THE LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE : 6.1 Quake Jolts L.A.; 3 Killed : Whittier Hit Hard; Scores Hurt, Damage Widespread : Buildings Crack, 100 Fires Counted, 2 Freeways Close

A major earthquake rocked the Los Angeles metropolitan area at 7:42 a.m. Thursday, killing three people, injuring scores of others, severely damaging more than 100 structures and forcing the closure of two freeways in the Santa Fe Springs area.

Seismologists at Caltech said the quake, which rumbled for 15 to 30 seconds, depending on how close you were to the epicenter, measured 6.1 on the Richter scale. That was considerably less than the devastating Sylmar quake in 1971--and was centered in south Rosemead, just west of Rosemead Boulevard at Garvey Boulevard, about 10 miles east of the Los Angeles Civic Center.

Thursday’s quake--the third largest to hit this area in the last 50 years--was felt as far away as San Diego, San Luis Obispo and even Las Vegas, more than 200 miles to the northeast. Scientists said it was not the “big quake” forecast for Southern California sometime in the next 30 years.

Walls crumbled, windows shattered, ceilings collapsed and at least 100 fires broke out in scattered locations throughout the metropolitan area. Telephone, radio and television systems were momentarily knocked out of service by the quake and there were numerous reports of gas and water leaks.

Some of the worst damage was in Whittier, one of the suburbs closest to the epicenter. Sixty people were treated at Whittier Presbyterian Hospital for injuries and about 1,000 people were evacuated from homes and businesses. About 150 people fled to a Red Cross shelter in the Community Center; between 50 and 70 were seeking shelter at nightfall with either the Red Cross or Salvation Army.

Power to more than 500,000 customers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area was knocked out by the quake, with blackouts lasting from a few minutes to several hours. Outages trapped office workers in more than 20 stalled elevators, and thousands of employees were evacuated from downtown office structures.

Power outages in the downtown area contributed to surface street tie-ups when traffic lights blinked out.

Crowded during the morning as workers evacuated from buildings milled about on the sidewalks, downtown Los Angeles became eerily quiet in the afternoon as those same people went home early when many offices simply closed for the day.

Police officers, placed on an alert that kept morning watch officers on duty into the afternoon to ensure adequate manpower, said they arrested five people looting stores with broken windows in the downtown area.

Damage to the control tower at Hollywood-Burbank Airport forced closure of the airfield for 35 minutes while controllers switched operations to a backup facility, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Los Angeles International Airport was closed for three minutes while FAA inspectors made sure there was no runway damage.

City fire officials said Lupe Exposito, 23, of San Gabriel was killed when the wall of a parking garage fell on her at the Cal State Los Angeles campus in the City Terrace area.

A construction worker, Antonio Bernal, 41, of Hemet, was killed when he was buried under seven feet of earth during a landslide in a tunnel being dug in the Eaton Canyon area above Pasadena, according to the Pasadena Fire Department.

Another man suffered fatal head injuries when he reportedly fell out of a second-floor window in Maywood when the quake rocked the building. He was identified as Juan Herrera, 32, who lived in the apartment at 4429 Slauson Ave.

At least four people suffered fatal heart attacks in the moments during and after the quake.

In all, more than 100 people were treated for quake-related injuries at local medical facilities.

An emergency room spokesman at County-USC Medical Center said the room was swamped with earthquake injuries. “We’ve had every kind of injury that can come in, and we’re extremely busy with all kinds of problems from very bad to minor,” he said.

One man was injured when a 3-by-4-foot boulder rolled down a steep hillside, crushing a car on the Golden State Freeway transition road to the Harbor Freeway near Elysian Park.

Burned by Power Line

Another man, a construction worker at Los Angeles International Airport, suffered burns when he grabbed a power line to steady himself as his ladder began to sway.

