Whittier Tries to Put Pieces Back Together

Molly and Raul Berumen awoke Friday morning after a crummy, restless night.

They had spent the first part of it inside a green tent on the front yard of their rented Victorian home that now stood shaky and crumbling. After a few hours, they left the tent for a mattress on the other side of the lawn. Just in case the earth moved again.

The earth did not move, but an already damaged three-foot-high wall, a few feet from their mattress, did. Around 3 in the morning the rest of the wall collapsed.

“A nightmare,” said Molly Berumen, still nursing bruises from being bounced around a doorway during the quake.

Moved to Ontario

Once they awakened, they rented a moving van and spent the day packing their belongings in the smoggy heat. They weren’t planning on moving to Ontario for another month, but now they had no choice. By the end of the day they were gone for good. So were the people who rented houses on both sides of them. So was the family across the street.

This was life on Newlin Avenue in Whittier, the city that suffered the most widespread damage in Thursday’s massive earthquake.

In thousands of residences men and women spent the day sweeping up glass and dishware and food and mementos that were blended into a casserole of chaos by the temblor and its aftershocks. Many rooms looked as though Godzilla had picked them up and shaken them, and many walls were scarred by cracks that appeared to have been made by chain saws.

Approximately 900 Whittier homeowners or renters called City Hall to report structural damage to their homes. City officials, who were just beginning a dwelling-by-dwelling survey to determine how many homes will be declared unfit for rebuilding, estimated that in about 150 cases damage was serious.

In addition to the residences, an estimated 30 business buildings were found unfit for rehabilitation. Total damage to property was estimated conservatively at $12 million.

At Lynn Ward’s 66-year-old house on Beverly Boulevard, which had been a Whittier showplace until the walls and foundations were ripped by the earthquake, the family and friends were “crying and laughing at the same time” as they struggled to clean up.

Built by one of the Coppock brothers, a leading family in the early days of Whittier, the 3,000-square-foot home had been cool in summer and warm in winter, thanks to its hollow-brick construction coated by tan stucco and topped with red tile.

But it was exactly that construction that caused the house to tip on its foundation, lose entire chunks of its walls and force the Wards to move all unbroken furnishings to the backyard and garage while they moved in with friends.

Likened to Movie Demons

“You know those movies where the demons and things are being thrown out of the cupboards?” Ward asked. “That was what it was like. We just assumed we were going to die.”

Barely 24 hours after the quake, Ward walked with a friend down the quiet, tree-lined street toward her home.

“Kismet,” Ward said.

“Kismet,” her friend replied.

The words, spoken quietly, were repeated by the two women as if to remind each other that things could have been worse, someone could have been killed or injured.

Inside, Ward stood in the downstairs room that had been the library. The marble and polished eucalyptus mantle still framed the fireplace, apparently untouched. But instead of logs, sunlight from a gaping hole showed across a pile of bricks on the fireplace floor.

The Wards’ son Dan, 22, a student at Arizona State University who had driven back immediately to be with his parents, was remarking on the former beauty of the home when his reflections were abruptly interrupted by a friend waving what appeared to be a flattened, dead cat.

It was a plywood and fake fur prop from the time Dan played Huckleberry Finn in a Whittier Community Theater production of “Tom Sawyer.”

And briefly a smiling mother and son ran through the still-remembered lines that Dan had practiced in the old home years ago.

Back on Newlin, in a gray house across the street from the Berumens, Monica Esquer was more rushed. She and her husband, Ron, were packing their belongings into cardboard boxes. They had only been here since June, and their landlord had re-stuccoed the place, and they could probably stay.

‘Barely Got Saved’

“I’m not taking any chances,” Monica Esquer said. “As soon as it happened, I knew I was out. We barely got saved.”

She had been caring for her sister’s 1-month-old boy, who was sleeping in a covered bassinet when the quake hit. A picture fell on top of the hard wicker cover, denting it. The thought of what could have been haunted the aunt.

The family stayed Thursday night with relatives in Pico Rivera, but Monica Esquer’s children remained badly shaken. “My daughter slept with her purse and her clothes on,” she said.

In addition to the Berumens and the Esquers, residents of three other rented homes on Newlin moved out. One did so Thursday night at the request of their landlord, who believed the dwelling was no longer safe. Two others did so out of fear.

“It’s not livable,” said Jill Galipeaux, who with her roommate, Jan Landis, accepted an invitation from the Berumens to temporarily share the Berumens’ newly rented home in Ontario.

Under a brutal noon sun, the residents of the two homes loaded their possessions into a pair of moving vans. As they sweated, businessmen drove up soliciting work: repairmen, contractors, real estate agents. More than 50 had come by since the quake, Molly Berumens said.

The Berumens’ landlord came by, told them how much she would miss them and ask if they had eaten breakfast yet.

“I’m too shaky,” Raul Berumens, 26, said, spreading his arms. “Once we get it all put in the truck, I can eat.” He paused. “And then fall down dead.”

A couple of miles and several economic layers away in an expensive hillside home, a teen-ager spotted a stranger.

Visit to the Fault

“You wanna see the fault?” he asked, and then led the way to a neighbor’s backyard, casually stuffed the toe of his shoe into a narrow gap in the grass, pointed out a crisscross of other cracks and proclaimed, “There it is.”

Sure enough, there were the now-innocuous signs of the massive earth movement that had wreaked havoc on Whittier.

In the city’s 24-block Uptown district--Whittier’s original business section and the part of the city hardest hit by the quake--municipal pride lay devastated.

Beginning a decade ago, the city poured $1.5 million into redeveloping Uptown with a Quaker-Latino motif, and business owners contributed at least that much through their additions of building facades, awnings and new paint jobs. The theme was credited with attracting more than $25 million in new development to the area, including a 206-room Hilton Hotel and two bank buildings.

Because most of the improvements to existing businesses were superficial, much of the cherished theme was lost through the earthquake’s destruction of awnings and facades.

Most of the business people “are nervous and anxious. They want to get back into their businesses. A lot of them are very despondent because their life’s work is gone,” said Ron Atkin, a beauty supply store owner who was sitting Friday in the makeshift office of the Whittier Uptown Assn., munching a sandwich and thinking about the thousands of containers piled in the aisles of his store.

A few blocks away on Bright Avenue, across the street from where Gov. George Deukmejian made a tour of the damaged area, Charles Foster was plain put out--out of his apartment and a little out of patience with his landlord.

Foster had spent Thursday night with friends because the aging Whittier home, now cut into three apartments, was within the business district and he had no official confirmation that it was safe to stay.

Dunned for Rent

So it was still bugging him Friday that an agent for his landlord had telephoned him shortly after the quake to remind him that it was the first of the month and the rent was due.

“She’s (the agent) never done that before,” Foster said. “I told her I’d be real happy to pay as long as I knew it (the house) was sound.”

Cameras abounded throughout the city. Insurance agents were demanding photos of the damage. Relatives from distant places wanted them. Residents found some historical curiosity, too.

Back on Newlin Avenue, Bee Cole was walking down the street, focusing a video camera at a home whose foundation had sunk into the ground and whispering a narrative into the camera’s microphone.

She was doing it partly for her daughter, who was vacationing out of the country, she said, and partly because “I’m just so rattled today, I didn’t want to stay in my house.”

Staff writer Mary Lou Fulton contributed to this article.