DEVASTATING JOLT IN JAPAN : Heartening, Grim Sights Greet California Official : Tour: Seismic panel director is cheered by still-standing high-rises. But he despairs at many collapsed buildings.

KOBE, Japan —  The day started with an easy boat trip from Osaka to the partly reopened port of Kobe, a city once again teeming with activity.

It ended after a 12-mile trek, with a grimly unsuccessful rescue attempt that left the executive director of California’s Seismic Safety Commission, L. Thomas Tobin, saying he wished that some of Sacramento’s politicians could see this place.

As firefighters and police pulled a rigid body from the wreckage of an old wooden house in a ravaged Kobe neighborhood Friday night and covered it with a blanket, Tobin said: “I just wish the people who make the laws . . . could come and see this sort of thing happen. . . . It’s what all of our mitigation efforts are designed to avoid.”

Earlier, there were both heartening and depressing sights as Tobin walked through the earthquake damage zone.

After a slow start, government convoys were entering Kobe every few minutes. Food and drink were being handed out every few blocks. And an astonishing variety of heavy equipment--cranes, trucks and bulldozers--had been deployed throughout the city. Demolition efforts were under way in earnest, with the heavy, noisy equipment digging continuously into the rubble.

Amid a constant din of sirens, heavily laden relief trucks were being ushered through by traffic officers holding other vehicles at bay.

But the small recovery efforts were the most touching--residents by the hundreds stacking fallen roof tiles and other debris into neat piles for removal, people reopening their shops or starting cooking fires in small neighborhood camps that have blossomed where homes had been.

Tobin took scores of pictures to show people back home. He photographed the hundreds of boxes of Washington state apples being distributed gratis, and the still-intact three- and four-story buildings that had slumped badly to one side as a result of ground failure, the liquefaction of the weak, water-saturated soil of a city built on landfill.

Despite seeing two small steel-frame buildings that had collapsed, and many others whose veneers had fallen, Tobin said, “It’s too early to know how steel buildings have performed here.

“Yes, there is a failed steel building or two,” he said at one point. “But in most cases, only a poorly attached front of bricks has fallen, and the frame seems intact. We can’t say for sure, because cracks may be invisible, but the building itself has not sagged or fallen.”

There were a few high-rise buildings damaged downtown--but for the most part, Tobin pointed out, only at their connecting points with other buildings. The separate structures may have suffered “differential shaking,” or crashing into one another, he said.

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“There’s a lot of damage where something has been added on later,” he said. “One of the fights we have over our (California) building codes are these add-ons, which frequently cause a lack of integrity in design and weaknesses in joints and connections. That, not steel failure, may be what we are seeing here.”

Tobin came upon a four-story building teetering at a 30-degree angle toward the street. As Tobin was taking pictures, Yoshinori Iwasaki of Kyoto’s Georesearch Institute approached. “Settlement in saturated sand caused this,” Iwasaki said.

“One of the differences here from Northridge is the larger extent of ground failure,” Tobin said. “In Northridge, we really had to look for it. Here, it is everywhere.”

But not in Doug Wells’ neighborhood. The Boulder, Colo., man has been living in Kobe and teaching in an adult school. He came up to say that five miles away, in his hillside area built on bedrock, there was scant damage: “My building doesn’t have a crack.

“I had asked my students, ‘Do you have earthquakes?’ ” Wells recalled. “They said: ‘No. That’s why we moved here. There’s only a mild earthquake danger.’ ”

As night fell Friday and Tobin walked toward the nearest operating railroad station in search of a train to Osaka, he was moving faster than the crawling traffic. The scene could have been part of “a Fellini movie,” he said.

People were hauling luggage or other belongings along narrow sidewalks, past collapsed homes. Every few blocks, workers gave out blankets, tea, water and rice cakes. An occasional vendor sold a more elaborate dinner from the back of a car for 500 or 600 yen--the equivalent of $5 or $6.

Tobin noticed bright spotlights a block from the main thoroughfare. It was a fire engine lighting the scene of the rescue attempt. Sixty rescue workers were involved, and there were a few quiet onlookers. A body was retrieved, and there was a sudden call for a stretcher, although no one showed much emotion.