Now, The

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

At 5:04 p.m. last Tuesday, precisely a week after the devastating earthquake, church bells pealed throughout San Francisco to mark the city's survival and recovery. But a few churches declined to join in the commemoration, which had been requested by Mayor Art Agnos, because the reverberations from the tolling might have brought cracked belfries tumbling down. About 90 minutes after the clangor of the bells died out came the ominous rumbling of yet another aftershock, one of thousands that have done little discernible damage but are likely to keep rattling the nerves of residents for weeks.

The sequence was almost too patly symbolic of the situation of San Francisco and its surrounding Bay Area. On the surface, the city had almost returned to normal. By subway under the bay, by ferry across it and by circuitous routes around the area, the vast majority of employees found their way back to reopened businesses, despite the continuing closure of the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge and two freeways. The colossal traffic jams that planners feared never developed. Tons of rubble from collapsed walls and shattered windows had been hauled off by a fleet of dump trucks that came from as far away as Palo Alto (35 miles). Virtually all San Francisco streets were open, though yellow tape still closed off hundreds of sidewalks adjacent to cracked buildings that might yet collapse. The World Series resumed Friday night at Candlestick Park, and even the tourist business showed signs of revival. To prepare for a meeting of 5,000 plastic surgeons, the Moscone Convention Center was forced last week to evict 1,000 homeless people, who were shifted to Army barracks in the Presidio and to the helicopter carrier U.S.S. Pelileu, which served as a floating dormitory. By apt coincidence, the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies held its convention, as scheduled, in San Francisco last week.

But the area was speckled with damage that will take weeks or even months to clean up and repair. The shattered portion of the I-880 freeway in Oakland will have to be torn down, and the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-decker that skirts downtown San Francisco, is riddled with cracks in the support columns. Officially, it is supposed to reopen next spring, but one structural engineer who has examined it says, "I'd never go back on that s.o.b. again. No matter how much they shore it up, there is no way to make it safe." Pier 45, the city's main fishing pier, was closed because inspectors found deep fissures running the length of the pier floor. With no alternative pier to sail from, the 150-boat commercial-fishing fleet has been idled just as the herring and Dungeness crab season was about to open. Other damage ranged from cracks in the paving of the main runway at Oakland International Airport to the rotting of 125,000 crates of strawberries at Watsonville, in the South Bay area, spoiled when electrical failure knocked out refrigeration equipment. And somewhere in Oakland 200 snakes and lizards, including a 6-ft. python, are at large, having escaped from twisted cages at the East Bay Vivarium. Fortunately, none are poisonous.

The quake was far and away the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history in terms of dollars -- thankfully, not lives. The confirmed death toll reached 64, and seems very nearly complete. Only six people are still listed as missing; probably only one or two bodies, if any, remain to be dug out of the mangled cars on I-880. More than 3,000 people were injured and 14,000 made homeless. Estimates of property damage, however, are rising rapidly. The unofficial tally hit $7.2 billion last week, and is expected to top out somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion -- enough to produce a financial aftershock that will reverberate throughout California and the country.

Only about one in five Bay Area homes was covered by earthquake insurance, and generally for only 85% to 90% of its value. (Earthquake insurance can cost as much as $800 a year for a $200,000 house.) Jack Byrne, chairman of Fireman's Fund, figures that insurers will eventually shell out $2.5 billion to repair earthquake damage. They stand to recover perhaps two-thirds of that from international reinsurers -- Lloyd's of London is the biggest -- which protect insurers against catastrophic losses. Still, the earthquake claims, coming less than a month after the devastation caused by Hurricane Hugo, could set off a chain reaction. Reinsurers might become reluctant to continue backstopping American insurers, which in turn would write fewer policies and raise premiums -- and not just on earthquake insurance.

( California, where America's tax revolt began in 1978 with Proposition 13 rolling back property levies, will have to consider a tax boost. The state has begun payments out of a $1 billion emergency fund, but Governor George Deukmejian does not intend to drain that fund, and even if he did, more would be required. The Governor is expected to call the state legislature into special session in another week or so to decide how much more relief is needed and how to pay for it. It is hard to see how any significant amount could be made available without a hike in either sales or gasoline taxes. Deukmejian, who has taken a Bush-like antitax position, said last week that such a boost "would be a last resort."

In Washington Congress quickly passed, and President Bush signed, a measure making $3.4 billion available to disaster victims, mostly in California; $2.85 billion of that will be new money. Legislators pointedly exempted the relief funds from the spending cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, but, in a somewhat surprising burst of honesty, agreed to count them as part of the budget deficit. Though New York Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan asserted that the relief money will have to be made up by cuts in other programs, that is most unlikely, and no one in Washington will even whisper the T word. Most likely, the $3 billion, and more that California lawmakers warned they will request later, will be financed by simply running the money- printing presses a bit faster and making the budget deficit larger and more intractable.

One way or another, and at whatever cost, the earthquake damage will be repaired. The bigger question is whether the Bay Area's prosperity will be affected over the long term. Though the region's economy is still growing, at least since 1983 it has fallen behind that of the Los Angeles area, and the Bay Area has lost relative importance as a financial, insurance and manufacturing center. It is too early to tell whether the earthquake will affect that trend, especially since the Los Angeles area is equally, if not more, vulnerable to the fearsome Big One.

The Bay Area quake, officially known as the Loma Prieta Quake after a mountain perched almost atop the epicenter, was retrospectively upgraded last week to 7.1 on the Richter scale, vs. an original 6.9. Big all right, but still not the Big One.

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washingon and Lee Griggs/San Francisco