Memories Of January 17, 1994

Twenty years (and about seventeen hours) ago, at 4:31 AM on Monday, January 17, 1994, I and about fifteen million of my closest friends all got one of the rudest wake up calls in our lives. I’m speaking, of course, of the Northridge earthquake.

It was a magnitude 6.9 temblor but went off pretty much right under our feet. (Our house is less than six miles due west of the epicenter.) The maximum ground acceleration was huge, more than 1.8G. We immediately lost power, phone, water, gas, as did two million other people in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Freeways collapsed. Apartment buildings pancaked down onto their bottom floors. Homes, stores, shopping malls, office buildings, and parking garages were turned to rubble. Fifty-seven people died, 1,500 suffered major injuries, over 16,000 were treated for minor injuries. Over 100,000 people found their houses or apartments to be uninhabitable. The damage cost over twenty billion dollars.

There are plenty of good news articles out there today about what happened that night and in the days that followed. Here’s what I remember about our “adventure”.

They say the shaking actually only lasted 20 to 30 seconds. You have no idea how long that time can be when you’re woken up, it’s dark, everything’s moving and shifting and falling, there’s a roar everywhere like there’s a freight train coming through the room, and you’re trying to get to your kids’ rooms. I would have guessed the shaking to have gone on at least twice that long. I had furniture sliding about and the bedroom door banging open and closed. I knew immediately what was going on. I then proceeded to start to do a few things I wasn’t supposed to.

Living in Southern California, you get regular reminders, public service announcements, documentaries on PBS, and news stories about what to do and what not to do in an earthquake. A few highlights include:

• Do NOT run outside if at all possible, many people are killed by debris falling on them. Being killed when the building collapses on you does account for a fair number of the deaths, but you’re still far safer staying inside.
• Do NOT try to move around too much inside, there may be large items (like couches and dressers) sliding and (like bookcases) falling over. Try to get down on the ground near something heavy (like a table) and HOLD ON so your rock & roll around with it instead of letting it slam into you. If you’re in bed, try to get onto the floor next to the bed. You want some furniture above you if the roof does come down, it will buy you a certain amount of crawl space underneath.
• Do NOT go stand in a doorway, although you’ve been told to since forever. There’s nothing special about doorways and you’ll get your fingers broken (or worse) as the door swings back & forth out of control.
• STAY OUT of the kitchen, it’s a death trap. All of the cabinets and drawers may come flying open and flinging their contents around the room. Many of those contents are sharp and many are glass, which will shatter.
• GET AWAY from windows, mirrors, shower doors, anything glass.
• If you can get there safely, an excellent place to shelter is on the floor in an interior hallway. It usually will be one of the last places to collapse if the building does go down, there usually aren’t any windows, and there usually isn’t a lot of furniture there.

With that in mind, even in the panic of the moment, I knew what to do and remembered most of the high points. But instead of staying put, I was headed to the kids’ rooms to make sure they were safe. The shortest path would have led me through the kitchen, but I remembered to not go there (good thing, too) and swung through the dining room instead. I wasn’t able to stand at all. It was like being on a skateboard that was on marbles which were on ice. So I crawled, the whole time screaming as loud as I could, “GET IN THE HALLWAY! GET IN THE HALLWAY!”

About the time I got to the hallway door the shaking started to subside. It was pitch black. If memory serves me (it was twenty years ago), I found my son in the hallway on the floor as he had been taught, with Janet (my first wife, the kids’ mother) getting one daughter from her room (she had slept though it) while I stumbled in to grab the other daughter from her room (she also had slept through it). Almost immediately the aftershocks started. We rode out two or three significant ones as we grabbed flashlights. I gave one to Janet and the kids and told them to sit tight in the hallway. I grabbed the other flashlight, threw on some clothes and shoes, and started the mental checklist of things to check for damage.