The quake forced the closure of the Santa Ana (Interstate 5) and San Gabriel River (Interstate 605) freeways in the Santa Fe Springs area at the height of the morning rush hour after chunks of concrete tumbled onto the roadway, and Caltrans engineers noted major cracks in the 605 overpass.

A major traffic tie-up resulted as commuters were diverted onto nearby surface streets. Officials said a 15-mile stretch of the Santa Ana Freeway and a 10-mile stretch of the San Gabriel would remain closed until sometime today.

A 30-year-old Temple City motorcyclist was killed Thursday evening when he ran into a warning sign posted by Caltrans crew members on the northbound San Gabriel near Firestone Boulevard.

The California Highway Patrol said the motorcycle skidded 80 feet on its side and came to a stop beneath the wheels of a Caltrans truck. The name of the victim, who was not wearing a helmet, was withheld pending notification of his family.

Landslides forced the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to close roads in the San Gabriel Mountains. “There’s a lot of damage, large boulders and slides,” Deputy Ron Marquez of the Crescenta Valley substation said.

A staff seismologist at Caltech, Kate Hutton, said the quake, which was the strongest in the Los Angeles area since the Sylmar earthquake in 1971, appeared to occur along the Whittier Fault, a massive, subterranean crack in the Earth that has been the source of a number of relatively minor temblors over the years.

She said tracking equipment recorded dozens of aftershocks Thursday morning, but none approached the 6.1 magnitude of the main quake.

One aftershock measuring 4.4 was registered at 7:45 a.m., followed by another 4.4 at 8:12 a.m. By mid-afternoon, there had been at least a dozen more between 3.0 and 3.5

The Richter scale is a measure of ground motion as recorded on seismographs. Every increase by one number means a tenfold increase in magnitude. An earthquake of 5 on the Richter scale can cause considerable damage, while one measuring 6 can cause severe damage.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which occurred before the Richter scale was devised, has been estimated at 8.3 on the Richter scale. The Sylmar quake, which killed more than 60 and caused damage estimated at more than $1 billion, measured 6.4. The 1933 Long Beach quake, which killed 120, measured 6.2.

In Whittier, the town hardest hit by Thursday’s quake, three buildings collapsed in the main business district, called Uptown. Dozens of structures--there was no precise count--were damaged, eight to 10 beyond repair. At least 100 houses sustained serious damage. Bricks and broken glass littered Washington Boulevard, one of the town’s principal thoroughfares. Police officers cordoned off the area to prevent looting.

Whittier celebrated its centennial on May 16. As part of the commemoration, a large town clock was installed outside City Hall. The clock was smashed.

In Bellflower, a roof collapsed at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, but patients and staff alike escaped injury.

Hospital Split Open

In Rosemead, officials declared the Del Mar Convalescent Hospital unsafe because of earthquake damage and 53 patients were transferred to other facilities.

“It looks like it was just split down the middle,” said Joe Romero, an engineer with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

In Pasadena, the wall of an old building on Fair Oaks Avenue fell onto a row of cars, sending construction workers, who were repairing the building to make it more earthquake-worthy, running for their lives. None of the workers was injured.

In South Gate, a cloud of sulfuric acid fumes erupted over a Dial-Purex plant when the quake ruptured a pipeline. Local businessmen complained of throat irritation from the fumes, but the cloud dispersed rapidly and there were no reports of injury.

In Alhambra, where structural damage forced the closure of six streets crossing over or under the San Bernardino Freeway, John Jomehri hadn’t planned to open his cafe--where the front windows collapsed--but all of his customers showed up anyway. Jomehri baked up some croissants and served them at no charge.

At the New Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles, angels that toppled from headstones lay strewn about on the grass.

Among events canceled Thursday night were performances of the Joffrey Ballet at the Music Center and the Flamenco Puro dance company at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Both cancellations were precautionary. No significant damage was reported in either structure.

Commuters had just begun reaching their offices in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday morning when the quake struck.

