I was still working nights then, covering sports for a paper in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, and I wasn't getting up all that early.
At least I thought I wasn't. At 4:31 a.m., I was awakened by what felt like a giant shaking our house with both his hands. I had never felt anything like it in my life.
Of course it was the Northridge Earthquake.
It wasn't the first time I had felt a California earthquake. In fact, the first one I felt, I wasn't even in California. It was just past 5 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, and I was sitting at my desk at the Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nev. All of a sudden, we felt some fairly strong tremors. We found out fairly soon what it was, because the television in our department was tuned to the pregame show of the World Series game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
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| I-880 |
It was the Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter Scale, and it was more than 200 miles away from our office. It was incredibly dramatic. Part of the Bay Bridge collapsed, and the upper level of I-880 through Oakland pancaked onto the lower level. Quite a first quake.
Three years later, in April 1992, I was awakened shortly before 5 a.m. when my waterbed developed a wave pattern. At was another quake, this one out in the desert near Joshua Tree. My Orange County, Calif., apartment was more than a hundred miles west of there, but I felt the 6.1 shaker.
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| 1994 |
By then, earthquakes were becoming sort of a ho-hum thing for me. I'd feel one that was in the 3-4 range and shrug it off.
But by January 1994 I was living in the foothills north of Los Angeles, less than 20 miles away from the epicenter when the Northridge quake awakened us. The actual strength of 6.7 wasn't outrageous, but it had an extremely high ground acceleration as well as two 6.0 aftershocks, one of them just one minute after the original quake.
It could have been a lot worse. Despite the shaking, we had very little damage. We did have something that we didn't realize until six years later. In 2000, we put a lot of money into remodeling our home, and one of the contractors pointed out that the upper part of our chimney had several major cracks in it. So we wound up spending another $3,000 on our remodel.
Still, what I remember was the day of the quake. The shaking awakened us right away, and 13-year-old Pauline felt it too. But the funniest part of it all was that Virgile, two weeks away from his ninth birthday, slept through it all. We actually had to awaken him to come outside with us in case there were more aftershocks.
Somewhat of a disaster for a lot of people, but 20 years later, it's sort of a sweet memory of when my kids were younger.
Are there better memories than that?
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