I perked up at the first distant sound. Then was swept by a wave of anxiety as the the sound grew closer and louder — like a locomotive approaching the house across the front lawn — like rolling thunder coming from below my feet.
The deep resonating BOOM was so intense, my bones vibrated.
The light in the bathroom winked out. The room went black.
I leaped to my feet, but before I could process one single thought, the Earth contorted. Like it was made of putty, the ground beneath me bent and twisted.
Reacting on pure instinct, I lurched toward the bathroom door intent on fleeing to safety in Mom and Dad’s adjacent bedroom. The floor rose to meet one foot, jarring me, then fell away from the other, nearly pitching me on my face.
On the bathroom’s threshold, I gripped the doorframe with both hands.
The walls moved.
The floor moved.
Clinging to the house, I struggled to ride along as it writhed atop the bucking Earth. My right hand moved up with the wall on my right, while my left hand moved down with the wall on my left. Then the right was pulled down, while the left was yanked upward. At the same time, my feet rose and fell with the fluid ground, like I stood atop an inner tube surfing a class-four rapid.
There was a momentary pause, barely a second, before it all began again. During that brief pause, I released my death grip on the door jamb and ran from the bathroom, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom, and launched myself onto their king-sized bed alongside them.
The rolling and roiling began anew as I landed. The three of us crawled to the head of the bed and lay staring out the window into the pre-dawn morning. We watched as the water in our swimming pool sloshed back and forth so violently it generated a tidal wave that crashed over the top of the garage, leaving the pool half full. Then the masonry wall surrounding the backyard seemed to faint into rubble.
All the while, the roar continued. In the foreground of sounds, like a high pitched aria, was the crash of falling objects and the tinkle of breaking glass; in the background was the Universe-consuming bellow of the Earth and everything balanced on its thin skin twisting and groaning and ripping and growling in a discordant, deafening din.
My sister, who had miraculously slept through the first half of the tumult, was awakened when her small television dove off its shelf onto her bed. I heard her long frightened wail as she ran to join us on the bed. She landed as the quake slowed and quieted and skidded to a stop.
The Sylmar Earthquake occurred on the San Fernando Fault that ran through the San Gabriel Mountains into the northern San Fernando Valley. It measured 6.6 on the Seismic Scale. Its maximum horizontal acceleration, however, was three times what it should have been, more like that of an 8.5 quake. The “Rumble” came from the 6.6. The “Boom!” resulted from the acceleration. They say the ground and everything on it would have been “weightless” for a moment during that acceleration. At the time, the Sylmar Quake was the third largest in modern California history, after the earthquakes in 1906 in San Francisco and 1933 in Long Beach.
Immediately after the quaking stopped, we were up.
“What should we do now, Wallace?” my mother said, as we stood in the dark. Her words were clipped, her face pale, and her eyes just a little wide and wild. I could tell she was gripping her panic hard, trying to appear brave for us girls.
“Let’s start by getting dressed,” Dad said, as he pulled on the first clothes he could lay his hands on.
Then he turned to me. “Joan, where’s your transistor radio?” He was sitting on the bed tying his shoes.
“In my room,” I said immediately. “On my dresser.” I was still shaking, but I found Dad’s directness and obvious plan of action calming.
I moved towards the hallway. Dad looked at my feet. “You have shoes. Good. There’s going to be broken glass. Be careful. I’ll be right behind you.”
Slowly I moved from the bedroom-end of the long house towards the kitchen and, beyond that, my bedroom, which decades ago had been the maid’s quarters, so was situated at the far end of the house next to the pantry and service porch. I passed through the living room and dining room. Normally dimly lit by street lights, the rooms were dark.
Dad came up behind me with a flashlight he’d found somewhere, and we worked our way forward. Nothing was where it was supposed to be — furniture had shifted position, table lamps lay across the carpet, paintings were missing from the walls, books and nicknacks were scattered about in haphazard piles. In the dining room, Mom’s china cabinet’s face-first fall had been broken by the dining table, so it lay suspended at a thirty degree angle. Before tipping over, it had flung open its doors and remnants of Mom’s fancy china dishes lay beneath it.
At the doorway separating the dining room from the kitchen, we were brought to a halt.
