38 years ago today: The Sylmar Earthquake...

[cherokeeprogressive]

6:00 a.m. 6.6 magnitude. It was my first experience with a large earthquake and I can remember the day like it was a movie I saw recently.

I shared a bedroom with my sister and we slept in bunkbeds with me on top. My mom used to wake us up in the morning by shaking the end of the beds. That morning, I sat up to tell her we were awake and there was no one there. A second or two later my mom came hopping into our bedroom with her pants around her ankles cuz she was on the stool when the earthquake hit. I thought it was funny at first until I picked up on her absolute panic caused by her sheer terror. We were at my grandma's house a few blocks away before 6:05.

I remember seeing a few scary things on TV that day such as the Van Norman dam that the authorities thought would breech and a wing of a veterans hospital that just fell over. I can't remember the name of the hospital now...

Anyone else with any memories of that day?

[ogneopasno]

1. I don't, but I have to drift a bit and say that you are the only other person besides my grandmother

that I know who calls it "the stool." I'm sorry, that cracked me up when I saw it in your post.

[cherokeeprogressive]

10. LOL. Okay, the terlet then!

Or the commode, or the throne, or the library chair, or the potty!

[ogneopasno]

11. No, no -- stool is fine!

It gave me a little nostalgia kick.

[begin_within]

2. I remember it vividly

I was living in Orange, California. My bed started bouncing up and down about a foot. I thought someone was trying to wake me up. But there was nobody else in the room. I heard voices in the hallway and went out there, and my whole family was up and trying to decide what to do. But it was all over by that time, so we decided to just go back to bed. Later in the morning we turned on the TV and all the channels were showing live coverage from the disaster areas.

[barbtries]

3. absolutely.

i was 15 years old, and my bedroom was the furthest from the front door. i hopped out of bed and ran to the front door, which i opened and then watched the street roll for what seemed like quite a while. my mother laid in bed and said, "nothing you can do," which was her basic earthquake response. my oldest brother and his girlfriend went into the bedroom closet! lol

it petrified me. i recall the aftershocks that went on for days or weeks afterward as well, every one of them scared the crap out of me.

my sister was living in japan at the time with her husband who was in the air force. she said the news of the earthquake over there was so dire she was convinced we'd all died.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. Yup. In an apartment with my wife in Canoga Park.

I leapt out of bed, stood in the doorway and yelled at my wife who could sleep through anything. Finally, bounded over and shook her enough to wake her and get her in the doorway. Then we threw on some clothes and drove out into an open field to sit out the aftershocks. I later helped smash open an apartment door that had been jammed trapping an old lady inside.

That was a wowser of a quake.

[Bertha Venation]

5. It was on my mother's 30th birthday.

I'll never forget it. Even at age eight, I knew enough to be terrified. We lived in Huntington Beach, pretty far away from Sylmar (70? 80 miles?). The room twisted around and the swag lamp hit the walls.

[underseasurveyor]

6. That was my first large earthquake experience too.

Living in Long Beach at the time I remember I was in bed and there were shelves on the wall above me with all my breyer horses on them and when the shaking started these hard plastic horses started falling on me. I was 9 and I was frozen in fear and I couldn't move or speak. When the shaking stopped I was afraid to let my feet touch the ground for fear that that would be enough to set off more shaking.

I thought that was a larger quake.. like a 7.0 or 7.1 or am I confusing this with another quake around that time:shrug:

[cherokeeprogressive]

12. I thought it was larger too, but Wiki says 6.6. I thought it was 7.1.

I lived in Norwalk, and really didn't know enough to be scared until I saw the news at my grandparents house. I thought the Van Norman dam would kill us all and it was waaaaay too far away to make a difference. I was only 10, what did I know?

[underseasurveyor]

19. The Earthquake Hazards website says 6.6 too

:shrug: I could have sworn it was 7.1 +/-

Well whatever it was I do remember I was scared shitless

[KansDem]

7. I remember it like it was yesterday...

I had just graduated from Lakewood High School (midyear) and started at Long Beach City College. I had an early class (remedial English--yeah, yeah, my entrance exam to LBCC revealed a deficiency in English. I had to take "bonehead" English before I could enroll in "English 1-A" :eyes:) that started at 7:00 a.m. I had to get up by 6:00 a.m. to get ready and go. I was laying in bed procrastinating when the earthquake hit. Everything, and I mean everything in my bedroom was shaking. I got out of bed in a hurry!

[kestrel91316]

8. I think it was Olive View, at that time a brand new county hospital,

that collapsed.

I remember it and I was in Jr High in UT.

[Duer 157099]

9. For years, Feb 9th was seared into my consciousness

Then, replaced by Jan 17th in '94.

Hell ya I remember that day. No School!! Walking around the main blvd (in west LA), looking at all the stuff broken on the floors of the stores (grocery store - local, not supermarket! liquor stores)

Scared the living hell out of me when it woke me - I was sure I was going to die that day.

Every Feb 9th for years after that, were scary days.

Until 1994.

[slackmaster]

14. My "seared into consciousness" date is April 8, 1968

The Borrego Mountain Earthquake.

http://www.data.scec.org/chrono_index/borrego.html

[Xithras]

16. I think all native Californian's have a "seared" date thanks to EQ's.

My own was the May 2, 1983 Northridge Quake...right up until 1989.