Check for gas leaks and turn it off at the meter. Look for structural damage and broken glass. Look for other dangers, such as downed power lines, trees about to tip over or break, walls about to fall down. All things considered, we got out lightly enough. There was plenty of stuff tossed onto the floor (that stay-out-of-the-kitchen advice was really, really good) and a few cracks in the walls, but nothing that made us think that the house might fall down.

Outside we had some of our cinder block walls that were either down or badly cracked and leaning, but nothing major other than that. While outside, we started running into all of our neighbors doing their inspections. Everyone was checking on everyone else to make sure that no one was hurt, to make sure that none of the houses had collapsed or had major structural damage. Most people had some broken glass (not sure how we missed that at our place) and everyone was rattled, but it didn’t look like there were any major injuries on our block.

The “urban legend” you might have heard about  people calling 9-1-1 in Los Angeles to ask about the “weird lights” in the sky? Where people were wondering if they were related to the earthquake somehow? It’s true, and if you were out wandering around at 4:45 AM on January 17th, you would understand why. The sky was freaking brilliantly clear and sharp, stars everywhere. The Milky Way stretched right from the eastern horizon to the western, straight up through the zenith, where Jupiter was very bright. A crescent moon was in the east, having risen about an hour earlier.  I knew what it was and I loved that aspect of it, but I have no doubt that there was a significant portion of the population that quite literally had no clue at all about what the night sky looked like from a dark location.

For Los Angeles had suddenly become a dark location, almost as dark as the heart of the Mohave Desert a couple hundred miles east. There were lights from cars and trucks, and some places such as hospitals and radio stations had emergency generators, but for nearly a hundred miles in every direction, the electricity had died and it was pitch black. Except for that spectacular, marvelous sky.

We didn’t have much time to look. I turned off the gas, went back inside, got a portable radio, and sat down with Janet and the kids to try to figure out what in hell had happened. The news over the next few hours got more and more grim. Massive damage, the death toll rising, the list growing of freeways made impassable by collapsed bridges and overpasses.

At home, once the sun came up, we started the cleanup. Things got put back onto shelves, furniture got shifted back into place. With no power, no water, no television, and three small kids (9, 7, and 4) we were fortunate to have a whole freakin’ house full of books. We also had put some supplies aside for just such an emergency (perhaps not as much as we should have, but probably a LOT more than most folks) so we weren’t in any danger of going hungry or thirsty in the short term. We just might be eating weird stuff and eating it cold.

We used up as much as we could as fast as we could from the refrigerator, since all of that was going to bad in the first day or so. We had no water, so the toilets got a bit fetid after a day or so. At night we all slept in that hallway, in part to stay warm (it does routinely get down into the 40’s here at night in the winter) and in part because we were still having those lousy, stinking aftershocks.

I think that I hated the aftershocks more than just about anything.

The initial earthquake catches you completely off guard so you only have time to react. There’s no anticipation, no stressing out beforehand. And then you’re done and you’re either dealing with a new crisis (i.e. your house collapsed or is burning and you’re trapped) or you’re okay and it can only get better because you’ve now successfully lived through what may well be the worst thing that can ever happen to you!

But the aftershocks are different. For better or for worse, you’ve been traumatized and your nerves are shot. No matter how cleanly you got out as far as damages and injuries go, deep down inside you’re only keeping the screaming inside because you’re a grown-up. You work hard on being strong, being a grown-up, moving on, coping, and then an aftershock hits and you’re right back into that moment of terror.

And the aftershocks keep coming, and coming, and coming! They get less frequent with time and in general they get weaker with time, but that just serves to set you up for a bigger fall next time. Every time one hits you tense up, hold your breath, and your brain starts thinking, “Is this the next big one? When will it stop? Should I dive under the desk?” As they get less frequent you start to forget, to relax, and then, WHAM, there’s another one to remind you. I really, really got to dislike aftershocks.