The kitchen looked like each cupboard had exploded, spewing its contents across the room. Upper and lower cabinet doors hung open. The floor was beyond ankle-deep in shattered jars and bottles, everyday dishes and glasses. Even the drawers were wide open and splattered with debris from above.
On top of all that chaos, both the double oven and the refrigerator had done their work. First, the doors of the frig had opened, milk and orange juice, fruits and vegetables, salad dressing and eggs had been launched like frosting atop the cupboard contents. Then, in what looked like a battle scene, the stove and refrigerator had toppled over and lay flat on their faces atop the pile.
The refrigerator completely blocked the door. Dad and I were standing there, staring at the carnage, when Mom and Diane joined us.
“Oh, Wallace! What are we going to do?” Mom said. The tightness in her voice was back.
As we stood staring, the rumbling and shaking began again. I grabbed Dad’s upper arm with one hand and the door jamb with the other and held on. Mom threw her arm around Diane’s shoulders and leaned against the wall. The temblor’s convulsions were not as big, not as long, not as loud, so not as scary. Expecting it to go on and on and on, I held my breath until it stopped, then I breathed again.
“Dad, can you boost me up?” I asked. “Then I can climb over and get to my room.”
“There’s an awful lot of broken glass in there,” he said, craning his neck to peer over the avocado-green blockade to get a better look at the kitchen floor.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. I was calmed by having a mission, a purpose. I would feel calmer still by doing something.
“First, let’s see if we can push the frig over far enough for you to squeeze through the gap, then you won’t have to do any climbing.” Dad handed the flashlight to Mom. Diane and I lined up with Dad, placing our hands on the broad side of the barrier. “On three… One, two, three!”
We all pushed and the heavy metal box shifted half a foot, bulldozing the pile in front of it.
“Again… One, two, three!” It pressed against the fallen stove, and they both moved another few inches. The gap opened almost enough for me to maneuver through.
“Last time. One, two, three!” The gap widened, and I was able to slither into the kitchen.
Taking the flashlight from Dad, I picked my way across the top of an eight-inch-deep layer of broken dishes and food. There was barbecue sauce and dill pickles and frying pans and juice glasses and salad bowls and olive oil and rice and cookies, all smashed, all mixed together in a slow motion science experiment gone bad. The powerful smells of vinegar and grape jelly filled the air.
It took several minutes, because when I got past the kitchen to the service porch, I had to shove the washing machine out of the doorway and walk over the pantry’s contents. Finally, I came to my room, and pushed on the normally open, but now closed, door. My dresser had moved away from the wall to bar the door. I pushed and shoved (later I’d tell a joke about huffing and puffing and blowing the door down) until I could squeeze inside.
My radio, lay in the middle of the floor.
I picked my way back to the pantry-kitchen door, where I could see Dad and Diane across the kitchen. I held the radio high and called, “Got it!”
Dad saluted me.
Diane yelled, “Yay!”
“Dad, instead of walking through that again, I’m going to go out the back door and walk around. You can let me in the front door.”
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| This is not our home, as I have none. Photo from USGS. |
Another aftershock struck as we stood there — not as big, but almost. There was a deep rumble. a long rolling wave, and a final thud. My heart rumbled, rolled, and thudded with the temblor, while I held on to the wall and my breath. Then it was quiet again.
I switched on the battery-powered radio, extended its antennae, and dialed through the static looking for a station broadcasting news and public safety information. A calm, deep male voice solidified out of the static. He announced that the Veterans Hospital in Sylmar, very near the epicenter, and just a few miles from us, had fallen into rubble. People were missing. He also reported that the Van Norman Dam, sitting in the hills several miles away from the center of the quake, had developed large cracks and might collapse. There were mandatory evacuations of thousands of families who lived in the dam’s shadow. Fortunately, that didn’t affect our neighborhood. He interviewed emergency personnel who directed us to “shelter in place,” stay home, if we could safely do so. The Red Cross was setting up an Emergency Shelter and Distribution Center at San Fernando Junior High, a four blocks down the street from our house.
“I think I should check on the neighbors,” Dad said. “One of you girls want to join me?” He looked at Diane and me.
“And your folks?” Mom said, still standing, frozen in hesitation, in the doorway, unsure if it was safer inside or out.
