Posted on 01/12/2014 10:34:55 AM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — If you were living in Southern California 20 years ago this week, you probably don’t need the reminder.
You might not want the reminder either. It was, and remains, one of the worst days in Southern California history.
Twenty years ago, specifically in the early morning hours of January 17, 1994, Southern California was rocked by the devastating and deadly Northridge quake.
The quake lasted only about 20 seconds, but the 6.7 quake reverberated long after. The toll? Nearly 60 dead, more than 7,000 injured and an estimated damage total estimated at upwards of $20 billion. The quake was felt as far as Las Vegas, Nevada. Officials said more than 20,000 people were left homeless. An estimated 40,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, some as far as 85 miles away from the epicenter.
In a special “Eye On Our Community” (CBS2 at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, January 12), anchors Pat Harvey and Paul Magers look back at that horrific day though the eyes of the people who lived it and witnessed it. They will talk to survivors, people who lost loved ones and many who barely escaped with their lives.
Harvey talks to former Mayor Richard Riordan who was in office a little more than six months when the quake struck. His take-charge attitude was largely credited with getting the city back on its feet quickly.
Magers talks to a special survivor — Mike Kubeisy, a photographer who ended up rescuing five people at the Northridge Meadows Apartments, including a woman he would go on to marry later in 1994. (This year, Mike and Patricia Silden will celebrate 20 years of marriage.)
Dr. Lucy Jones, who has been studying earthquakes for more than three decades and a seismologist with the US Geological Survey, also leaves viewers with a cautionary note.
“The thing we need to understand,” Dr. Jones says, “is that Northridge was really not a big earthquake. Northridge is a moderate to large earthquake. We have the potential for much larger and much more damaging quake.”
To that end, the special broadcast will also ask an important question: Are we ready for the big one?
>> Here in Camarillo it was ghostly shrieking and moaning combined with an awesome light show.<<
I think that was a Bay City Rollers concert....
More information HERE.
It sounded like a freight train was coming through our house. We had shutters and could see nothing so cut our feet on the broken glass trying to get out of the house. Our aquarium exploded and we stepped on live fish in the dark, too. The 14 Freeway, going south out of Canyon Country, is where Officer Clarence Wayne Dean lost his life. He had gone out early to help with the earthquake and could not see that 14 had fallen down. The rebuilt interchange is dedicated to him. The 5/14 interchange was our of commission until May. I remember telling my husband that spring, that they had better work faster getting the 5 moving or somebody was going to get killed. One morning I was waiting on a ramp to go south on the 5 and saw one driver get out of his car and swing a 2/4 at the window of another car. I guess the other guy had cut him off or something and then they were both stuck on the ramp. Seriously, the whole ordeal was pretty overwhelming. I would never want to go through anything like that again.
I hear you. I lived through quakes large and small in L.A. from the 1960s through the early 2000s, but I was never unlucky enough to be close to the epicenter of one.
I remember our whole house rocking during the '71 Sylmar quake. We lived right across the fence from a DWP easement that had high tension towers. Two were right behind our house. I ran outside to see what the towers were doing. They had already stopped moving, but the electrical wires were dancing for as far as you could see.
I didn't get back home to Cali until April of '94. When I did, everyone I talked to, had a story to tell about the quake. My future wife told me that she was thrown from her bed in the hills of Burbank. One good buddy was spooked so badly by the quake that he permanently moved to Florida. Others told me of damage to personal goods, and many were getting their houses bolted to their foundations to prevent them from slipping off in any future disturbances. All of them described the feelings of shock and helplessness that you did.
No, I'm not sorry I missed all that.
Had I been home, I would have likely ridden it out in the Silverlake area where I lived at the time. From what I heard later, it wasn't too bad there.
I still remember the after-effects, though. People were still living in makeshift camps. Piles of bricks were still on nearly every street in the Valley. Seemed like everywhere you turned, people were either still talking about it, or cleaning up the damage. Because I'm in the building trades, I wound up doing lots of repair work that first year back.
I got home four months after the quake and noticed the same thing. Some people were deeply affected on a psychological level, while others who'd ridden it out in the same area seemed unfazed.
My wife (who's from Florida) had never experienced a quake of any kind, but she was tossed out of her bed by the Northridge quake. She shook it off, and had no lasting ill effects from the experience. I knew others who rode it out much further from the epicenter who were badly shaken by the experience.
I’m from Texas and I was one mile from the epicenter of the quake. You can have my experiences... gladly.
I had a buddy who did that. He'd lived in SoCal for well over a decade and had ridden out dozens of smaller quakes and innumerable tremors, but something about the Northridge quake spooked him so bad that he unhooked from his whole life and ran off to Florida.
Man, what tough luck. That had to piss you off.
Trust me, I never felt remorse for missing the worst of it, but as a native Angeleno, I felt I was missing in action during a time when everyone I loved was enduring a horrific experience. If that makes any sense.
I’ve lived in Texas for eight years now. A couple of years ago when we lived in Irving, there was a little 3.5 tremor and it made me feel like home again.
Weird, I know.
You are right, but I was really trying to point out about how earthquakes can affect one neighborhood, while not the other.
Sleeping in my car at Northridge I got caught up in the feel of the area, and was amazed when I drove out of it to buy some groceries, most of the city was unaffected and already forgetting what had happened among their neighbors.
“In the heart of the worst hit areas, you could spend a couple of days and feel that you were in a war zone, with exhaustion and trauma, and stress being the norm, but then you could drive a mile away to buy groceries or gas, and everything, and everybody was completely normal and routine.”
Yeah, I get that. I saw a lot of that after I came in April of that year. Now, it was four months after the big event, but I saw lots of Northridge locals going about their business as usual. In fact, most were.
At the same time, there were a few people I met who seemed to be genuinely traumatized by what they'd been through. Probably had a lot to do with each individual's experience. Some houses were almost a total loss, while their neighbors sustained little damage. Same with the people. Some were just damaged more than others.
My dog called it 36 hours before it hit.
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