Most of them will remember always that it was dark when the earth moved and that they were helpless against its power.
In seconds, Monday morning’s 6.6-magnitude earthquake left untold thousands of lives transformed, homes destroyed, dreams shattered. For at least 51 people, death came calling at 4:31 a.m.
But millions more were picking themselves up and looking for signs of hope amid the rubble Thursday, pieces of their lives they could hold onto and refashion and use to steel themselves for what may lie ahead. Their nerves still on edge from repeated aftershocks, Angelenos are trading stories this week about where they were when the quake hit and how they came out and what might come next. Here are six of them:
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If there is one thing Alex Lukovic isn’t, it’s claustrophobic. “Plumbers have to love small places. It’s part of the job,” Lukovic said with a wry smile.
When the quake hit, Lukovic was in one of those small spaces-under a house in Burbank fixing a broken pipe. “I was on emergency call, and the office sent me on a job at 3 a.m.,” he recalled.
After shutting off the water to the house to stop a geyser shooting through the kitchen floor, the 6-foot 3-inch, 275-pound Lukovic squeezed into the crawl space under the house and set about patching the leaky pipe.
Just as he was about to put the final clamp on, the temblor hit.
“The whole house started shaking above me. There was a huge thumping sound, like someone was hitting the damn place with a huge hammer. Things started to shift, my flashlight broke and pipes started to break all over the place.
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“I was about 10 feet away (from the crawl space entry), stuck in a corner. There was nothing I could do but cover my head and hope. I thought I had had it.”
As soon as the main quake subsided, Lukovic tried to get out. Then the first aftershock hit.
“I was banging my head on everything. Water was squirting everywhere.”
By the time Lukovic got out into the yard, the owners of the house were standing in the driveway in panic. Lukovic joined them and waited out more aftershocks. Then he delivered one of his own.
“I gave them the bad news right away,” Lukovic added. “The first leak was fixed, but now they needed a whole new system. The old galvanized pipes just tore apart. Poor people. It’s going to cost.”
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Before the earthquake, conditions for the 10-member Calderon family were already severely cramped in the studio apartment the Mexican immigrants shared in a Hollywood building.
Eight sons and daughters, ages 5 to 22, slept in five beds in the main room and the closet. The parents slept in the kitchen.
“I came to the United States so my children could study,” said Maricela Calderon, 39, a housecleaner, lying on a cot in the emergency shelter at Hollywood High School. Not far away her children crowded around a visiting magician. “We don’t have money. We don’t know anybody. We don’t know what we will do.”
Her husband, an ironworker who lost his job when the quake crushed his workplace, was off trying to figure out how to store their meager possessions, left inside their now-condemned apartment building.
Now in their second day in the shelter, the family still was waiting to get even basic information about their rights regarding return of their security deposit and possible emergency grants.
The court-appointed receiver of their substandard apartment building, which overlooks the Hollywood Freeway, had begun returning January’s rent and asking tenants to sign a form, probably illegal, giving up further claims.
Under the law, flouted far and wide here this week, landlords must return security deposits and come up with relocation funds, according to the Legal Aid Foundation.
“What are we going to do?” Calderon asked. “We certainly don’t have money to return home, and what would I do anyway? My children are going to graduate high school. We came here for them. We don’t take welfare, because we came to work. But how can I work when I have my children all here?”
Three of her children, Daniel, 21, Jesus, 17, and Adriana, 15, attend the high school where the Calderons and 450 other people found shelter under the glaring lights of the noisy gym.
The children, educated in California schools, knew what to do during the quake as plates, glasses and windows shattered and the building’s foundation cracked.
“They said, `Be calm, be calm.’ They told us to put on our shoes. We all held hands as we walked through the dark.”
“We have thanked God that we are all alive, and we will fight,” she said. “They say in El Norte (the United States) it’s beautiful. They say they have beautiful clothes and cars. We’ve never had anything beautiful. Now we don’t have anything at all.”
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Like most Angelenos, Lynn Copes was sound asleep when the quake hit. Glass began to fly as the bed on which she and her husband, Robert, were lying bounced across the room.
“The window imploded, and glass shot right across my head and stuck into the wall on the other side of the room,” Copes said Thursday as she stood in line waiting to get into a federal and state relief center in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Winnetka.
The Copeses and their 13-year-old son, Lee, lived on the ground floor of a two-story apartment complex in Northridge, the quake’s epicenter.
“My son started shouting from the back bedroom `Mom! Mom!’ I told him to stay where he was until the shaking stopped.”
When the first jolt ended, Copes and her husband climbed out of bed, severely cutting their feet on broken glass. They rushed to Lee’s room, but he was trapped inside because the door was blocked by two fallen shelves and piles of books.
“We didn’t know if there was going to be a fire or a gas leak. We couldn’t budge the door. We couldn’t get him out,” Copes said.
She stayed by the door talking to her panicked son, who was screaming by now, while her husband, still barefoot and in his pajamas, ran out of the partially collapsed building and into the dark.
“He started clawing his way up the rubble to my son’s bedroom window,” she said, describing her husband’s rescue attempt. “The glass wasn’t broken, but the window would not budge. Finally Robert told our son to break the glass.”
Only then was Robert Copes able to pull Lee through the window and down to the street.
Still inside, Lynn Copes began rummaging through the debris, gathering up money and important papers. Rushing through the dark, she tripped over a toppled table and fell.