While Dad and I checked on old Mrs. Greene next door, the Burlieghs across Fifth Street, and our backside neighbors, the Werrings, Mom and Diane stood rooted on the porch.
A short time later, we all slowly drove the eight blocks to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Workman Street, where we found them safe and sound, and surrounded by a mess as big as our own.
In the following hours and days the mainstays of daily life I took for granted were altered:
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| Photo from USGS. |
• My school, Sylmar High School, also close to the epicenter, was closed for two or three weeks. The science wing, where the chemistry classrooms and my homeroom were located, was closed much longer, maybe to the end of the year. Diane’s school, San Fernando Junior High School, with its many early century buildings condemned because of severe structural damage, was closed even longer.
• Around town, scores of older buildings — businesses, schools, homes — were destroyed or so severely damaged they were condemned, including the beautiful two-story main building at Morningside Elementary School directly across the street from our home and a cute, old, river-rock-sided house on our block.
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| Businesses were severely damaged in the 1100 block of San Fernando Road. |
We were lucky. Our house, built in 1930, long before modern earthquake-proof building codes, was structurally undamaged — just a few extra cracks in the plaster. Even the swimming pool came through without breaking. Lots of stuff was broken, though, and the backyard wall had to be rebuilt, but within a few months, everything would be put right.
The damage was seemingly random — one thing stood steady next to another that fell and shattered. Prior to the quake, Mom and Dad had been painting the dining room. In order to move the heavy maple china cabinet away from the wall, they’d emptied the top several shelves of all Mom’s fine leaded crystal glasses. They’d set the glasses on top of the upright piano in the den, where they’d be safely out of the way.
During the earthquake, the china cabinet fell over, and the few pieces left inside were shattered. But the upright piano, which stood on caster wheels on a Spanish tile floor, rolled instead of tipping. It rolled away from the wall, it rolled along the length of the wall, and it rolled back towards the wall. The tall crystal wine glasses and goblets on its narrow top rode along. Only one wine glass fell to its death. A top-heavy goblet on the very edge began to fall, but was saved by the wall, where it lay balanced at a forty-five degree angle until we discovered it later that afternoon.
Over the next days and weeks, there were hundreds of aftershocks, some nearly as large as the initial shock, but most a good deal smaller, yet still terrifying. Each time, no matter the size, I froze, held my breath, feeling and listening for the rumbling sounds and the rolling, quivering sensation. Each time, it felt like my heart stopped for just a fraction of a second before jerking back into its rhythm.
We spent those days cleaning up the messes, swabbing the walls and floors with buckets of chlorinated pool water only after shoveling the kitchen debris into big dumpsters the city placed on every block. It turned out that some combination of the ingredients that drizzled together down the front of the kitchen cabinets or splashed there after crashing to the floor made an effective paint stripper and linoleum dye.
I’d forgotten, but my sister Diane reminded me that the National Guard set up roadblocks to prevent looting and keep out looky-loos. Only those with ID showing a residence in San Fernando or Sylmar were allowed to pass. She recalls returning from across the Valley after showering at a friend’s house and being stopped by the uniformed officers, who only waved us through after Dad produced his driver’s license showing our address at 556 North Brand, San Fernando.
California is a land of earthquakes. As a California girl born and bred, I was familiar with the little wiggling of the ground, the swaying of a chandelier, that momentary sense of unease as the ground shifted. I’d experienced dozens and always dismissed them as no big deal — even laughed at them, considering the gentle rolling of the ground as lightheartedly as a roller-coaster ride. That attitude of bravado was a California teenager’s badge of honor.
Until February 9, 1971.
After The Big One, something in me changed. I suppose in today’s language we’d call it PTSD, but not back then. To this day, nearly a half-century later, my body panics of its own accord whenever the ground rumbles. It could be as simple as the shimmy caused by the passing of a large truck, or it could be the authentic quiver of a small quake, but my body reacts without my permission. My breath catches, my heart skips a beat, a burst of adrenaline shoots through my cells, and I freeze. When my brain catches up to my body, I can tell myself to breathe, and I can laugh at myself, but the initial reaction is completely out of my conscious control.
There’s something terrifying about not being able to trust the Earth — not being able to know, without a doubt, that the ground will remain solid and dependable beneath my feet. Because, if I can’t trust the Earth, the solid ground, what can I trust?
