Northridge Earthquake
In most of my adventures, I wasn't called Gun Turret John.
January 17, 1994, at 4:30 in the morning, the ground of the ten-mile wide San Fernando Valley rose up 12 feet at the epicenter, then slammed down and shook for another 20 seconds. It was rated a magnitude 6.7. When it was over, the mountains to the north and to the south were 4 feet closer together. It knocked down freeways and office buildings, apartment houses, parking structures, and homes. Miraculously only 57 were killed. If it had happened in the daytime, many thousands would have been killed; at jobs, in stores, in schools, driving on the roadways. One motorcycle cop living north of the valley had jumped out of bed and was racing down the freeway in the dark on his motorcycle when he sailed off the end of a fallen high overpass and was killed.
I got a call from a contract inspection company I hadn't heard of before. Could I respond to the Northridge disaster as a FEMA Inspector? Why, yes I could. I knew the ropes and my expenses would be much lower on account of the location; I could drive my own truck, no car to rent; I had a phone in my truck, I would be reachable by phone all day; I could drive up to Carpinteria and stay with my mom or my sister, no hotel room to rent. Instead of a plane ticket, the company was happy to pay a mileage allowance for travel to and from the site.
This time, a year and a half after Hurricane Andrew, the FEMA operation had evolved in a few ways. The most important way was that we were issued tablet computers and trained in the use of home inspection software that replaced all the forms and pieces of paper we had in Florida. We had to keep the batteries charged, and once or twice a day we'd find a phone connection to plug in and reach a screechy dial-up to download new applications and upload your completed work. After the first days of tablet training and getting our ID's we never had to go to the company's office until the end when we returned our equipment, and were released.
My inspections were mostly in the west end of the valley; Canoga Park and the border between Reseda and Northridge. Two inspections were very close to the exact epicenter in NE Northridge, and one was two miles away, across the street from where I had lived at 18637 Strathern in 1954 through 1957 when I was attending Northridge Junior High.
The houses at the center were literally cracked in half, when two parts of the landscape went separate ways. Those houses were red-tagged: Not safe for entry. We had to do the best we could inspecting those types of structures from the curb. One house in my old neighborhood, which I had never been inside back then, was surprising in that it had no foundation. In the old days, before readily available concrete, houses were often built on the dirt. Our term "mudsill", the first board bolted to the top of a foundation, was originally exactly what it says: a board lying directly on the ground. It had held up as well as any of the places I inspected in the valley, except there was no cracked foundation to document.
Again I'm the Uncle Sam figure there to listen to people relive their trauma and document the damage. When I lived in the San Fernando Valley, 1951 through 1957, most everybody looked like me. The demographic was 90% as white as I was. By 1994, it had become the most diverse immigrant population I had experienced. There was a fifty-fifty chance that the person you went to interview had English as their first language. There were pockets of Russians, Iranians, Israelis, Koreans, Vietnamese, Central and South Americans, South Asians and Polynesians.
Another of the red-tagged buildings I was called to was the kind of apartment building that had a garage on the whole bottom floor. These types of structures were the most vulnerable to earthquake damage because that bottom story, which is supporting the weight above, was not designed with a lot of bracing. This flaw is called a "soft story". In this case it was used as the parking garage. The building where my claimant was living had collapsed with the two floors of apartment coming down intact on all the cars parked underneath. One of the earthquake's fatalities happened there. A man sleeping in his camper truck had been crushed. In the apartments above, everyone survived.
Many of the people I came into contact with were seriously stressed out. Besides the regular stresses of a disaster situation; the grief and depression about a lost way of life and belongings, Valley residents were experiencing a lot of very strong aftershocks, most of them in the early hours of the morning like the initial quake. People were going to bed with the likelihood that powerful, potentially dangerous shaking would happen in the night. I would drive north to Carpinteria every night and sleep on my mom's couch in her mobile home near the beach, and when I came back the next day, people would be traumatized by the latest aftershock and the lack of any quality sleep.
