3 miles from the epicenter.
What people don’t realize is the SOUND!
It was like being inside a jackhammer.
Unforgettable and a tiny % why I moved (I had been through Sylmar, Malibu, Whittier Narrows and that weird San Bedu event).
A quake like Northridge is a life changer.
I was in Van Nuys. Felt like a giant picked up the building I was in and violently shook it. Afterwards, the apartment looked like a hurricane had been through it. I thought for sure this was “the big one.” And...it wasn’t!!!
It's interesting that many people describe the sound very differently depending on where they were. Here in Camarillo it was ghostly shrieking and moaning combined with an awesome light show. I had to drag my wife away from the bedroom window where she was staring at sheets of what was apparently lightning off to the northwest, oblivious to the possible danger of broken windows. It wasn't power transformers; our power lines are underground.
We had very little damage considering the intensity of the shaking. The quake itself was bad enough but I think the aftershocks were just as scary. When a 5.1 hit the next morning we all wondered if we were getting the "real" big one. I still think of the tragedy of the L.A. motorcycle policeman who was heading downtown on his bike in the dark to assist. He sailed to his death off a collapsed freeway structure he had no way of seeing.