[bd476]

Remembering the 1994 Northridge, California quake and those who lost their lives, those who lost loved ones and those who survived.

Forty minutes from now, it will have been exactly ten years ago a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Northridge, California.

[Uncle Hal]

I was living in Marina del Rey 10 years ago and I remember how dark it was because as all the power was out. We had a few broken things nothing serious. During the Sylmar earthquake the thing I remember most were my kids screaming and crying. They were preschool age then. No major damage.

[GVnana]

I remember it well. How could I ever forget?

[steveo]

At the time my father was seriously ill due to his leukemia and had just come home from the latest stay at a Long Beach hospital. We traveled down by plane did Disneyland the day before and were sleeping at the Residents Inn near Signal Hill. My wife and I were upstairs in the suite and our daughters were on the lower level. Trying to climb down the stairs took what seemed a life time. When I finally reached the bottom step, the shaking gave way to a long roll and I watched as the refrigerator gently rolled across the kitchen floor into the dining room.

The fridge thing was surreal, I remember thinking 'nice casters on that thing'.

I called a friend of ours in Sacramento who was just about to go on the air for his morning show telling him about the shaking. the reports starting coming in about the great amount of damage. I didn't realize that morning exactly how strong the quake was.

Later that day I found it interesting listening to KNX radio where the air person would announce yet another aftershock, and timing the four to five seconds before I felt it in Signal Hill. Several months afterward I would wake up in a start when my wife turned over in bed or some load noise shook our windows.

[RckyRaCoCo]

That was the day I left California after living there 13 years. After getting laid-off from an aerospace firm I accepted a job in Kansas and was on the road(Arizona?)when I heard.

Maybe CAL's way of saying "goodbye and good riddance". ; )

[Publius]

I was living in the Wood Ranch section of Simi Valley, just a stone's throw from the Reagan Libary, when the Northridge quake hit. I had just finished a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom and curled up back in bed when it happened. The place began to shake, and I could hear the wood in the walls creak, but other than that there was no sound.

I was surprised at how calm I was. Once the shaking ended, I estimated it as being at least a 6 on the Richter scale. Maybe it was even The Big One. But I was alive, and the building was still standing.

I grabbed my Walkman and tried finding an FM radio station, but the only ones still on the air were automated music stations. Finally, someone at the Westinghouse-owned automated rock FM station pulled the plug on the music and plugged in the Westinghouse-owned AM all-news station, KFWB. I now knew we had been through something around 6.7 and that there were gas fires in the San Fernando Valley. Freeway transitions had collapsed. I was only a short distance from Ground Zero, but the San Rafael Hills had buffered me from the worst of it.

Now I began to shake.

There was no power. For the rest of the day the ground shook off and on. Just seconds after power was restored in the afternoon, the large 5.6 aftershock took place, and we lost power for a few more hours.

I didn't take a shower until evening.

My place of business in Woodland Hills was very close to Ground Zero, and the all-glass cafeteria blew out all its windows. The water mains had severed, and our hot water boiler had blown up. It was 3 weeks before we got hot water at work again.

The liquifaction zone in Simi Valley had missed me and the Reagan Library because we were standing on granite slopes. Thus the low frequency vibrations that shake buildings apart bypassed us. But the zone ran right through the golf course across the street from me, and the clubhouse was badly damaged.

I went through the 6.8 earthquake here in the Puget Sound region a few years ago, but it was nothing like what I went through in Northridge.

Had I been awakened by the Northridge earthquake, I would have been one of those heart attack casualties you read about, but fortunately I was already awake. As it was, my standard joke goes, I only lost 15 pounds -- all of it brown.