One of the places I inspected was in a mobile home park, and I interviewed the man who had been there when the quake happened. He could have been me. He had been visiting his elderly mother and was spending the night on her couch. Mobile homes are trailers that are propped up on these two-foot tall jack stands all along the steel beams that support the floor. In an earthquake of this violence, the house was thrown off its jack stands, which pierced through the living room floor making the carpeted floor into moguls of hills and valleys with the sharp metal edges of some of the stands poking through. His injuries were mostly to his shins from the living room obstacles.
The power had failed immediately so the whole scramble was taking place in total darkness. His mother was screaming in the back bedroom. The bed had overturned and she was underneath it. Her dresser had fallen over so that it prevented him from opening the door. He had to break the door apart to get to where she was. Outside, all the mobile homes had come off their supports and in doing so, had broken their natural gas connections and gas was filling the space between the homes. Out at the street, transformers on power poles were exploding into a shower of sparks. Somehow, they escaped the park and nothing further happened to them.
The inspection that affected me most was the second closest to the epicenter. A couple had lived there. I met with the wife, or widow. At the time of the quake, her husband had come home to die of his terminal cancer. He was in a hospital bed in the living room; she had been in constant attendance for months. He had been a CHP motorcycle cop for many years. Like most disaster victims I've interviewed, she recounted for me the night it all came down. She had been totally in love with him, and still was. You could feel it in her narrative. He had always been her protector.
When the earthquake struck, convulsing the house and toppling furniture and breaking windows, she had run to his bed and jumped in with him for protection, and when the shaking stopped, they laughed and cried about the fact that even in his pathetic state, she ran to him for comfort and protection. Her love and grief was so powerful, when she got to that part of the story, something radiated from her that I could feel, like the door of a furnace of love and grief was opened in front of me. It left me shaken. He had passed away of his cancer between the time of the quake, and the time I was there; four or five days later.
We got up to finish the inspection; I did have to continue taking the measurements and calculating the covered damage to process her claim. We went into their bedroom. His gun was laying on the made up double bed. It was a great big revolver. I looked at the gun, I looked at her. She said, "Don't worry about that, I'm not thinking about that. I just had it out, it reminds me of him...He wouldn't want me to do that." Again that wave of radiation. I can feel it again in the telling of it.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
January 17, 1994, at 4:30 in the morning, the ground of the ten-mile wide San Fernando Valley rose up 12 feet at the epicenter, then slammed down and shook for another 20 seconds. It was rated a magnitude 6.7. When it was over, the mountains to the north and to the south were 4 feet closer together. It knocked down freeways and office buildings, apartment houses, parking structures, and homes. Miraculously only 57 were killed. If it had happened in the daytime, many thousands would have been killed; at jobs, in stores, in schools, driving on the roadways. One motorcycle cop living north of the valley had jumped out of bed and was racing down the freeway in the dark on his motorcycle when he sailed off the end of a fallen high overpass and was killed.
I got a call from a contract inspection company I hadn't heard of before. Could I respond to the Northridge disaster as a FEMA Inspector? Why, yes I could. I knew the ropes and my expenses would be much lower on account of the location; I could drive my own truck, no car to rent; I had a phone in my truck, I would be reachable by phone all day; I could drive up to Carpinteria and stay with my mom or my sister, no hotel room to rent. Instead of a plane ticket, the company was happy to pay a mileage allowance for travel to and from the site.
This time, a year and a half after Hurricane Andrew, the FEMA operation had evolved in a few ways. The most important way was that we were issued tablet computers and trained in the use of home inspection software that replaced all the forms and pieces of paper we had in Florida. We had to keep the batteries charged, and once or twice a day we'd find a phone connection to plug in and reach a screechy dial-up to download new applications and upload your completed work. After the first days of tablet training and getting our ID's we never had to go to the company's office until the end when we returned our equipment, and were released.
My inspections were mostly in the west end of the valley; Canoga Park and the border between Reseda and Northridge. Two inspections were very close to the exact epicenter in NE Northridge, and one was two miles away, across the street from where I had lived at 18637 Strathern in 1954 through 1957 when I was attending Northridge Junior High.
