The Northridge, California Earthquake of 1994...

...took place eleven years ago today [originally posted in 2005]. As I promised a few days ago, here is my personal experience of the earthquake. I apologize for not posting as many pictures as I had intended, but life intervened.

The Sunday after the earthquake, tens of thousands of people took a Sunday drive around to look at the damage. The scene in Northridge was absolutely bizarre.

In Northridge, I was walking along Reseda Blvd., and walked up to the National Guard roadblock. It seemed so very strange seeing men in fatigues walking around with M-16s on the street. I walked up to the roadblock and an officer in the National Guard spoke with me, telling me how to bypass all the blocked streets so I could get across from the Northridge Meadows apartment building, where sixteen people died. It was the greatest loss of the entire earthquake in one building. Fifty-seven people died citywide. If you clicked on the link, you will notice the building on the left is two story, and the one on the right is three story. The one on the left used to be the same height as the one on the right. The people that died were crushed when the first floor pancaked under the second and third floors.

The National Guardsmen were taking things very seriously, though. I had just taken a picture of the Northridge post office, standing at the entrance to the alley next to the post office building. Immediately, before I even lowered my camera, a National Guardsman rushed past me and shouted at some teenagers further down in the alley. I clicked this photo just as the Guardsman ran in front of me. He was interested in doing his job, and was certainly not worried about stepping directly in front of some amateur photographer. The kids were in a forbidden area, and the after pausing a second or two in front of me, the Guardsman ran after them. I looked down the alley as the Guardsman ran to them. They were frozen in place with a deer-in-the-headlights look at the sight of this armed man in fatigues running full tilt at them. He merely shooed them back to the permitted walking area.

I made my way through the crowd to the roadblock across from the building. Well, sort of at angle, anyway. I said before it was bizarre. This is what I mean.

There were people walking about in droves, yet speaking in hushed tones. Lots of picture taking. In fact, I happened upon Kodak’s Corporation’s corporate photographer, and chatted with her a bit. She had the biggest telephoto lens I have ever see, about the size of a witch’s hat.

There was a construction crew working at the apartment building, lots of earth-moving equipment, their back-up horns sounding as they moved about. The National Guardsmen carrying automatic weapons. The news helicopters hovering overhead, and…

A row of large floral sprays in front of the apartment building, the type one sees at funerals. There must have been at least half a dozen or more of those floral sprays. It was a lot to take in at one moment.

Crushed cars. Apartment buildings literally broken in half (see my earlier post below). You could see the sky through the middle of the buildings. Buildings knocked off their foundations. The firemen and guardsmen had spray-painted on the sides of the buildings such things as “N/B”, which means “No Bodies.” One building I saw had “2B” spray-painted on it. “Two Bodies.”

Water running unabated out of buildings a week after the quake. Block walls down everywhere. Almost every business sign was destroyed. I went into a grocery store, and every single ceiling tile was missing. Imagine the muck created when the ketchup-mustard-hot sauce aisle in a grocery store is completely shattered after an earthquake.

One store had “We are open. Prices Shattered” on it. Had to laugh at that one.

I pulled into the McDonald's at Devonshire and Balboa to take pictures from the parking lot. Look above the roof line of the McDonald's in this photo. See the damaged building in the distance? That McDonald's is no longer there (the building is there, but it is now the home of some other business) and the Kaiser building is gone. All that remains is an empty lot.

The Kaiser building failure was perhaps the most spectacular structural failure in the city. It certainly seemed to get the most press. The Kaiser Permanente office building was in Granada Hills, near Northridge. For those that do not know, Kaiser Permanente is a health care insurer and provider.

Here is a closeup of the Balboa side of the Kaiser building. Note the destroyed concrete structure of the building, the trash can, and the pictures still clinging to the wall. They must have used "earthquake fasteners" to keep the pictures in place, for what it is worth.

I also stopped by the apartment building in Granada Hills, where I used to live, near the Kaiser building. There was a three-man crew of National Guardsmen manning a potable water tank in the parking lot of the city park across the street. I took this picture as they assisted a local couple in filling their water containers.

Here is another nearby apartment building, with little prospect of doing business.

Further personal recollections.

I was living with one roommate in South Pasadena at the time. His name is Jay, and he is Hawaiian/Philipino. I was working in Fullerton, CA at the time, and it was about a fifty-minute drive for me. I had to set my alarm for 4:30am to get to work on time at 6:30am. That morning, my alarm went off as usual at 4:30am. I slapped the snooze alarm, as usual. Less than a minute later, officially at 4:31am, all hell broke loose.

That was very Unusual.

The rumbling started, coming from the northwest. Logical, since South Pasadena is southeast of Northridge. It got more intense, more intense, and did not stop. I leapt out of bed, and a shock wave hit me that threw me back to my bed. I heard things falling in my bathroom, which was my shaving cream can, aftershave, and etc. falling into the sink.

I ran to the front door to the sound of my upstairs neighbor’s piano jumping up and down. I thought it was going to come through the ceiling. Wearing nothing but briefs (as I usually slept in, of course) I stood in the front doorway, trying to decide whether safety or vanity would rule the day. I was not sure if the building was going to collapse on me or not. I mean I REALLY was not sure. Then…it stopped. It seemed like an eternity, but was only about thirty seconds.

My roommate, who slept on a waterbed in his bedroom, could not even get out of bed. The waves in his waterbed wouldn’t let him. We discovered our refrigerator had walked away from the wall about eighteen inches. I turned on my radio to a local news station, KNX (CBS news radio). The radio station had totally broken format. Usually after an earthquake the radio and TV stations go on about their business. Oh, the radio announcer might say something like “yes, folks, that was an earthquake you felt. We’ll check in with Dr. Shakey So and So at Cal-Tech when we can. Now for the weather…”

Not this morning. The news announcer had a pronounced quaver in his voice. “Uh…this is…KNX Los Angeles…we have obviously had a MAJOR earthquake…” No commercials, no music, no nothing. Just two morning news anchors scared spitless.

Turned on the TV. All the local stations were showing pictures of the damage in their newsrooms. Monitors with exploded screens. Cables hanging. Everything was wasted.

AFTERSHOCK! The aftershocks were in the 5.0+ range, which are respectable earthquakes in their own right. Felt at least two in that range.

Picked up the telephone to call my mother and stepfather in Florida to tell them I was all right. Dead. No dial tone. Got a dial tone about twenty minutes later and called them to tell them I was all right. They did not have any radio or TV on, so I told them to turn on their TV. My stepfather said, “Yes, it is on here.” It’s big when an earthquake is breaking news at the other end of the continent. I asked them to call my sister in Chicago to tell her I was ok. I am glad they did, as she could not get through to me until the next day, as “all circuits were busy.” She tried eight times.

I waited a few hours before I attempted to drive to work. I wanted to be sure that there were not any overpasses down across the freeways before I drove. If there were, I could be trapped on the freeway for hours trying simply to get back home. Once assured that there were no overpasses down, I drove to work. There were ceiling tiles down there also…more than seventy miles away from the epicenter.

All pictures Copyright 2005 by Impacted Wisdom Truth

Updated: 16 January 2006 to add additional photographs and text.