Where Were You During the '94 Earthquake?

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Permalink Reply by Melissa Gregory on January 17, 2010 at 11:25am

I was working at a TV station in San Diego at the time. Our newsroom was being remodelled, so we were working out of trailers in the station parking lot. I remember right around 4am, the trailer we were in starting rocking back and forth really hard for about 30 seconds. We knew there was a BAD earthquake somewhere. Then the phones started ringing off the hook...

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Permalink Reply by Cassandra Z on January 17, 2010 at 4:16pm

I was asleep, I was 4 yrs old, almost 5.

My mom was in Northridge, her apartment was red taged and she lived in a tent for three days. She went to my grandmothers in las vegas for two weeks and when she got back our bird "percie" was still there, waiting. We talked about her experience the other day over breakfast, with our bird percie, who is now 22, going on 23.

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Permalink Reply by Brenda Hunten on January 18, 2010 at 2:02pm

I was in college in San Diego but my brother got married in Northern California and my boyfriend (now hubby) and I drove up for the weekend. I remember driving through this area, everything was such a mess, all re-routed, we got lost trying to get through but eventually made it to the grape vine.

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Permalink Reply by Cristen Farrell on January 18, 2010 at 5:41pm

I was young, so I still lived with my parents here in Valencia. I remember the sound like there was a train coming, then the shaking. I tried to get out of my room, but the door frame was shifting, so it was jammed. I finally got out to the family room with my family & I remember the sky flashing, aka transformers exploding. We all ran out of the house. We had minimal damage.

My grandmother lives 2 miles away in Saugus. My dad & I immediately got in the car to go check on her. Her neighborhood and house were bad. It turned out that her house was condemned. Her chimney fell through her roof, right onto the bed that she had just been sleeping in. Walls, interior & exterior buckled. Everything inside was shattered everwhere. On her street, cars were everywhere, as they had bounced out of driveways & parking spots along curbs.

My grandmother came to my house. There was no water, power, phone or gas for a week, so we were outside as much as possible and we were eating whatever we could by cooking it on our camping grill. Circle K was giving out random food (what little there was) and someone was distributing water at Santa Clarita Park, but you only got two gallons. The only other water we had was what we had managed to fill the bathtub with. We were listening to AM radio for all of our emergency updates. My mom had a cell phone, but service then wasn't what it is now. We were able to talk to my uncle in Simi Valley, but couldn't get any other calls out.

With the freeway overpass down at the 5/14 interchange, my dad couldn't get to his dad's house in Northridge and couldn't get through to him on the phone. It was days before we knew if he was okay. My dad would leave every day trying to find a way to get to him. The freeway was finally cleared, so he got through after a week and found that his dad was fine, although his house was a mess.

Everything after that is cleanup and bad memories of aftershocks.

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Permalink Reply by Cindy Saddler on January 18, 2010 at 8:37pm

I lived in Long Beach as student at CSULB. What I hate about big quakes is that always seem to happen in the middle of the night. Nothing like getting rocked out of bed in the middle of the night.

It shook my apartment building pretty hard. I lived on the third floor. I was probably 50 miles from the epicenter so it didn't cause any damage.

I just remember the images of the 10 freeway collapse. The collapse of the 14 overpass and how awful I felt when I heard about the police officer who drove off the collapsed overpass.

I also remember the Whittier Narrows quake that happened in 1987. It was a 5.9 on the Richter scale. I lived in La Habra which is the town right next to Whittier. It was horrible. The parking structure at the mall collapsed and there was so much damage.

The earthquakes are scary but there is no place I would rather live!

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Permalink Reply by Janell Pollock on January 18, 2010 at 9:57pm

In addition to a devastating earthquake, ironically, January 17th, 1994 was also my 32nd birthday. I was in bed. I think I heard it before I felt it. I remember my husband attempting to jump out of bed to get to our three year old daughter. Every time he tried to get up, the violent quake threw him right back into bed. After the shaking stopped, he ran to her bedroom and found her sleeping peacefully….
The earthquake brought back a flood of memories for me. I also survived the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. It significantly impacted the Santa Clarita Valley as well. My husband is from the Midwest was quite unnerved by the quake. I kept telling him that it wasn’t nearly as big as the 1971 quake. Later I learned that I was very wrong. In fact it was much bigger. Perhaps because I was a child in 1971, it seemed so much bigger.
In 1994 I was working as a Manager of Computer Support for the IT division of UniHealth America. At the time, UniHealth owned Northridge hospital, California Hospital, Long Beach Hospital and Santa Monica Hospital. Both Northridge and Santa Monica Hospital suffered severe damage in the earthquake. When I was finally able to reach someone at my office, I was told to come right away.
My office was located in the central data center for all of the hospitals It was located in Mission Hills next to the Facey Medical Building on Sepulveda. It took me hours to reach the office. We had only just moved into our new state of the art data center a few weeks prior to the earthquake. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and found almost the entire roof collapsed and resting on cubicle walls. My team’s section was especially hard hit. If anyone of my employees had been at work at that time I’m sure that they would’ve been killed or hurt quite seriously. The CIO pointed to several cables running in open air from the computer room to the front of the building. There was just open air and cables with desks, tables and file cabinets. It was quite eerie to look at. Those two cables were the T1 lines supplying data connectivity for all of the hospitals. It’s amazing that when the ceiling collapsed that those cables did not rip away. A true blessing from God. Our backup location that was supposed to kick in in case of tragedy ended up being completely wiped out so we were forced to use the shell of a building. We worked in hard hats for months!
At home, we lost few material items in the quake. I only lost one champagne flute! My kitchen cabinets didn’t even open. When I went to neighbors, their kitchens were knee deep in spilled food, etc. It seems that it depended on which way your cabinets swung open. If they were opposite of the swaying (like ours were), you didn’t lose much.
We thought that we escaped damage but days later discovered tremendous cracks in our foundation. In fact we lived with half of our furniture and belongings in storage and on cold, ugly concrete floors for almost nine months! That was a nightmare. The insurance company was trying to determine the best way to repair our foundation. There were backlogs and delays. We were shuffled through various departments trying to get answers. At one point, they cut our foundation in the living room two feet wide by the entire length of our living room. It was just a dirt pit! (Try keeping the kids out of that!) One day I came home from a really stressful day of work. I took one look at our “trench” and had a complete emotional breakdown. I was crying like a baby and told my husband that if the insurance company couldn’t decide what they were going to do, I was going to plant %^#>$%&ing flowers in there so that I had something nice to look at!
After months of disruption to our daily routines, everything slowly but surely became “normal” once again. I hope that I don’t ever experience a third earthquake like those in ’71 and ’94.

