by Steven V. Roberts, Jim Impoco, Mike Tharp, Betsy Streisand, Guttman, Katia Hetter, Warren Cohen, Dorian Friedman, Erica Goode
After the Great Quake of '94 pummeled his suburban town of San Fernando, Mayor Daniel Acuna lamented: "I think we've had more than our share of disasters. We're paying a high price for living in paradise."
The mayor has a point. The quake that ripped and roared through the Los Angeles basin last week left stunning devastation: more than 50 dead, 5,900 injured, 20,000 homeless, at least six major freeways buckled, countless businesses closed and workers idled. But those dry statistics cannot capture the raw terror that clawed at thousands of Californians in the predawn darkness of a Monday morning as their world was rudely flung upside down -- literally, in some cases -- by a sudden thrust of rock deep below the Earth's surface. It fractured utility lines across a wide swath near the quake's epicenter in the suburban town of Northridge, creating a surreal landscape of fire and water, fear and courage. Ordinary people turned into heroes, risking their own safety to pull neighbors from their obliterated homes. Some were pitched out of their comfortable lives into poverty and homelessness. Others glimpsed, perhaps for the first time, their own mortality. Said Encino resident Jason Mernick: "I've never felt that close to death before."
Gov. Pete Wilson estimated that the damage could range up to $30 billion, perhaps making it the most costly disaster in history. Surely, that kind of money will be hard to come by. It will cost $700 million just to repair 150 battered school buildings, but the city system does not have the funds needed for such mammoth repairs. Police working 12-hour shifts are piling up overtime -- but so far, they haven't even received the extra cash they earned during the riots of two years ago. Highway officials say that while some surface streets will be open within weeks, the target for the main freeways is year's end. Fully normal operations will take at least 18 months.
Skepticism is understandable. In the San Francisco Bay area, some roads ruptured by the earthquake four years ago are still out of service. Many Angelenos are doomed to spend more time in their cars than anywhere else. Days after the quake, traffic began to crawl at four blocks an hour through the worst bottlenecks. And by the end of last week, the patience and goodwill that greeted the tragedy was starting to drain away. Homeless families facing a weekend of wet weather jammed federal offices and voiced growing frustration with the red tape of relief. Police kept a close eye on the 13,000 refugees still camped in city parks; in the words of Lt. Al Dravidzius, "If someone starts acting badly, then there will be someone there to address the issue."
But the most serious long-term questions concern the economy, already crippled by two recent body blows: dwindling defense expenditures and slumping real-estate prices. Accelerated public- works projects to rebuild the city could actually fuel a brief recovery, but such booms don't usually last. Just before the quake, analysts were beginning to detect signs of life in the local economy, including a mild upturn in the housing market. Economist Walter Hahn of Kenneth Leventhal & Co. was predicting a return to positive job growth by the second half of 1994; he now fears that the region could lose an additional 40,000 jobs because of the upheaval. "Los Angeles is now going to lag behind the rest of the recovery of Southern California by about a year," Hahn predicts. Indeed, a computer analysis done for U.S. News by Mark Zandi of Regional Financial Associates Inc. shows that if the governor's worst fears about the devastation are true, the economic losses will be staggering: The region's economy will shrink by $22.3 billion, or more than 10 percent, over this year.
The damage goes well beyond bridges and jobs. Southern California's self-confidence has been fractured as well. A series of biblical-style plagues -- riots, fires, gangs, guns, smog -- has undermined one of the region's most precious assets, its sense of space and optimism. The Promised Land now seems, at times, like the Valley of the Damned. Says Marylouise Oates, author of Picture Perfect, a new novel about Los Angeles: "It's like everything is on shifting sands. You don't know what tomorrow will bring."
But sprouting from the twisted rubble of homes and highways are also seedlings of hope. The city's sense of humor survives, with many joking that a plague of locusts will probably arrive next. In the days following the disaster, Angelenos took care of each other instead of taking advantage of each other. There were only 128 arrests in the first 48 hours, one ninth the normal rate, and only a few were for looting. People shared food and prayers and concern. The riots two years ago made Angelenos fearful and suspicious; this time, says Chaytor Mason, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, "most people reacted with what's called the `lifeboat syndrome,' where people start to pull together more. The idea is, `Nature is out to get us, so we'll fight back even harder.' "
How long can this spirit last? A hot line set up to combat price gouging received several hundred complaints, mainly about neighborhood convenience stores, and officials warn that desperate homeowners are easy prey for con artists promising quick repairs or insurance payments. The menacing scenes at federal offices indicate that if help does not come quickly, tempers are sure to rise.
For all the disruption, though, many disaster plans worked smoothly -- in part, Angelenos noted mordantly, because they've had so much practice. A Vons supermarket in Woodland Hills rapidly dispensed bottled water trucked in from the chain's warehouse, and a store official noted that "all Vons supervisors travel with earthquake kits and cellular phones in the car just for such asituation."
Despite the devastation, most structures survived. As President Clinton noted during a brief visit to the quake scene, "If there's a silver lining here it is that every one of these highways that has been reinforced stood up to the earthquake." Mayor Richard Riordan was even more upbeat, saying the quake's aftermath could provide a "great laboratory" for seeking new solutions to the region's traffic problems.
Still, critics say the planning and the preparation were not good enough. Peter Yanev, a San Francisco-based engineer and an expert on earthquake damage, toured several older structures built before codes were beefed up in 1975 and concluded: "From a building and construction perspective, they've done very poorly." There will undoubtedly be cries for tougher safety measures. Topping the target list: older buildings that still haven't been reinforced to modern-day standards. The problem, argues architecture critic Mike Davis, is that the public quickly loses interest in the battle to upgrade building codes and do the necessary repairs.
The economic engine. It is far too early to write off Southern California's economy, a powerful engine of potential growth fueled by technological innovation and the energy of immigrant entrepreneurs. "The economic impact of a natural disaster is usually just temporary," says Jack Kyser, an economist at the Los Angeles-based Economic Development Corp. "When a plant closes, that's forever."
The problem is that too many plants have closed recently, many of them victims of declining defense budgets. Others were driven out by the high cost of taxes and labor and the suffocating effect of the state's environmental regulations and workers' compensation laws. Over the past three years, 526,000 Californians have lost their jobs, 90 percent of them in the south. In Los Angeles County alone, nearly 400,000 have been tossed out of work. That has led to a collapse in real estate. People who thought escalating values would make them rich are now living in houses that are worth less than their mortgages. Says Marylou