Lily Pruitt, 36, a management aide with the city Transportation Department, said she squatted on the floor of her office on the 13th floor of the Los Angeles City Hall as metal file cabinets crashed around her. She looked up to see small cracks open in the office walls.

When the first quake subsided, Harvey Lowe, 51, a material control storekeeper who was the designated Civil Defense warden for the floor, walked from desk to desk to make sure staffers were unhurt. He waited until 30 workers had gathered at the stairwell and then joined them in the walk down.

On the way down, there were more shocks. As plaster rained down on them, the employees moved briskly, but no one panicked, Lowe said. “There wasn’t anyone crying or hysterical,” Lowe said. “But we all wanted out of there fast.”

Large cracks were left in the City Hall facade. On the sixth floor, a fissure extended from a window facing south. On the building’s east side, workmen gathered around a chunk of concrete that pushed out from the wall.

Several City Hall commission meetings were canceled because of the quake, and the downtown Criminal Courts Building and the Los Angeles County Courthouse were closed for business, except for civil suits that had to be filed to meet legal deadlines.

Courts Coordinator John Iverson said he was trying to clean up the mess in his office when officials ordered the evacuation of the Criminal Courts Building.

‘Ants Not Evacuated’

“My ant farm bit the dust,” he said. “The ants were not evacuated. They’re alive and crawling around.”

Two workers were injured when about a dozen concrete slabs from the top floors of the 12-story federal detention facility under construction at Aliso and Alameda streets broke free and crashed to the ground below.

One slab crushed a tractor a split second after the driver, Gregory Morris, heeded warning shouts and leaped to safety. Another slab knifed through the wooden roof of a pedestrian walkway, but the walk was empty and no one was hurt.

At the Los Angeles Mission, a chimney tore loose and fell through the roof of the building, a facility for the homeless at 400 S. Los Angeles St. About 30 people inside the building fled to safety. No injuries were reported.

Outside the nearby Union Rescue Mission, 400 homeless were being served their morning meal when the shocks started. They dashed to the west side of the street as plaster and chunks of debris fell around them.

Daniel Shea, 26, a transient who had arrived in Los Angeles just three days ago from Ohio, was rounding the corner toward the mission when the ground began swaying. “I looked up and the whole church was going in and out,” he said. “I’ve been here three days and I’m mighty tempted to go home.”

At the Spring Street office of the Daily Journal, a legal newspaper, the first shocks stripped plaster from the walls and shattered the front display window three feet from where Burt Mann, 55, dived under his desk. When he raised his head after the trembling stopped, he saw dark shards of glass resting against the potted plants inches from where he had been working.

Behind Mann in the office, advertising manager Skip Lewis, 35, felt the floor sway and dashed toward the front door, pushing a woman staffer out ahead of him. He passed through the doorway as the display window disintegrated to his left and a small shard cut his right index finger.

“Thank God that’s as bad as it got,” Lewis said. Surveying the damage from outside the door, he shook his head. “We were supposed to paint the walls this weekend,” he said. “I guess that’ll have to wait.”

Ted Singer, 40, a caseworker for the state Department of Social Services, was working on files at his desk on the sixth floor of the State Office Building when papers began to fly and desks began bumping up and down.

“I thought I was dead,” he said. “It shook for two minutes. It felt like 100 years.”

1. At Burbank Airport, all the windows in the control tower were shattered and the airport was closed for 35 minutes.

2. A man died when he was buried under seven feet of earth in a tunnel being dug in Eaton Canyon above Pasadena.

3. An automotive repair shop at 101 S. Fair Oaks Ave. in Pasadena collapsed in a hail of falling bricks, crushing five cars and two trucks.

4. In Malibu, at least two cars driving along Pacific Coast Highway were struck by falling rocks near Big Rock Drive, the site of several huge landslides in the past. The area was littered by rocks, some 2 1/2 feet in diameter.

