Looking for Stability

My own personal “9/11” is “431.” It’s nothing like “420.”

“420” is a number used by teenagers. To some it refers to 4:20 pm, the supposed average time most high school marijuana users light up. For others it represents April 20th, Adolph Hitler’s birthday. “420” reminds still others of the Columbine High School Massacre which occurred on April 20, 1999.

“431” is a time. It’s the time in the morning when I most often wake up when I’m suffering from insomnia.

At 4:31 A.M., Pacific Standard Time, on Monday, January 17, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the densely populated San Fernando Valley, in northern Los Angeles. Thousands of aftershocks, many in the magnitude 4.0 to 5.0 range, rocked the valley during the next few weeks.

Initially they CALLED it a 6.5, then 6.7. There were rumors floating around L.A. in 1994 that it was closer to a 7.2, but that Cal Tech stuck with 6.8 because many insurance companies wouldn’t have to pay for any damages produced by any earthquake of a 7.0 magnitude or higher.

Anything above a 7 is considered an “act of God.” Believe me, if you’ve ever experienced an earthquake above a 5.0, you’d call it an “act of God.”

It was our first year out of college. We were teaching at L.A. Lutheran Jr/Sr High School. Actually, I spent the mornings at Trinity middle school in Reseda and spent my lunch hours on the freeway to get to LHS in the north Valley for the afternoon. First year teaching is hard for anyone. We lived in a tiny one-bedroom in a poor suburb called Sylmar. 600 sq feet for $660 per month.

My in-laws, Marge and Allan Neddermeyer were visiting us during the three-day MLKjr weekend.

They were supposed to fly home Monday. Saturday night there had been a small earthquake out in the ocean, off the coast from Malibu. It had been unseasonably warm, in the eighties. Natives called it “earthquake weather,” but that meant nothing to us.

We had purchased a new couch, but the Salvation Army wasn’t making pick ups on Sunday, so we had to store our old sofa (a pull out bed) in the garage. We propped it up against the wall next to our car. “Is it sturdy enough? Oh yeah, the only thing that would make that thing fall would be an earth quake.” Prophetic, we never did gat that dent out of the hood, but many or our neighbors had the top two stories of apartments bury the cars in their first floor garages!

Mom and Dad were our guests, so they got the bedroom. Doors on either side of the bathroom separated us from them in the living room. We were on an air mattress , when we made the bed we chose to sleep with our feet toward the entertainment system. That was a good decision, since the TV would’ve landed on our heads if we’d slept the other way.

At 4:31 we were rudely awakened by the quake. The air mattress felt like a pontoon raft in white water rapids shooting down the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon. Experts say that it didn’t last more than 18-30 seconds but it felt like several minutes. Bethany later teased me because I was reciting the Lord’s Prayer over and over as fast as I could. I’ve done that on really scary roller coasters too while my knuckles turn white.

Pitch black since all power was out. Battery powered car and home alarms were screaming, neighbors and their children crying and screaming, your body filled with adrenaline just like it is right after a car accident…you can see that this would be the one situation where it would not be so irrational to imagine that this was the end of the world.

Our front door was ajar, but jammed so that it wouldn’t open much wider. All of the bathroom drawers were out of the vanity. Since doors on both sides of the bathroom opened in, they were jammed and we were separated from our parents in the bedroom on the other side. The refrigerator was out of its hole and leaning against the kitchen counter. The microwave had been thrown 8 or 10 feet across the kitchen.

When we walked across the room glass crunched under our bare feet. If it weren’t covered by a layer of books that fell off the shelves, our feet would’ve surely been bloody.

When the first aftershock came, we felt like we were on a rope bridge, or in a small boat being tossed around on a stormy sea, when all four of us had gotten Marge and Allan out of the bedroom, we got out of the apartment. The pool in the center courtyard was a little more than half empty. Dozens of neighbors gathered together on the curb of the street outside the apartment complex. All of us in our underwear, most without shoes. It’s amazing how cold it is at 5 o’clock in the morning in January, even in Southern California! Some Good Samaritans with shoes and flash lights ventured back inside to retrieve blackest and robes for others. When an aftershock would hit, it felt as if the asphalt were waving like a billowing blanket on a clothesline in the breeze. It’s a surreal feeling.

Dozens of strangers sitting on the curb the curb together. Several were smoking cigarettes to try to settle their nerves even though we could all smell the natural gas escaping from severed gas lines. We heard siren after siren and helicopter after helicopter, but no police or ambulance ever stopped at our complex. That meant that this had to be huge. Was this the legendary “big one?” How big was it? What was left of L.A.? Was it WWIII? The end of the world? Some kind of disaster movie? A trailer park across the freeway from our complex blazed with fires. This and the dawn were the only lights we had.

Official reports put the death toll around 57, including a janitor who was smashed by the parking garage at the Northridge Mall. More than 1,500 people were seriously injured. 9,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity for days afterward. 20,000 without gas; and over 48,500 had little or no water.

The official reports say that nearly 12,500 structures were damaged, leaving thousands temporarily homeless. 6% of the over 66 thousand buildings inspected were severely damaged (“red tagged”) and 17% were moderately damaged (“yellow tagged”).
The strange thing about an earthquake is that it fishers out like the spider-web cracks in your windshield when it’s hit by a pebble. So our apartment was damaged beyond repair, but not destroyed, another building in our complex was damaged first, the top floors caved in on the lowest level. One neighbor had just pulled out of his garage at 4:30 on his way to National Guard duty. He said that he hit his remote for his garage door to come down, but instead the entire building came down! Yet less than 2 miles away we had a fellow teacher who had only one pitcher fall off of her kitchen counter. She was a native and wasn’t even awakened by the quake.

Our apartment was red tagged. We were homeless. Later that morning gathered clothes and photo albums into our car and somehow made it to a cousin’s house a couple of hours south. There we sat dazed watching their CNN all day, seeing lines of people buying bottled water at grocery stores and horror stories about deaths and desperate searches for survivors.

Marge and Allan stayed another week or two to help us find a new apartment and salvage the rest of our belongings. The airline graciously honored their passes. Parents and kids sometimes become friends when the kids become adults, but few people have a bond like those of us who’ve been through a crisis together.

And like a soldier, a decade later, I still struggle with post traumatic stress disorder. More stressed, irritable, depressed and sleepless.

According to Reuters News Service, at 5:26 AM on 26 December 2003, an earthquake shook a large area of Iran. The epicenter of the devastating earthquake is located a few miles South West of a city called Bam. I bet the survivors thought that it lived up to its name that morning.
Iranian scientists revised the magnitude up to 6.8, from a previous estimate of 6.3 on the Richter scale. Yeah, try over 7.0, guys. Some Iranian officials have estimated their death toll at nearly 50,000.

Los Angeles architects, engineers, and emergency service people plan and train for earthquakes with the most advanced technology in the world. In Bam, Iran, homes aren’t much different than they were in the sixth century, simple mud adobe.

Reuters reported that U.N. officials said about 40,000 people are left in Bam - most spending the bitterly cold nights in tents - out of an original population of 103,000. The rest are thought to be either dead, missing, in hospital or had gotten the hell away from there. I can’t blame them, I left L.A. for Iowa looking for more stable ground.