Los Angeles: Tales of the City

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Diane Stillman is watching a very large dresser with attached mirror hurtle toward her across her bedroom. Having lived in Los Angeles all her life, the 43-year-old paralegal knows she is in an earthquake. And she herself isn't hurt. What worries her is her mother, 83 and legally blind, living several blocks away. The trick, once Diane gets out from under the dresser, is leaving her apartment in the Northridge Meadows complex in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley and making sure her mother is all right. As Stillman crosses her bedroom, she thinks, this must have been a big one. Nearly everything in the apartment is on the floor. Then she hears a crack, and her dining area seems to list to the left and downward. "I felt a sensation of falling," she reports later. She is falling -- 10 ft. -- and so is her apartment. And the building's entire second and third floors. "But until I actually saw what was on the outside," she says, "I really was not aware that it had totally crushed the first floor."

If one were looking for the best metaphor for last week's earthquake, its power and ruthlessness, one could hardly do better than this brute subtraction: at 4:30 a.m. on Monday there was a three-story apartment building. Younger people lived on the second and third floors; the older folks tended to live downstairs so as not to climb steps. At 4:31 it was a two-story apartment building, with all the carnage that suggests.

If this was just Atlas' shrug, one would hate to see the shimmy. If this was not the Big One, then it is almost impossible to imagine what that would be like. In the aftermath of 30 seconds on Monday, at least 55 people died. Local mountains may have risen more than a foot. Nine highways snapped like twigs. An oil main and 250 gas lines ruptured, igniting an untold number of fires. So many wires fell down and circuits blew that 3.1 million people were plunged into total darkness. Water was denied to 40,000. There were more than 1,000 aftershocks, some considerable tremors in their own right. And the future of the country's second largest city as well as that of its citizens was forever altered.

John Karmelich is on the WELL, just three hours after the quake. The phone lines left standing now are overloaded with calls from frantic friends and relatives in other parts of the country, most unable to get through. The exceptions are those on computer bulletin boards like the WELL, which can be accessed through local numbers. Karmelich, whose log-on is "Morngman," lives in northwest Orange County. To thousands of fellow hackers, he reports, "Shakin' all over, but basically everything is O.K."

Al McNeill is in his yard, in front of what was once his house. The house was on Balboa Boulevard just north of the 118 freeway, a few miles from Northridge Meadows. Moments after the first upheaval, Al's son David smelled gas. Before he could turn off their line, a man in a pickup truck out front tried to start his engine. "There was a huge explosion," says David. A fireball leaped 50 ft. in the air and then consumed the McNeill home and two others across from it. The same thing was happening all up and down the block, just as the local water mains were breaking. Later, people remarked on the peculiarity of seeing floods and flames in one and the same place. The McNeills managed to save their pug-dog and their 1964 Austin Mini. "We were pretty well prepared for an earthquake," says Al, looking tired. "But not the fire."

Andrea Donnellan is enjoying what she calls "the ride." A 29-year-old geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she published an interesting paper last November -- one that called for a 6.4 Richter scale earthquake on the Oak Ridge fault line. She moved back to California from Maryland to experience it. Later today she feels deep compassion and some guilt and attains a degree of local fame. But right now, as she sits in her bed in Altadena, counting the frequency and duration of the shocks, all she can think is, "I'm so glad I'm here for this!"

Ladonna Hamilton is stacking equipment in front of the Needham-Kurtz beauty salon. If the riots ruined one of L.A.'s poorer sections and the fires singed some of its wealthier enclaves, the earthquake has done its worst damage to & the middle class. Ventura Boulevard is a main drag of the San Fernando Valley, as in Valley Girl. And Ventura is a mess. The windows of the Casa de Cadillac are blown out. The Fred Sands Realty building is partly rubble. Just to the north, stucco houses are cracked like broken eggs. Most of the dead will be in the Valley. As for the Needham-Kurtz shop -- "manicures, pedicures, facials, waxing, makeup, massage" -- it was first ravaged by fire and then drenched by the fire department. The owners, employees and some friends are pulling out the pink Leatherette chairs. Hamilton, a manicurist, is putting out displays of nail polish on the sidewalk. Reds. Oranges. Shocking pinks. She heard the store was burning from a friend who saw it on the news. She's wearing a black Needham-Kurtz T shirt. "It's completely gone," she says quietly.

