husband and checking on her 3-year-old son, who was in preschool and "didn't feel a thing."

Two hours later, Greuel was standing in front of television news cameras in the mayor's office, reassuring residents that the city was spared major damage or injuries and was taking all the precautions necessary.

"All of us who live in Southern California live with the possibility of an earthquake each and every day," Greuel, who is running for city controller in 2009, told reporters. "Today we were lucky."