Jean O’Sullivan’s initial memory of the Northridge earthquake exactly 30 years ago came in mid-air — a few feet above her bed — where she was awakened to the sound of her own screams.
Minutes later, O’Sullivan scrambled out of her Granada Hills home and joined neighbors in the pre-dawn darkness, tossing displaced goldfish back into a decorative fish pond.
“I was sitting with my feet on the ground, embracing my knees. Then I looked up and I noticed what I had never seen in the San Fernando Valley — so many stars in a deep, black sky. It was just this moment of peace,” she said on Wednesday, Jan. 10.
For most, memories of the first minutes after 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994, when a 6.7-magnitude, thrust-fault earthquake pushed up the San Fernando Valley’s floor, consisted of frightening sensations interspersed with neighborly acts and flashes of calm. For many, the experience reminded them of life’s preciousness, and later on, the need for a change of scenery.
Sometimes, mundane thoughts would pop up, temporarily wiping away the horrific reality.
Right after the quake struck “I remember thinking I was going to go shopping with my mom today,” O’Sullivan remembered.
Actor Peter Onorati still lives in his landmark home in Sherman Oaks, where he and his family literally were slammed into walls that morning. On instinct, he placed his twin boys and 4-year-old son in the SUV, away from falling debris. The 1929 Spanish Hacienda house’s roof was damaged, some walls had puncture holes and two chimneys needed to be rebuilt. He could do nothing but wait two weeks for the power to come back on, he said.
In the meantime, Onorati helped a friend move a piano out of his apartment, one of many residential buildings in the area along a stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard damaged by the quake, he said.
“This guy’s apartment building had shifted off its foundation so much that the main entry to the hallways looked like one of those fun house mirrors,” said Onorati, who is in movies and television shows including “Civil Wars,” “Goodfellas,” “This Is Us” and “S.W.A.T.”
His moment of peace came during those two weeks of waiting for some normalcy when he discovered gardening, something he still loves.
“I sat in my rose garden, clipping the roses with an open Heineken (beer),” he said on Wednesday, Jan. 10. “I learned how to prune my roses because of the earthquake. It calmed me. I was doing something when I felt completely helpless,” he said.
When the conversation steers toward earthquakes, Merrie Lasky interrupts with her own story from that momentous day. The Northridge resident’s house shook and suffered cracks, but was left relatively intact. She first secured her children, then drove to check on her mother, Hazel Poster, in her 70s.
Poster lived on the second floor of the Northridge Meadows apartments on Reseda Boulevard where 16 people died amidst severe damage. Lasky’s mother lived on the second floor, and the second floor had collapsed to ground level.
Lasky spotted her mom’s barbecue wrapped in a blue tarp. “I kept yelling, ‘Hazel! Hazel!’” Lasky remembered. She crawled into the apartment but her mom wasn’t there. Miraculously, Poster had gotten out of the building as soon as the shaking started and was standing in the courtyard with other survivors.
“It was an absolute relief to see her,” said Lasky, now 73.
Her mother asked her if Lasky could go back to retrieve her jewelry. Amazingly, Lasky did so. As aftershocks wobbled the building, Lasky plucked the tin can containing valuables out of the rubble and handed it to her mom. Her mother later found an apartment in Encino where she lived until she died at age 89, Lasky said.
Scary moments were common among those who responded to the question, “What do you remember about the Northridge earthquake?”
Sometimes the day included moments of joy.
David Schuster, who was 6 years old, lived in Northridge near the epicenter. That morning he was with his sisters Amy and Anna, and a babysitter. His mother was giving birth to his brother, Joshua, born during the earthquake at Kaiser Hospital in Woodland Hills.
“He (Joshua) came out with the umbilical cord around his neck,” Schuster wrote in an email. “There was no power at the hospital.” He and his sisters were driven to a safer house while his parents were at the hospital. He remembers seeing flames coming out of the ground on Balboa Boulevard and a crushed truck in a hole in the road. The traumatic experience is one he “definitely didn’t forget,” he wrote.
The family was reunited at a relative’s home in Cerritos a couple days later. His brother was born strong and healthy, he wrote.
After the shaking stopped at his Glendale apartment, David Drake couldn’t get back to sleep. So he dressed, jumped in his car and drove to Glendale Galleria where he was a manager at Nordstrom. To continue his routine amid chaos, Drake, who now lives in Murrieta, dodged errant cars and fires from ruptured gas mains — and went to work.
“The power was still out so the traffic lights didn’t work. I almost got hit by another car who ran a light,” he wrote in an email. “When I arrived at the mall it was blocked off by police and I was told to go home and that the mall and our store had suffered serious damage. I later found out one of the parking structures had collapsed.”
A few months later, he quit his job and enrolled at San Diego State University and later became a teacher. His oldest son was born on Jan. 17, 2002 — exactly eight years later. “I feel the earthquake was an act of fate; as a result of that event, my life changed forever.”
Alice Campbell of Altadena jumped out of bed, peered out the window and spied arcing power lines that ignited a brush fire. It was just a few months after the 1993 Kinneloa Fire had burned 196 structures in the San Gabriel Valley foothill communities of Altadena, Kinneloa Mesa and Sierra Madre.
“We put on boots and went out in our pajamas with shovels to put out the fire,” she wrote in an email, “Then we went back to bed.” She said she didn’t want to see the fire spread like the last one that came within inches of her home.
For others, the earthquake literally moved people.
Loma Smith-Weber, a Maryland transplant, said the shaker cracked floors, burst her home’s water heater and shook up her and her family who lived in Santa Clarita and had never been in an earthquake. She experienced PTSD symptoms for several years afterward.
While visiting a small town in Northern California, she was suddenly brought back to the Northridge quake, she recalled on Thursday, Jan. 11. “What I mean by PTSD is something triggers it. I stepped on a floating bridge and it was a weird sensation. I overreacted to how I was feeling,” said Smith-Weber, 66.
In 1999 she moved to Oregon where several relatives lived, in part to forget about earthquakes. But the whole experience altered her outlook on life. “The earthquake gave me a sense of how important it is living each day and loving each day,” she said.
On the other hand, Andrea Alvarado didn’t leave the San Fernando Valley after the earthquake, she put down roots.
She learned that many people left Northridge after the quake. She and a real estate agent found an empty house in Northridge near the epicenter. She bought it for the low price of $158,000 and in May, 1994 moved in, she said on Wednesday. “Now, the house is worth about $850,000.”
Why buy a house in an area hit by the worst earthquake in California since the 1933 shaker in Long Beach?
“I am one of those people who thinks when one door closes, another opens,” she said. She heard prices of houses in the earthquake zone were plummeting. Also, she had saved up some money in an IRA for a down payment. “The door opened because now I could afford a house here,” she explained.
Alvarado, 79, went on to form the Northridge Beautification Foundation, which put up art work, murals and artfully painted signs in Northridge Village.
O’Sullivan, who was a graduate student at heavily damaged Cal State University Northridge, works there today. Since Jan. 17, 1994, she no longer considers earthquakes “fun” like she did as a little girl growing up in Los Angeles.
Nowadays, when she feels the earth move even slightly from a small temblor, she stops, listens and breathes a sigh of relief once it has passed.
“I do have extra water. And I leave my shoes by the bed,” she said.
To participate in a U.S. Geological Survey, “Did You Feel it?” fill out the form at earthquakes.usgs.gov.
SCNG staff writer Olga Grigoryants contributed to this article.