It began with 30 seconds of terror in Monday’s pre-dawn darkness and stretched into a day-long nightmare of fire and flood and devastation and death.
The Northridge Earthquake shook Southern California awake with a series of jackhammer jolts at 4:31 a.m. PST. It crumpled buildings, leveled freeway overpasses and ignited plumes of gas-fed flames.
The first deaths came within moments, as the 164-unit Northridge Meadows apartments collapsed into an underground garage, the second and third stories smashing onto the first. At least 15 people died there.
Four hours later, one woman was still standing vigil. Her name was Hyan Sook Lee and she stood looking for some sign that her husband and 14-year-old son would emerge, that searchers would find them under that mountain of debris.
She had managed to crawl from her first-floor apartment. So had her other son, Jason, though his leg was broken.
But her husband, Phil Soom, 47, and her son, Howard, were still inside.
“It was a big shaking and everything fell down,” Lee said.
At 8:30 a.m., paramedic Dave Thompson approached her.
“Ma’am, listen to me. Your son, how old is your son?” he asked. “This son is dead, ma’am. He is dead.”
Lee dissolved into tears. An hour later, Thompson again brought the worst of news. Her husband was also dead. There was no way he could have survived.
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Bescher Bannout moved to California just two weeks ago from Delray Beach. He abandoned his belongings and fled barefoot and bleeding from Northridge Meadows.
“All we were thinking about was getting out,” Bannout said. “We tried to go down the stairs, but the stairs were gone. Finally, we got down from the fire escape. We have nothing with us. No clothes, no car, no glasses. I knew about earthquakes when I moved here, but I wasn’t expecting anything like this.”
The Northridge Meadows toll could go higher than 14, fire Capt. Wake Jones said. Some residents are still missing and hope is slipping away.
“I don’t think we will find more survivors,” Jones said. “We are using sound devices and don’t hear any more voices.”
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Many more might have died at Northridge Meadows but for the impromptu rescue operation of survivors and others who arrived on the scene, said Erik Pearson, a certified emergency technician.
“There were five or six of us,” he said. “We worked as a team rescuing about 150 people from the third and second stories. … We formed a human chain, stretching fire hoses between balconies and using a ladder to reach people.
“People were screaming. They were crawling all over each other. People came down in front and between your legs.”
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Such rescues happened all over Los Angeles.
At a shopping center near the apartments, rescuers raced against time and frequent aftershocks to free an injured maintenance worker.
Eight hours after the quake, they brought him out. His legs were crushed. But he was coherent and able to talk to his rescuers.
The man, Salvador Pena, was caught behind the wheel of his street sweeper, buried beneath tons of rubble at the bottom of a collapsed three-story garage.
Throughout the hours of extrication, paramedics remained at Pena’s side. “He was in a lot of pain and he kept saying, ‘Come down and pray with me, come down and pray,'” said firefighter Rey Lavalle, who comforted Pena in Spanish. —
The earthquake surged through Southern California with unimaginable power, sending sections of freeway surging upward, knocking down overpasses and splitting part of the roadway in two.
One of its victims was a Los Angeles motorcycle officer, who died after plunging 30 feet from a collapsed section of state Highway 14.
“I felt a light coming up from behind me,” said Mark Southard, 35, of San Francisco. “[The officer) just came tumbling, cartwheeling off the end. I could see his mouth moving. It was like a UFO.”
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All across the San Fernando Valley, the sprawling suburbs northwest of downtown Los Angeles, residents struggled to right their lives amid scenes all too familiar to South Floridians who survived Hurricane Andrew.
“This place was moving like a jackhammer was going at it,” said Richard Goodis of Sherman Oaks. “Our bedroom wall tore away. I was looking at the ceiling one moment, then I was looking at the sky. I thought we were dead.”
“We didn’t think we would make it this morning,” said his wife, Maris. “We said this is it … I love you.”
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The earthquake left the valley towns with an other-worldly look, jagged trenches across normally swarming highways and towers of fire bubbling up from water-filled streets.
Exploding gas lines sparked hundreds of fires and destroyed dozens of homes.
“We had five minutes after the quake before the fire started,” said Al McNeill, 50, whose Granada Hills home of 17 years was destroyed. “There was a tremendous explosion in the street; it shot flames maybe 300 feet high. The whole street was on fire. Even the tall palm trees were burning.”
More than 70 mobile homes were destroyed near Sylmar, not far from the epicenter of the 1971 Los Angeles earthquake.
The fire spread from trailer to trailer. It took firefighters nearly an hour to get to the mobile-home park; residents had no water pressure to fight the blazes themselves. They were helpless.
Standing in the street in her blue bathrobe, Marina Cappas sobbed and clutched her husband’s waist as flames took her trailer home.
“Oh, my house in burning. Oh, Jesus, it’s burning,” she said, her legs buckling beneath her. “I can’t believe it. I’m standing here watching my house burn.”
Cappas had carried her cat and some cash out of the trailer, but as the house burned, she began to think of possessions she was forced to leave behind.
“My pictures,” she said. “I didn’t even get my pictures out.”
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The quake is the latest in a string of calamities to befall Southern California, following riots and mudslides and brushfires. For some, it was the last disaster they were willing to face.
Wendy Chalson of Sherman Oaks swears she won’t experience it again.
“I have a wall unit I screwed into the wall in case of earthquakes. Well, it fell on me,” Chalson said.
“I’m moving to Tennessee. I’m outta here.”
