Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994 TAG: 9401220123
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIENNE PETTY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Monday, they were shaken again as the most powerful earthquake to strike Los Angeles this century rattled the walls of their daughter Jennifer's Simi Valley home.
Despite the family's back-to-back brushes with disaster, the Garners are not begging their daughters to retreat.
In fact, they're still considering retiring out West themselves.
"I have not turned my back on the thought of moving to California to be closer to my girls," Barbara Garner said.
The couple woke up Monday morning to terrifying television images of flames shooting up from gas lines and highways mangled by the pre-dawn quake.
It tugged at Barbara Garner's motherly instinct to be near her girls, and she frantically called the youngest of her four daughters.
Cindi Garner, 29, a graduate of Cave Spring High School, was huddled under her dining room table as dishes cracked and pictures tumbled off the walls. The shaking frightened her, but she survived unscathed.
More serious damage battered the home of her sister, 43-year-old Jennifer Wacenske, who lives 50 miles north of Los Angeles with her husband, William, and 8-year-old son, Eric.
The earthquake hit while they were spending the holiday weekend hiking in the San Bernardino Valley.
"We didn't get Jennifer until two days later," Bill Garner said. "We were climbing the walls."
Meanwhile, Cindi Garner rushed to her sister's house to survey the damage before the Wacenskes returned from their getaway.
She knew the collapsed walls, shattered china and ruined rooms would devastate them, so she left a note near the phone to lighten things up.
"Jennifer, we had a party here last night," it read. "Hope we didn't trash the place too bad."
The Wacenskes felt the tremors as they slept in their vacation cabin, where there was no radio, television or phone, but they figured the earthquake hadn't hit their home, miles away.
"I just assumed that what we felt first thing in the morning was in that area," Jennifer Wacenske said. "We got up, had our nice little breakfast very naively and were totally oblivious to the fact that it was in our home city."
It didn't dawn on them until they saw the tents in their neighborhood. The toppled furniture, cracked walls and general disrepair of their own home jolted them.
"It would have been really easy to get in the car and drive away and never come back," Jennifer Wacenske said. "Instead, we came upstairs, rifled through and set up the tent outside."
A building inspector is scheduled to visit their home Wednesday to determine whether it is inhabitable.
They moved indoors from the tent because the temperature started falling. All three of them cram into one bed.
"It's kind of spooky to have your son in the other room with all these aftershocks," Jennifer Wacenske said.
Shuffling through the clutter and staying strong for her son has been tough, but cross-country calls to her mother have helped.
"I told her, `Even if you have to eat off paper plates on a card table for a year, you still have your life,' " Barbara Garner said.
by CNB