[cherokeeprogressive]

27. I saw pictures from the inside of the Northridge Arms Apts.

It was the one that pancaked onto it's first floor. Wierd scenes. Drywall nails pushed out of the studs so that the hallways looked like they had zippers on the left and right. The wierdest though was a sliding glass door that had bowed but not broken. It was bowed so that the whole window wasn't four feet high. I saw the picture of a fireman touching it with the pointed side of his axe and glass sprayed about 20 feet when it broke.

I remember the Landers quake pretty well too.

[slackmaster]

13. I remember it well - I was having breakfast at home in La Jolla

It was obviously a significant event. I turned on the TV and an AM radio right away. Radio DJs were saying things like "Obviously a large earthquake somewhere in southern California.

[Paranoid Pessimist]

17. I experienced that one and the 1989 San Francisco one

The Sylmar one was more shocking because it woke us up in the morning, nearly threw us out of bed, and opened up a big crack in the back yard of the house I lived in.

In the '89 quake I was hot footing it across the street and was on that concrete separator strip and it felt like my legs were going wobbly; that was literally my thought "What's wrong with my legs." It took me a few minutes to notice that there was no power anywhere and to realize there had been a quake.

I prefer earthquakes to hurricanes and tornadoes -- they're over with quicker and you know that, if you're not buried in rubble, you're ok (till the aftershocks, that is).

[Tikki]

15. The mister was...shall we say...riding the ...

porcelain bull that morning, too.
We lived near the Coast about 40 miles away from the epicenter
and we felt the quake...but, thankfully no damage for us.


The Tikkis

[slackmaster]

20. That's got to be about the worst situation you can be in

You don't know whether to ride it out and hope you don't get soaked from below, or to haul your crappy self to a safer location.

[Tikki]

25. In the 94 quake he was in the van that early morning...

in his van pool from Ventura County to near LAX and the driver
just kept driving.
She never listened to the van radio in the a.m. and was oblivious to all the lights
popping off around her...and the rest of the people in the van were sleeping..
They got all the way to work and then the few people who made it to the plant were turned
around and told to go home.

Tikki

[Reader Rabbit]

18. One of my first childhood memories!

We lived in Chatsworth, and my dad worked at Granada Hills High School. I remember standing in the living room of our house and watching all the stuff on the mantel fall off in perfect sequence—as if there were a tiny man running behind them and pushing them off one by one.

My dad went into work and ended up being an emergency volunteer, as the high school ended up as a partial evac center.

[mnhtnbb]

21. My roommate and I, living near campus of UCLA, were awakened and

thought it was the end of the world. I sat up in bed, and the books that were in a bookcase
over the head of the bed tumbled down onto the pillow where my head had been seconds earlier.
They weren't paperbacks, either! Huge, heavy, college textbooks.

Aftershocks went on forever. There were a lot of them, and some of them were pretty good
shakers.

Here's a summary:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/states/events/1971_02_09.php

Buildings at both the new county hospital, Olive View, and the older VA Hospital of San Fernando collapsed.


The stacks at all the libraries on campus at UCLA had books 3-4 feet deep in the aisles between them.

Years later, comparing notes on that morning, I heard what happened in a storage room--filled with shelves of specimens stored in jars of formaldehyde--in the basement of a hospital in Hollywood where I worked. You know what's next. All over the floor. Stunk to high heaven.

[Rageneau]

22. I worked in Sylmar at the time.

Lived in North Hollywood. Worked in Sylmar. On the street where I worked, 15 of 20 buildings were later condemned and razed. The freeway I took to work collapsed, crushing some poor guy in his truck. Coworkers of mine lost their homes. The swimming pool in my apt building sloshed gallons of water over the rim. Street cracked open all over the place and gas mains caught fire inside them. There were hundreds of fires and many buildings came down. A real disaster, but somehow I slept through most of it. IOW, it was a lot like the Bush Administration.

[madokie]

23. Yes I do

but I was half a world away having to deal with more than just the worlds shaking. I went through a few quakes in and around San Diego the year before that. One I remember well was when I was on a city bus traveling down the road on north island. Yes when the quake is large enough you can feel it in your cars trucks or like me on a bus.

[katanalori]

24. Yes, I was in Van Nuys

and had just returned home from an all-night drunken bender. My roomie was running around screaming, and I was sure that the spinning and trembling was merely a part of my drunkness. Of course, in those days, I tought everything was about ME, even the earthquake. I am now 16 years sober; When the Northridge quake struck it was much more frightening, since I knew exactly what was happening.

[PlanetBev]

26. I was living in Encino

Hung onto the mattress for dear life.

That being said, nothing was worse than the Northridge quake of '94. I really didn't think I was going to live through that one.

[NV Whino]

28. I was in Las Vegas and felt it there

Very strange, seeing those tall buildings sway in the desert. I had been with friends to see Elvis Presley and we were due to travel back to L.A. that morning. We weren't sure we could get back, although we eventually did.

The veteran's hospital was in Saugas. I had a friend there at the time.