5. A 69-year-old Los Angeles man died of a heart attack as he and others rushed out of an office building on Wilshire Boulevard near Normandie Street during the quake.

6. At least one person was seriously injured when a 3-by-4-foot boulder rolled down a steep hillside, crushing a vehicle on the Golden State Freeway transition road to the Harbor Freeway near Elysian Park.

7. A large portion of a chimney from the King Edwards Hotel on Los Angeles Street broke off and crashed through the roof of the adjacent L.A. Mission for the poor. No one injured.

8. A woman was killed when she was struck by a concrete slab that fell 30 feet from the facade of a parking structure at California State University, Los Angeles.

9. In Alhambra, structural damage forced the closure of six streets crossing over or under the San Bernardino Freeway.

10. Del Mar Convalescent Hospital in Rosemead was declared unsafe, and 53 patients had to be evacuated to other hospitals.

11. A construction worker at Los Angeles International Airport sustained burns when he grabbed a power line to steady himself as his ladder began to sway.

12. A cloud of sulfuric acid formed over the Dial-Purex plant in South Gate after a pipe burst, spilling 300 to 500 gallons of the fluid and causing evacuation of the plant and surrounding neighborhood.

13. A man sustained fatal head injuries when he was thrown through a second-story window in Maywood.

14. Whittier police evacuated and cordoned off a 15-block area when the walls of businesses collapsed.

15. Five supporting columns of the 605 Freeway overpass above the Santa Ana Freeway cracked, exposing large steel supports. Large pieces of broken cement lay on both sides of the freeway in the fast lanes.

16. In Bellflower, a roof collapsed at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, but patients and staff escaped injury.

17. Chunks of adobe were torn loose from the historic Dominguez Rancho Adobe, an 1826 home near Carson. A three-foot carved Spanish crucifix fell from the altar of a chapel inside the house and smashed.

18. A 20,000-pound white marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s David snapped at the ankles and smashed to pieces at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress.

Assisting in The Times’ earthquake coverage were Times staff writers Roxane Arnold, Bob Baker, Stephen Braun, John Dart, Zan Dubin, Andrea Estepa, Marilyn Garateix, Larry Gordon, Kathleen Hendrix, Marita Hernandez, Kirk Jackson, Jack Jones, John Kendall, Carlos Lozano, Hugo Martin, Penelope McMillan, Victor Merina, Richard E. Meyer, Patt Morrison, Dean Murphy, Allan Parachini, George Ramos, Kenneth Reich, Rene Romo, Raymond L. Sanchez, Richard Simon, Claire Spiegel, Larry B. Stammer, Siok-Hian Tay, Curtis Taylor, Lois Timnick, andRobert Welkos, David Wharton and Tracy Wilkinson in Los Angeles.

Mike Ward in Alhambra; Edmund Newton in Arcadia; T. W. McGarry and Bob Pool in Burbank; Bettina Boxall in Cerritos; Tamara Jones in Golden, Colo.; Richard Holguin in Montebello; William Nottingham, Terry Spencer and Chris Woodyard in Long Beach; Gordon Grant, Lanie Jones, Mark Landsbaum, David Olmos, Jeffrey A. Perlman and Nancy Wride in Orange County; Mary Barber, Alan Citron and Pamela Moreland in Pasadena; Sue Avery, Kenneth J. Garcia and Jeffrey Miller in Rosemead; Douglas Shuit and Leo C. Wolinsky in Sacramento; Michael Connelly, Gregory Crouch, Gabe Fuentes and Lynn O’Shaughnessy in the San Fernando Valley; Julio Moran and George Stein in Torrance; Rich Connell and Gary Libman in Santa Fe Springs; Mary Lou Fulton and Lee Harris in Whittier.

Also researchers Tracy Thomas and Nona Yates and editorial assistants Odin Della Catena, Warwick Elston, Will Etheridge, Shawn Griggs and Bryan M. Moylan in Los Angeles.