Remembering the Northridge Earthquake 1/17/1994

I probably heard about 10 people call today "Earthquake Day" or "The Anniversary" For those who lived through it, or those who watched the aftermath on TV, I point you to a after-action report from a Batallion Chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department:

http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/940117_NorthridgeEarthquake/011794_F255_B15_ActivityReport.htm

My wife and I lived in the bottom level of a 3 level apartment building in Northridge.

Next door, a cement parking structure was punched up approximately a foot and a half (where you would just drive in on the level, there was a foot and a half bump).

We were sleeping in the bedroom, and the piano in the living room on the other side of the wall, kept moving away from the wall, and then slamming back into the wall.

When we tried to get out of our home, the front door was jammed, and the glass sliding door to the patio (which led to the fron of the apartment building) was also jammed. It turns out that the glass in the other half was shattered, and we could get out through there (remember, it was 4am and dark).

We got in our car and drove a half block away (staying out of the way of any trees or telephone poles).

Fortunately, some friends who lived on a hill northeast of San Fernando, came and got us (the wife had been injured by a broken mirror). We stayed there for a couple months until my company moved to Salt Lake City,

I can say that I was very nervous whenever I was driving and came under an overpass. I would not stop under the overpass, and the people honking at me just had to wait. I had seen the scenes of the people squished, and didn't want to go there.

Many friends were likewise affected.

Thanks for the post. I hadn't remembered that it was an anniversary.

I lived through several while we lived in San Marino 1988-1990.

I remember one 5.4 that woke me up in the middle of the night, it lasted 15 seconds, made the bed feel like a water bed, with waves rolling in it.

One time I was at Ralph's during the earthquake then at home for the aftershocks. At Ralph's, groceries fell off the shelves, and elderly customers kept pushing their carts, shopping, didn't phase them. My cat wouldn't come back into the house until the aftershocks ceased. She also refused to come into the house that morning BEFORE the quake, as if she sensed it was going to happen. My kids were at school and the teachers said the kids were at recess and none of them noticed the quake.

One time during an earthquake we had the kids at a park and we felt it, sitting there on a chair, but the kids running and playing didn't notice it. My daughter was at a birthday party and NONE of the kids there noticed it, they were about six years old.

My wife and I survived it; we lived in Sherman Oaks, about five miles from the epicenter. I have posted my earthquake story several times here on FR, and do not care to repeat it now.

Suffice it to say that I truly thought I was going to die that day.

As it happened, we escaped with only the loss of one cat (ran away), all of our furniture and dishes (pulverized), and a severe burn on my wife's hand, later repaired.

“Any casualties?” asked Captain Kirk in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. “Yes”, replied Ship's Surgeon Dr. Leonard McCoy. “My wits. As in frightened out of.” That sums up my experience in the Northridge Quake of 1994. I thank God we lived to tell about it.

Many did not. For weeks afterward, we drove by the silent ruins of apartment buildings, their crumbled walls spray-painted by the rescue squads with neon-red arrows, always aimed downwards. Near the arrows we'd see the word BODY.

Children pray for the victims of the1995 earthquake that hit Japan's port city of Kobe, at a park in Itami, near Kobe, on Friday night, January 16, 2004. Some 6,425 people were killed by the Jan. 17, 1995, quake and the aftershocks and fires that followed.

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