Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 19, 1994 TAG: 9401190110
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL HELTZEL
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Monday's early-morning earthquake shook many Angelenos, including me, out of bed and under doorways and desks.
The quake, centered 20 miles from my apartment, was a personal first. My last five years at Virginia Tech were wonderfully free of the geological tumult found in Southern California.
Several smaller quakes shook my apartment earlier this week, but they were nothing compared to the rumbling jolt that brought lamps, speakers and just about everything else crashing to the floor.
In typical California fashion, L.A. took the disaster in stride. The streets filled with people making the most of the unexpected day off. They walked their dogs and grabbed a bite to eat at overcrowded restaurants where the ice in their drinks rattled with aftershocks. Picnickers were out in force, trying to find a place to sit where nothing could fall on their heads.
Neighbors who normally ignored each other struck up conversations. They asked how their apartments had fared and traded bits of information heard on radio and television. With power outages, water contamination and intermittent phone and cable service, the grapevine took over.
How many people had been killed? Did you hear about the apartment that collapsed? Where was the epicenter? How big was this one? Is your family OK?
Blown-out windows and ruptured gas lines led to my first lesson in earthquake safety: Put on shoes and don't light a candle. Contaminated water brought lesson two: Don't flush the toilet. You can drink water out of the tank, not the bowl. And don't forget to boil it for five minutes.
I opted for bottled water from the liquor store across the street. The cashier was telling me how his family in Mexico feared the worst when they couldn't reach him. Between the difficulty with phone lines and local gossip, they were under the impression that the entire state had fallen into the Pacific. He grinned and gestured to suggest a big splash. We both laughed, and I thought about California's almost-biblical disasters of late. I imagined a great decline in atheists after Monday.
My boyish enthusiasm for my first natural disaster was quickly replaced by sad confusion. Radio reports told of a policeman who was killed driving off a collapsed overpass on the freeway I take to work. Another station Heltzel reported that a mother died when she fell in the darkness trying to check on her children.
The phone rang constantly, despite the inconsistent service the quake had caused. Friends and relatives checked to make sure I was safe.
I called to check on a friend, Gayle Cohen, a recent James Madison University graduate from Martinsville, who was even closer to the epicenter. It was her first earthquake, too, and her electricity had been out all day.
Like all of my friends in L.A., she was shaken but unhurt. Gayle was cooking anything she had the ingredients for, in what she described as a chipmunk-like urge to store food following the disaster.
During the night she'd dreamed that a giant meteor crashed into the Earth, and when the quake started she thought she was still dreaming. "When I got up, I wouldn't let go of the sheets, and when the electricity came on you could see a trail of sheets back to the doorway," she said.
Gayle's reaction to her first quake was a lot like mine. The constant aftershocks were infuriating. All day I felt a false sense of motion, like getting off a boat or an exercycle. Sometimes the motion was anything but false; aftershocks already number in the hundreds and will continue for weeks. The almost nonstop trembles serve as a reminder of a capricious planet.
"It makes me want to get the hell out of Dodge," she told me. "I keep thinking I would never want to have a little child here. Can you imagine putting children in another room and wondering if something's going to fall on their heads? There's nothing you can build, nothing you can do, to stop an earthquake."
I hung up the phone and called Elizabeth Lee, from Rocky Mount, who graduated from William and Mary last year. She had been unsettled by the loudness of the quake. Along with the incredible rumble that accompanied the initial shock, car and store alarms created an eerie chorus of warning.
We talked about feeling stir-crazy and the fact that nobody could get in or out of the city by car. That definitely went against instinct. As night fell, the L.A. mayor instituted a curfew, which added to my cabin fever.
"This is California's version of the blizzard," she joked. "That's the only thing I could think of that's close to anything in Virginia. Snow will melt, but the earth moving under your feet . . . ."
We had laughed at the idea of those survivalist "kooks" who store water and extra flashlight batteries, and now wished we had done the same. When you can't light a candle for fear that a leaking gas line will blow you out of your apartment, you wonder if your survivalist instincts might be lacking.
As my computer monitor vibrates with another aftershock, I'm trying to remember why I moved to L.A.
Southern California loses some of its charm when the number of floors in your apartment can change in 10 seconds. Right now I'd gladly trade the temperate weather for the safety and familiarity of a Virginia snowstorm.
Paul Heltzel is a Virginia Tech graduate and former stringer for this newspaper. He is an editor of U., The National College Magazine, in Los Angeles.
by CNB