Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994                   TAG: 9401180168
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: E. SCOTT RECKARD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Medium

`I WAS READY TO DIE' IN QUAKE

Houses shivered and withstood the shaking only to be swallowed by flames. A 20-foot-high tongue of fire rose eerily from water flooding a boulevard where gas and water mains burst.

And everywhere in Southern California on Monday, thousands of dazed people tried to pick up the pieces of the latest earthquake.

The usually peaceful San Fernando Valley that sprawls north of Los Angeles was transformed by the 6.6 earthquake into a nightmare of ruin and pain by a temblor that struck at 4:31 a.m.

The quake crumpled freeways, knocked over office buildings and houses and filled skies at daybreak with crimson flames and black smoke.

Emergency sirens and burglar and car alarms created a constant wail throughout Los Angeles.

There also were human cries of pain - especially at a collapsed apartment building in Northridge, in the vicinity of the earthquake's epicenter. At least 14 people died there.

"What was really hard was when you could hear someone screaming and you couldn't help them," said Buffy Jo Fitch. She and her husband helped save at least 15 people in Northridge Meadows Apartments, a modest building with a sign outside advertising "luxury resort living."

"I was ready to die," Fitch said. "I thought this was it."

It wasn't immediately known how many people lived in the 164-unit building of one- and two-bedroom apartments.

The whole building "shifted north about 6 feet," said Battalion Chief Bob De Feo.

"It took about four seconds for the thing to go up, over and down," said resident Eric Pearson. "These people had no time to get out. They just kept getting grinded in there."

Howard Lee, 14, was among the dead. His family's apartment was flattened.

"My husband and son trapped inside. I hear my son crying," said Lee's mother, Hyun Sook Lee. "My [other] son crawled out first. He rescued me."

One unidentified man dragged from the ruins exclaimed, "Oh, that sky looks beautiful."

Elsewhere in Northridge, steam billowed from the blacktop streets where an oil line exploded. The burnt shells of automobiles littered the roadside.

Thousands more homes around Los Angeles were destroyed or damaged, while motorists commuting on empty freeways before sunrise were buried in deadly avalanches of concrete.

John Gulzow, 45, was traveling north on the Golden State Freeway when the earthquake hit. "I saw the highway buckling in front of me," he said.

Moments later, a motorcycle officer hurtled off the jutting edge and died.

One block from the leaping flames of a gas main break in Granada Hills, in the home of Lynn Pooler, 49, everything was on the floor.

"You spend your whole life acquiring things and then they're gone in an instant," she said, gesturing to the broken crystal and a smashed grandfather clock.

"There's no power, there's no water, there's no gas, but we're safe. That's what's important."

A burst water main flooded Balboa Boulevard, which crosses the valley, in a surge a foot deep in places. Fire rose from that same watery street when a broken gas main ignited.

At the Granada Hills Community Hospital, about 75 people huddled on plastic chairs in the parking lot outside the emergency room, evacuated because of a burst water main.

In a scene reminiscent of last fall's wildfires, residents clambered to their rooftops with hoses to repel the flames.

The elegant braiding of freeways turned sinister, suddenly oddly empty, after the quake snapped the concrete on two of the area's busiest corridors, the Santa Monica and Golden State freeways.

The jolt tore at the historic core of the San Fernando Valley, toppling adobe walls at the San Fernando Mission, built in 1797, and causing heavy damage to the Andres Pico adobe, a former Roman Catholic mission, parts of which date to 1834.

"Things like this happen to other people," said Burt Lockwood, who watched a neighbor's Sherman Oaks home tumble down a hillside. "You don't expect to see something like this. Mother Nature, you don't want to mess with her."

Keywords:
FATALITY