Unable to get back to her feet, she crawled to the door, down the corridor and out into the street. Her husband and son put her into the car and drove her to Granada Hills Medical Center, where she discovered that her hip had been pulled out of its socket in the fall.
The emergency room was overflowing with injured, and Copes was treated in the hospital parking lot. She spent the rest of the day stretched across the back of the family car trying to bear the pain.
“Everything is gone. We have two changes of clothing each, and that is it,” she said.
Copes and her family have lived through three other California quakes, but never one like Monday’s.
“I’ve never been through something like that. It is the most terrifying experience there can be. You are totally helpless.”
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For Arnie Wohl, 4:30 in the morning normally is his hour of peace, a time to sip coffee and meditate while the rest of the city sleeps.
Shortly afterwards, Wohl, 44, leaves his San Fernando Valley condominium in Studio City for the short commute to his job as a music promoter in Canoga Park.
This Monday, Wohl was brewing coffee as usual, preparing for his daily ritual, 20 minutes of deep breathing and chanting mantras.
At 4:31 a.m., there was a sound like a bomb, and Wohl tumbled to the floor as bookshelves, dishes and the coffeemaker crashed around him.
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“I thought this was it, we are going to die,” said the athletic, long-haired Wohl. “It was terrifying.”
Three days later, Wohl and his wife, Randy Thomas, a voice-over actress in her late 30s, are weary from sorting through the heaps of broken crockery and jumbled possessions in their two-story unit.
They were among the last few residents of their building to remain at home the last few days, cleaning away the debris as they waited for city building inspectors to work their way over.
Just down the street, inspectors already had condemned an entire block of similar buildings as structurally unsound and unlivable.
On Thursday they got the word. City inspectors discovered that the building had moved off its foundation from west to east during the quake. They declared it unsafe and closed it to all but city employees and residents.
Residents can enter only for short periods, lest an aftershock bring the structure down on them. Private engineers will try to determine if the building can be salvaged.
Regardless, Wohl and Thomas plan to leave. They want to move as far from California as possible.
“That is it for us,” Wohl said. “Ever. Ever.”
They considered California a professional paradise but no more. “What good is being able to make $5 million if you’re dead?” Wohl said. “We bought some property in Florida in December, and we’re just going to go there.”
First, though, there is other important business. “We’re going to a friend’s house to take a long, hot shower,” Thomas said. “And I’d like to be able to meditate again. I haven’t been able to meditate since the earthquake, and I haven’t been getting much rest. I’m sure I’ll feel better once I get to meditate again.”
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What began as a day of chaos ended up looking like a gift from heaven for Ben and Jan Macias of Santa Monica.
Jan Macias, 51, was at work behind the deli counter at Pavilion’s supermarket when the temblor tossed every can, bag and box into the aisles and left the store’s employees in darkness.
Bolting for the door, Macias tripped over a display stand that had fallen in her path, sending her sprawling and leaving her with a nasty scratch on her arm.
At home, Ben Macias, 59, sprang out of bed as soon as the rumbling stopped and rushed to the supermarket to make sure his wife was safe. All the way, all he could think of was the boiling grease in the deep-fryer behind the deli counter.
He was relieved to find that she was only shaken, and that she hadn’t yet turned on the fryer. “Thank God,” she said.
“I was scared, but at first you just start worrying about other people,” Ben Macias said. “You can’t rest until you know that your family is OK.”
The couple suffered only minor damage to their home. Two days later, they were out pedaling around on their mountain bikes, snapping pictures of all the fallen brick storefronts along Santa Monica’s festive Third Street Promenade, where the usual laughs and chatter of revelers and shoppers had given way to the pounding of jackhammers and front-end loaders.
A brick mason by trade, Ben Macias said he recognized the extreme tragedy in the destruction but also saw in it a chance to begin working again.
The depression in California’s construction and real estate business had left Macias out of work for over a year, and he is on his third extension of unemployment benefits.
Earlier that day, his boss had called, saying they had so many repair jobs lined up that they could only afford to take care of the bosses’ personal friends first. “We should be swinging back into action,” Macias said with a smile.
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After the tremendous jolt, Janis Hunt and David Johnson leaped out of bed naked and scurried for the door of their first-floor apartment, stumbling with the vibrations of the quake that never seemed to end.
Hunt, 33, tried to push open their front door but found that she was looking straight ahead at pavement. “My sidewalk wasn’t here,” she said the next day, bending over and holding her palm open on the ground. “It was here,” she said, holding the palm out in front of her eyes.
The quake had ripped their apartment building off its foundations and dropped it into its basement. As aftershocks followed, the couple climbed out the window onto the sidewalk and crawled across broken glass until they were safely away from the building.
“We didn’t realize that the bed had fallen a couple of feet,” said Johnson, 30, in the midst of packing up what was left of the couple’s belongings in front of the destroyed apartment building in Sherman Oaks Tuesday. “It was horrific at best, something I hope I never have to go through again.”
Johnson, a television producer, and Hunt, a singer and songwriter from Chicago, got away with only a few cuts and scratches, but they estimate they lost thousands of dollars of property.
“Computers, VCR, TV. We had it all,” Johnson said.
What they didn’t lose were the wedding rings they had just bought for their marriage next month. Johnson courageously dived back into the apartment moments after the quake to grab the rings, as well as a robe for his frightened and embarrassed fiance.
Not knowing what they would do about a new apartment, they were still hoping to get wed. “If the wedding site is still up,” Johnson said.