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Permalink Reply by Shawna Valestin on January 19, 2010 at 9:05am

I just moved out of my parents into my new place...in Northridge around the corner from CSUN!!! So everything that I packed was on the floor and out of the closets/cabinets two short weeks later!!! What a nightmare... I was sooo scared rethinking if moving out was the right thing to do...I was only 19 years old at the time. No heat, water, etc. for a few days.

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Permalink Reply by Kathy Kipfstuhl on January 19, 2010 at 9:52am

Husband and I were asleep, our alarm was supposed to go off at 5:00am for the commute from Valencia to Pasadena. At 4:31 it felt like something huge had hit the house, but it just kept shaking. After a few seconds we realized that this was an Earthquake. Soon as the shaking stopped we grabbed our flashlights and shoes and started looking around. In the limited light we could see that frames were on the floor broken, glasses had come out of the kitchen cupboards, the stove had come away from the wall, and lamps were knocked over and broken.

We went outside to check on the neighbors and everyone was ok. I didn't want to go back into the house to stay, with the dark and continuous shaking. So we grabbed our pillows and blankets and went to sleep in the car until it got light. The shaking kept on for quite a while with all the aftershocks. Our cats were someplace in the house hiding.

Once it got light we were able to better assess the damage. All the walls had cracks at the corners of windows and other weaker places and there was a crack in the chimney. We picked up what glass we could and covered areas on the carpet where there could be shards we couldn't get up. We listened to the radio all day while they told of all the damage in Northridge and around the Santa Clarita Valley. We wanted to get a loaf of bread and tried one store down the street that was asking exorbitant prices for the items they had in stock. We went up the street to Circle K and they were giving away items that people needed.

We couldn't get out of the immediate area because most of the bridges crossing the rivers and washes were closed until they were inspected.

We played cards and board games all day to keep ourselves busy. Night came and we didn't have power, so it was a very quite night. Power was restored to us at 11PM that night, when the lights came on, I said "Thank You Edison!" We still had water, but it was not drinkable.

The next day we weren't able to get to work yet, so we watched TV and got to see the damage we'd heard about on the radio the day before. We saw that the bridges past Calgrove were down with vehicles stranded on the parts that were standing and the 5/14 interchange was down again, reminding me of the 1971 quake when it had gone down before.

Some time in the next day or so water was being delivered to Santa Clarita Park, so we had drinking water again. I remember 2 different deliveries, one was arrowhead and the other was from Miller Brewing company, they were bottling water in beer bottles and delivering it up to us, six packs of bottled water. A shower truck was also delivered for those that didn't have any water service at all.

A few days after the main quake we had a large aftershock. We were in Pasadena and it took us 2 1/2hrs to get back home. When we got home we went down the hall and found that the water hose to the toilet had broken and water was flooding the bathroom and down the hall. The humorous part was that sitting in the hall were 2 cats looking at their cat box on the other side of the lake that was covering the bathroom floor. They looked at us as if to say "How are we supposed to get over there now??"

We are much more prepared than we were then as far as safety and emergency items, but I really don't want to have to ever have to use them.

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Permalink Reply by Maria Waschak on January 19, 2010 at 1:30pm

I was in bed nursing my 7 day old daughter. I flew out of bed with her in one arm and grabbed the post of my bed with the other as I was flung around to the otherside like a maypole.

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Permalink Reply by MommyPaine on January 19, 2010 at 8:49pm

I was in my senior year of high school living at my parent's house in Northridge. I was trapped in my bedroom from the dresser falling toward the door. I remember my dad went to find a flashlight in the back of the house and came back with his feet completely covered in blood from the broken glass. Basically every single dish in the kitchen cupboards was broken on the floor and the only dishwasher was on the other side of the kitchen but those dishers were safe!

I remember the hills seemed like they were on fire in the early morning dew and the cement walls were all crashed down. Our house had several "cracks" but was deemed safe. Also the aftershocks were VERY scary. I lived in the hallway on pretzel sticks and lemonade for a few days.

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Permalink Reply by Massage By Regina on January 21, 2010 at 3:39pm

I was in my last semester of college in Indiana. My then fiance just moved here 2 weeks before it hit! He was ready to pack it up and head back home!!!

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