The houses at the center were literally cracked in half, when two parts of the landscape went separate ways. Those houses were red-tagged: Not safe for entry. We had to do the best we could inspecting those types of structures from the curb. One house in my old neighborhood, which I had never been inside back then, was surprising in that it had no foundation. In the old days, before readily available concrete, houses were often built on the dirt. Our term "mudsill", the first board bolted to the top of a foundation, was originally exactly what it says: a board lying directly on the ground. It had held up as well as any of the places I inspected in the valley, except there was no cracked foundation to document.
Again I'm the Uncle Sam figure there to listen to people relive their trauma and document the damage. When I lived in the San Fernando Valley, 1951 through 1957, most everybody looked like me. The demographic was 90% as white as I was. By 1994, it had become the most diverse immigrant population I had experienced. There was a fifty-fifty chance that the person you went to interview had English as their first language. There were pockets of Russians, Iranians, Israelis, Koreans, Vietnamese, Central and South Americans, South Asians and Polynesians.
Another of the red-tagged buildings I was called to was the kind of apartment building that had a garage on the whole bottom floor. These types of structures were the most vulnerable to earthquake damage because that bottom story, which is supporting the weight above, was not designed with a lot of bracing. This flaw is called a "soft story". In this case it was used as the parking garage. The building where my claimant was living had collapsed with the two floors of apartment coming down intact on all the cars parked underneath. One of the earthquake's fatalities happened there. A man sleeping in his camper truck had been crushed. In the apartments above, everyone survived.
Many of the people I came into contact with were seriously stressed out. Besides the regular stresses of a disaster situation; the grief and depression about a lost way of life and belongings, Valley residents were experiencing a lot of very strong aftershocks, most of them in the early hours of the morning like the initial quake. People were going to bed with the likelihood that powerful, potentially dangerous shaking would happen in the night. I would drive north to Carpinteria every night and sleep on my mom's couch in her mobile home near the beach, and when I came back the next day, people would be traumatized by the latest aftershock and the lack of any quality sleep.
One of the places I inspected was in a mobile home park, and I interviewed the man who had been there when the quake happened. He could have been me. He had been visiting his elderly mother and was spending the night on her couch. Mobile homes are trailers that are propped up on these two-foot tall jack stands all along the steel beams that support the floor. In an earthquake of this violence, the house was thrown off its jack stands, which pierced through the living room floor making the carpeted floor into moguls of hills and valleys with the sharp metal edges of some of the stands poking through. His injuries were mostly to his shins from the living room obstacles.
The power had failed immediately so the whole scramble was taking place in total darkness. His mother was screaming in the back bedroom. The bed had overturned and she was underneath it. Her dresser had fallen over so that it prevented him from opening the door. He had to break the door apart to get to where she was. Outside, all the mobile homes had come off their supports and in doing so, had broken their natural gas connections and gas was filling the space between the homes. Out at the street, transformers on power poles were exploding into a shower of sparks. Somehow, they escaped the park and nothing further happened to them.
The inspection that affected me most was the second closest to the epicenter. A couple had lived there. I met with the wife, or widow. At the time of the quake, her husband had come home to die of his terminal cancer. He was in a hospital bed in the living room; she had been in constant attendance for months. He had been a CHP motorcycle cop for many years. Like most disaster victims I've interviewed, she recounted for me the night it all came down. She had been totally in love with him, and still was. You could feel it in her narrative. He had always been her protector.
When the earthquake struck, convulsing the house and toppling furniture and breaking windows, she had run to his bed and jumped in with him for protection, and when the shaking stopped, they laughed and cried about the fact that even in his pathetic state, she ran to him for comfort and protection. Her love and grief was so powerful, when she got to that part of the story, something radiated from her that I could feel, like the door of a furnace of love and grief was opened in front of me. It left me shaken. He had passed away of his cancer between the time of the quake, and the time I was there; four or five days later.
We got up to finish the inspection; I did have to continue taking the measurements and calculating the covered damage to process her claim. We went into their bedroom. His gun was laying on the made up double bed. It was a great big revolver. I looked at the gun, I looked at her. She said, "Don't worry about that, I'm not thinking about that. I just had it out, it reminds me of him...He wouldn't want me to do that." Again that wave of radiation. I can feel it again in the telling of it.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com