The big one and the little one

We had rented a small ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac on Spring Oak Drive in Bronson Canyon, between Franklin Avenue and Griffith Park, and had just purchased a new king size bed when it happened.  There was a terrible noise that everyone describes it as the sound of a freight train passing through your house, and they’re right. The bed started walking across the room toward the bathroom door.  The thing was shaking and bouncing and pictures were dropping off the walls and shattering on the floor, and I shouted to my wife Carolyn, “It’s a nuclear attack!” We struggled out of bed and started moving toward the back door.

It was 4:30 in the morning on January 17, 1994, and it was an earthquake, the big one, the Northridge Quake as it would be called when electricity was restored and we could watch the news on the TV, where the only thing that would get coverage as big as this would be the OJ trial later that year.

The kitchen practically exploded – every cupboard burst open, plates and cups and saucers and glasses all over the floor swimming in a sea of olive oil.  Two bottles of the stuff had pitched off the counter and burst open, along with half of everything in the refrigerator. 

It turned out that the house was okay, because its foundation was poured concrete anchored to a gigantic boulder the house had been built on, up against the wall of the little box canyon out of which our cul-de-sac had been carved, large enough for five small houses.  That’s what saved us – saved the entire Hollywood Hills, as it turned out – houses with foundations anchored on the rock that formed the hills. 

We would own two houses over the next 12 or 13 years in the hills, and both were built atop rock.  One on Los Feliz Boulevard was built in 1921 on a dome of rock that ran along Los Feliz above Franklin Avenue, where the Hollywood flats began.  The other was above Franklin on Holly Mont Drive in one of the first houses built in the hills, a 1923 turreted Spanish-style house with a clay tile roof built right up against the fact of a granite hill that had been blasted for the home’s foundation.  You could go into the basement of the house on Spring Oak and the one on Holly Mont, and the first thing you’d see were the gigantic boulders the houses sat on.  There was a little basement and a large crawlspace under the Los Feliz house, and down there you could see the sandstone dome under a thin dusting of sand from the rock.

The Los Feliz house had been through seven major quakes by the time we bought it in 1996 and had never suffered even a minor crack in its plaster-on-lath interior walls.  Same with the house on Holly Mont.  The exterior walls of both places were constructed using rough two-by-six Douglas Fir framing, onto which was nailed a thick wire mesh, and then three inches of lime concrete stucco was applied in layers.  Both the concrete and the Douglas Fir frames had hardened so much you could barely drill into the stucco, and good luck trying to drive a nail into the houses’ Douglas Fir framing.  We went through multiple small earthquakes over the years in both houses.  The pictures would shake a little on the walls, but you couldn’t feel the floors shake, even a little.  Through the decades, neither house had suffered even a small crack in the exterior stucco.

The Northridge Quake was something else.  The house on Spring Oak Drive was a wood frame structure built in the 1950’s, but its concrete foundation, anchored on the rock of the box canyon, saved it.  Same with the other houses on the cul-de-sac.  They all shook, but the stone walls of the box canyon held fast, and the concrete patios behind each house didn’t even crack. 

We were new to Southern California.  Our neighbors were veterans, but even they were shook up.  Nobody had been through a quake that violent.  All our cars shifted from where they were parked either on the street or within garages.  Outdoor furniture walked from one side of the patios to the other, but nobody had any windows or walls that cracked. 

The rest of L.A. wasn’t so lucky.  We heard about a house in the next canyon over, Beachwood, that had been built on the side of the canyon wall.  We called them “hanging houses” and always wondered what would happen to them in an earthquake.  This one began sliding slowly down the canyon wall with the first shock of the quake.  The couple who lived in the house were in bed and immediately woke up to find themselves looking out their picture window at the hillside going by on either side of the house.  Their bed had a footboard, so they didn’t come out of the bed and just rode it down the hill until the house stopped.  The roof didn’t collapse on them, and neither was hurt, amazingly.

Further down in the Hollywood flats and up in the San Fernando Valley where the quake’s epicenter was, the story was very different.  Entire apartment buildings pancaked.  Sixteen people died in the collapse of one apartment building in Northridge itself.  We learned that the flat areas of the L.A. basin were basically sand, and the sand “liquified,” as they called it, forming waves that took down houses, garages, and one stretch of the Santa Monica freeway that passed over La Cienega Boulevard.  Up in the valley, an exit of the Interstate 5 freeway in Newhall Pass collapsed, killing a motorcycle cop who was driving across the elevated exit in the dark and never saw the gap in front of him.  Fifty-seven died in all, with more than 9,000 injured.  Tens of billions of dollars of damage was done by the quake across the Los Angeles area.  Schools were damaged and disrupted.  Theaters closed.  Gas stations were damaged and had to be repaired before they could reopen.  Television and motion picture production came to a stop.  People in South Los Angeles who lived in damaged houses camped out in parks for weeks. L.A. was brought to a screeching halt.

Hundreds of aftershocks followed the big one.  Two days after the quake, I was driving on the 101 freeway into the Valley for some fool reason, and I was just coming up on the underpass for the 134 Freeway in Toluca Lake when the road in front of me buckled up at least three feet before settling back exactly like it was.  The underpass was directly ahead about 100 yards, but there were cars just behind me, and I couldn’t stop, so I floored it and shot under the 134 and kept going as another aftershock sent more ripples down the 101 Freeway ahead of me.  I got off at the first exit and parked on a side street in the Valley and just sat there.  People in that neighborhood had felt the aftershock, too, and were outside their houses gathered in small groups talking about what had just happened. 

Nobody knew what to do.  The day after the initial earthquake, my friend Bob Ward called to check in and see if anything had happened to our house.  We talked for a few moments.  Bob was the showrunner on Law and Order and said production had shut down.  Suddenly I panicked.  I had recently signed up to write a script for HBO and was in talks with a production company for another script.  My career in Hollywood was just beginning to move.  I was waiting for the first check from HBO and now the meetings with the other producers were put off, or canceled. 

“What about my deals?” I found myself shouting into the phone at Ward.  “We just had the biggest earthquake anyone can remember in L.A., and you’re worried about your deals?” Ward answered.  “You’re losing it, man.”

I was losing it.  Over the next couple of years, it would emerge that one of the biggest aftershocks of all from the Northridge quake was to people’s mental health.  Alcohol consumption went way up.  So did divorces.  Children’s grades suffered.  People had breakdowns.  The population took a hit, with people moving east to states where earthquakes were not going to wake you at four a.m. with your bed scooting across the floor, or worse still, down a hill.

I thought living here in Northeast Pennsylvania was safe from earthquakes until last Friday.  We were about 25 miles away from town, down in New Jersey in Newton, where my wife Tracy had an appointment at the medical center.  I was sitting in the car outside waiting for her when I felt a bump.  The car bounced on its suspension once or twice. 

It felt so familiar, I immediately knew it was an earthquake.  Half an hour later, we drove home.  The road didn’t buckle.  It was a little one.