Arnold Sacco is having a heart attack. Sacco, 51 and white-haired, has made it to the parking lot of the Valley Presbyterian Hospital before collapsing. The lot has been serving as an emergency room ever since the quake's first shock tore into the hospital, followed shortly by the first wave of broken, bruised and shaken-up victims. A doctor runs to Sacco's side. There is a scream a few feet away. The critically ill man looks over to see a woman in the pain of advanced labor. "Go take care of the women having babies," he says, waving the doctor away. "They need more help than me." The doctor ignores him. Sacco dies. The baby is born healthy.

Sakina Ellis is at work in her bright orange vest and hard hat. She is guarding a damaged stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway between Fairfax and La Cienega for Caltrans, the state transportation agency. Before her, a small army of gawkers takes in the freeway as if it were a huge, ugly sculpture -- Monument to Human Vanity by Mother Nature. Ellis could probably have taken the day off; both her Van Nuys apartment and new BMW convertible were demolished this morning. But she is actually cheery, meditating on Martin Luther King Jr.: "Just think of all the damage that could have been done if it wasn't his birthday and people were going about their business as usual. He made this a better place. He saved souls."

Robert DeFeo is grim faced. The L.A. city fire department battalion chief would like to be saving lives, but instead is filling and refilling the coroner's station wagon on perpetual duty in the driveway of Northridge Meadows. DeFeo's crew is using buzz saws and jackhammers and Swiss search dogs, and so far he has turned up nine corpses, each crushed while in bed. The coroner's car leaves but always returns. The heroics occurred earlier, when residents pried neighbors from tight spaces or let them down from the roof with knotted fire hoses. The place is crawling with reporters now from Seattle and New York City and Oslo. One asks DeFeo, "How would you describe what you've seen today, sir?" "Catastrophic," he answers flatly. "I haven't seen anything like it."

Two hours later, the L.A. city fire department can finally save someone. Firemen extract maintenance worker Salvador Pena from a street sweeper he was operating in the now collapsed garage of the Northridge mall, not far from the Meadows. Some slabs of concrete are airlifted off him; others are pushed away with a huge inflatable bladder. The process takes about four hours; then he is free. His legs are crushed, but he will survive. Says a fireman: "It feels so good to get him out."

Jack Wiggens is probing the nearby rubble of what was once a Bullock's. A structural engineer who serves on Mayor Richard Riordan's blue-ribbon panel on retrofitting city buildings, he believes that the Bullock's, which made up part of the mall, probably should have been retrofitted. Similar observations are being made by many regarding the numerous major highways crippled by the quake. After the area's last big temblor, in 1971, L.A. swore it would strengthen its freeway bridges. But costs slowed the project, and the legislature voted down a 2 cents-per-gal. gas tax that might have goosed it along. Infuriatingly, I-10, the most important and hardest hit of the freeways, had been scheduled for retrofitting next month.

Wiggens thinks he knows why Bullock's did not undertake improvements. "Some companies decide they can't afford it because of additional costs, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, asbestos removal and sprinkler upgrades." Then he drops a bombshell. He has just come from Northridge Meadows, and that bothers him too. "That building had no plywood shear walls," he says. "It's a perfect example of a building that doesn't meet current codes."

Immediately after the quake hit, city officials seemed less worried about such matters than about a repetition of the hooliganism accompanying the 1992 riots. Police chief Willie Williams instituted a dusk-to-dawn curfew and warned that looters would be prosecuted and jailed. Instead, in the first few | days crime dropped 80%. Maybe people were too awed to loot anything but grapefruits from public parking lots. There was a treeful right here at the mall, and the quake has shaken them down prematurely, brilliant yellow polka dots on a gray field. A family rushes to the lot and collects as many grapefruits as it can in a bag.

