THE LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE : Atop Skyscraper, On Ladder : Southland Residents Ride Out a Quake

Welding inspector Ken Root always wondered what he would do if an earthquake struck while he was atop a skyscraper under construction.

He got his chance to find out Thursday, 27 stories off the ground on the skeleton of the new World Trade Center in Long Beach.

Root lay flat on the deck as steel columns beneath him waved to and fro.

Later, safely back on the ground, Root had his answer: “There ain’t much you can do.”

The ground wasn’t a safe enough option for Gary Coleman of Manhattan Beach. He was walking out the door, surfboard under arm, when he felt the rumbling. After hesitating, he continued down to the beach to catch a few waves.

“If the buildings were going to fall, I was going to watch them from the water,” he said.

Hard to Stay Calm

Others weren’t in a position to be quite so calm.

When the quake was followed by a temporary blackout in one downtown Los Angeles office building, a burly electrician on the third floor threw up his hands and yelled: “We’re dead! We’re dead!”

James Rue of Downey, worried about the condition of his 90-year-old mother, jumped into his car and sped to her home in Seal Beach. When she didn’t come to the door, he broke in--only to find her sleeping peacefully.

A Secret Service agent from Texas, assigned to guard King Juan Carlos of Spain, was taking a shower at 7:42 a.m. “I was afraid I was gonna die naked,” he drawled afterward.

The king himself, staying in the 30th-floor penthouse suite of the Century Plaza Hotel, seemed unruffled. Walking toward the elevator shortly afterward, he playfully wobbled his legs as though unable to stand and asked an aide: “What did you think of that? “

While many agencies and broadcast facilities were besieged with telephone calls, workers at radio station KLOS couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

“We’ve been running this tell-us-a-joke contest with a $1,000 prize for the best one,” spokesman Steve Smith said. “After the quake, people were still calling up with jokes--as though nothing had happened. We told them, ‘Excuse us, but we’re trying to cope with an emergency.’ ”

All Shook Up

Smith also noted a pattern in the the song requests that KLOS received:

“Our switchboard said people were asking for stuff like ‘Shake It Up,’ by the Cars, ‘Shakin’ by Eddie Money and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ by AC-DC.”

Damage at the Pacific Dining Car restaurant was not only visible but odoriferous.

“We lost about 60 bottles in our wine cellar,” said manager Mike Green. “The smell was really fierce in the dining room. We had to turn the air conditioner on. We lost a bottle of Pernod in the cellar and I don’t know if we’ll ever get rid of the licorice smell.”

Outside the restaurant, a painter on a two-story extension ladder clung to his apparatus during the shaking. “Then he climbed down and took the rest of the day off,” Green said.

For the homeless camped at Venice Beach, the quake provided a touch of poignant irony.

“It was kind of fun to watch all the people running out of buildings,” Ted Perry said from his makeshift abode, consisting of a striped parasol, a rug and a couple of lawn chairs, sitting safely in the soft sand.

“I kind of thought their homes could collapse, and then we’d be helping them, and then they’d see we are not really bums,” said Perry, a beach resident since February.

Tidal wave warnings often accompany earthquakes, but Dr. Jerald Davitz, a Hollywood pediatrician, knew the source of the saltwater flooding the rug of his office.

His aquarium had overflowed. The fish survived, though.

All in all, a raucous sort of day for Southern Californians--including Robin Rattner. It was her first day in charge of emergency preparedness as Long Beach’s municipal risk manager.