That having been said, one of my coolest and most vivid memories of the days after the Northridge earthquake involves a strong aftershock. I was walking with the kids up to a neighborhood park so they could run around, play on the swings, and blow off some steam. It was late morning or early afternoon and we were walking along a long, straight street looking due north. There are two-story houses lining both sides of the street and a row of tall palm trees in the center divider. As I was looking up ahead at the far end of the street, I saw the sunlight reflecting off of the second story windows start to flicker and strobe, and the palm trees at that end of the street started to sway. I yelled for the kids to sit down on the sidewalk and we watched as the seismic wave came down the street at probably 50 or 60 miles an hour, the jiggling reflections and the swaying trees racing straight at us. I could actually see a small wave in the asphalt pavement, coming toward us as if there was a giant worm burrowing down the middle of the street. (“Shai Halud!”) The aftershock lasted five or ten seconds and then was gone. Very impressive!

Exact times get fuzzy, but I think the phones came back on late the next day (Tuesday) and we were able to call relatives and let them know we were okay. The water and gas came back on Wednesday so we were able to again flush and have hot showers and hot food. I distinctly remember the electricity coming back on because there were things turning on (the hallway light, computer, bathroom fan) that woke me up in the middle of the night. It might have been early Thursday morning or it might have been early Friday morning.

I’m pretty sure that the kids went back to school on the following Monday. I don’t remember if I went back to work before then — if I did, it was just for a couple of hours to check out damage at our offices.

It’s often said that the reason so few people died in the Northridge earthquake was because it occurred in the middle of the night on a holiday (MLK Day). Our office was a good example. Our suite was on the fourth floor of a very large building on Ventura Boulevard in Encino and it was trashed. Everything was on the floor, file cabinets tipped over, water damage from pipes that had broken in the floors above us. In my office, two big book shelves full of three-ring binders had come down right onto the desk (where I would have been sitting) and smashed the desk nearly in half. They also fell so that they completely blocked the door — we had to pop out the ceiling tiles, climb over the top and back down in, then tilt the book cases back up before we could open the door. Down in the building’s  lobby of wall to wall marble with giant inset display windows everywhere, sheets of marble had shed themselves from walls and smashed, cracking and breaking the floor as well, with plate glass cracking all up and down the hallways.

We moved on.

I and the three neighbors to the east, west, and south split the cost of replacing the cinder block walls between our yards. The freeways got repaired in absolute record time (three or four months for the Santa Monica Freeway), a real testament to what can get done when government abandons the red tape and just gets out of the way.

There was trash and debris everywhere. The procedure that was set up was to simply start piling debris at the curb and it would get picked up eventually. It worked, but “eventually” could be weeks, and just about everyone had a pile of bricks, wood, fallen trees, broken furniture, and the kitchen sink. I know that they kept picking up all of these piles for at least a year.

We now have much a more extensive assortment of supplies set aside for the next emergency, although we still occasionally talk about doing even more. We have six backpacks (five for the humans and one for the pets) in the front entryway with water, food, clothes, flashlights, radios, tools, and so on in case we have to bug out on short notice. (This is a good idea for everyone, regardless of where you live, because if you don’t have earthquakes [and wildfires], you will have blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, or something.)

Another thing that would be a huge difference if we had a similar earthquake today is the availability of portable communication and computing devices. Twenty years ago I don’t think I had a cell phone yet, and I most certainly didn’t have a tablet. I might have had a laptop. Now, while the cellular network might go down, most disaster plans call for getting the cellular network up ASAP so that folks can call for help and receive information. I would expect that within forty-eight hours (and probably within twenty-four) we would be able to get at least limited access to the internet, which would be a huge help.

It was a life-changing event, totally unexpected, totally out of our control. But we survived it. As bad as it might have been for us, it was so much worse for others. In one sense, we dodged a bullet. I hope that we learned from the experience.

We’ll never forget the experience as a whole. (Even if the fine details might fade and get fuzzy with the passage of time.)