Roberto Barrera is out in the cold. "Todas las cosas en la cocina estan rotas," he says. Everything in the kitchen is broken. Shrouded in blankets, he is sitting on a brick fence across from Van Nuys High School. The school is putting people up, but he will not go indoors. As night falls and the temperature drops to 30 degrees, a rough rule has established itself: Anglos and blacks head for the shelters, while the fields and parks fill with Hispanics, mostly new immigrants, perhaps as many as 20,000. Many of them come from countries with a history of quakes and take no chances with aftershocks. There are grills with rice and beans; someone has a portable TV; a radio is playing Mexican pop. There is less panic here than among the Anglos, but more sadness. Yvonne Androver, 27, a cleaning woman, glances at her nephew Brando, age nine months. He is fast asleep, contented. She has been jolted back into her past: Guatemala in 1976. A 7.5 on the Richter scale. Twenty-three thousand people dead. "I remember all of it," she says. "The houses going down, the people crying."

Bill Clinton is jerking up and down. For two days, he has postponed flying in from Washington, but even now two Richter 5.1 aftershocks startle his entourage at a "town meeting" he is holding at a Burbank airport. The news he has heard is bad. Broken freeways and the busted utilities cost a tremendous amount of money. The quake closed down 150 public schools, and there are worries about insurance coverage. It is a fact that 60% of the city's homeowners did not carry any. California Governor Pete Wilson has sent Clinton his estimated bill: between $15 billion and $30 billion. The latter amount would tie the quake with Hurricane Andrew as the most expensive disaster in American history. Wilson asked Clinton to pick up the entire tab, waiving laws requiring that state and local governments chip in as well.

The President pledges $41 million for immediate highway repair and $639 million in low-interest small-business loans. He boasts that when told by a highway engineer it would take a year to repair I-10, he asked, "What do we have to do to fix it in less time?" And he assures his hosts, "We have no intention, none, of letting this be a short-term thing." Pause. Soon, he says, he and Budget Director Leon Panetta will "go back to Washington and figure out how to pay for it." He is smiling, but this is obviously not a joke.

Diane Stillman is waiting. Having escaped the deathtrap of her building, she is waiting to be told how she will keep a roof over her head in the next few days, or weeks, or months.

The 55 people recorded as having died in the quake constitute a higher toll than in the riots two years ago and far more than in last year's fires. The number will not climb much more. But Secretary of Housing Henry Cisneros has announced that many more houses were damaged than was first estimated. Thousands more people are homeless, and the weather report for the weekend predicts rain and temperatures in the 40s. Sanitary conditions and patience in the city's parks, parking lots and shelters are deteriorating, as people realize the long-term repercussions of their tragedies.

Diane managed to get out of Northridge Meadows, helped down a ladder by a young man she didn't know. She found her mother Francine sitting amid her smashed belongings, thrilled to have recovered three pet cockatiels that escaped while her living room bucked and twisted. In four days, the two have lodged in a church, a Red Cross shelter and in the home of a generous couple in North Hollywood. Diane was buoyed by the reports that residents of Northridge Meadows would receive free lodging in a nearby apartment complex and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would provide 18 additional months of rent vouchers.

But those reports proved to be untrue. And standing in line with hundreds of others at FEMA's Tarzana office, Diane finds that the agency is not even prepared to begin processing her request for the smaller subsidies that actually are available. A clerk has just handed her a one-page application and her new appointment date -- Feb. 12. No, she may not take home an application for her mother; the applicant must be physically present.

"We're homeless," explains Diane to the clerk somewhat desperately. "What should we do between now and then?" And suddenly she learns the wages of survival. "That's just too bad," he answers. "Feb. 12. That's it."

At the entrance to the FEMA building stand National Guardsmen with rifles. Yesterday angry applicants shouted and wagged their fingers in the faces of volunteers at the agency's Northridge branch. Diane merely looks exhausted. She will go to her Congressman's office to complain. Then she will go home. Or what is passing for home. Then? She says, "I don't know what else to do." Neither do thousands of others.

With reporting by Georgienne E. Bradley, Patrick E. Cole, Jeanne McDowell, Johanna McGeary, Sylvester Monroe, Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles