Homes Feel Quakes’ Bitter Cost : Family’s 11 Years of Planning Is Splintered in Mere Seconds

It was very much as though a loved one had died and now the arrangements had to be made.

Dennis Ward eyed the telephone on his desk at work.

“I don’t want to start this stuff,” he said.

But he did. He made call after call and sifted through one piece of paper work after another to arrange the demolition of his once-lovely two-story home below the foothills of Whittier, the place where he and his wife had reared two children, the place on which they had lavished so much care during the last 11 years, the place whose equity was to provide for their eventual retirement, the place that now lay vacant, sliced, gnawed and gutted by the devastating Oct. 1 earthquake and its aftershocks.

“The hardest thing to do in the world is this,” said Ward, a tall, blond, 47-year-old policeman-turned-real estate agent, fishing into his briefcase and pulling out the pink demolition permit he had obtained from Whittier City Hall the day before.

There were many things to do, and they all hurt. The water had to be turned off. The electricity had to be turned off. Structural engineers had to be found to write letters testifying that the big, comfortable 66-year-old house on Beverly Boulevard could not be saved.

More trips had to be made back to the house, and they hurt too. The furniture had all been put into storage by now and the house looked old and ghostly, as though a few seconds of the Earth’s power had aged it by 100 years.

Hundreds of chunks of tan stucco had fallen off, exposing the fragile hollow-brick construction. Two 10-foot columns on the side entrance had been cut in half, and one had toppled. On the other side, a front wall had been destroyed. A giant window frame lay atop the rubble. Inside there were some dishes in the dishwasher, and that was it.

Thousands of people suffered damage to their homes in the quake. By one score, Dennis Ward and his wife, Lynn, both longtime residents of Whittier, were among the unluckiest. They were among a relatively small number whose homes were so badly damaged that they could not be repaired.

Financially, this was devastating. Like many homeowners, the Wards had looked upon the considerable equity in their home--which they had purchased for $45,000 in 1976, just before Southland real estate prices began to skyrocket--as their ticket to a comfortable retirement.

Suddenly, much of the equity was gone--only the land was left. And, like many homeowners, they had not purchased earthquake insurance.

“I looked at it like everybody else,” Dennis Ward said. “You think it’s always going to happen to someone else.”

Now he had just about enough in the bank to cover the cost of demolishing the house--if he took the low bid of $5,000.

After that, his options were not pretty. True, he has a job, as does his wife; they work side by side at a Century 21 office in Whittier, where a plaque on the wall notes that Lynn sold $2 million of property last year. True, he is probably eligible to apply for a $100,000 low-interest federal loan when the government opens its disaster assistance office in Whittier today. True, he still owns a valuable and very large lot on one of Whittier’s prettiest streets.

It is just that it was never supposed to come to this.

For 25 years, Dennis Ward was a Los Angeles policeman. Two years ago, just before he retired as a detective in the burglary-auto theft division, he obtained his real estate license. So did his wife.

They seemed set. They had been able to send their two children to college, they had been able to decorate their 3,000-square-foot home comfortably, they had time to lend themselves to Whittier community activities like Kiwanis and PTA.

Now they were staying with friends in another section of Whittier and confronting the fact that they could not afford to simultaneously pay off their mortgage, rent an apartment and build or buy a new home.

“I’ll probably lose $150,000,” Ward said glumly. “That’s loss. There’s no recouping it. They talk about (federal) aid, but you still have to pay it back.

“If it wasn’t for friends, I’d be in a community shelter somewhere. And here I’ve always felt like I was affluent.”

He forced a couple of jokes. His wife was thinking about going on game shows. The earthquake had so badly devastated Whittier that he would soon be making a living selling fixer-uppers.

A co-worker walked by Ward’s desk.

“Totally destroyed, huh?” the man asked.

“It’s gone,” Ward said.

“Geez.”

“Gotta come down,” Ward said.

“Oh geez. God almighty. . . .”

He made more phone calls. On one side of his desk was his briefcase. On the other was a shopping bag full of personal financial records he had salvaged from the house. In the middle was a cup of coffee. He flipped through a thick book of business cards belonging to fellow members of the Whittier-Rio Hondo Kiwanis Club.

These were particularly valuable contacts at a time like this, when all manner of contractors and self-styled building experts were swarming through Whittier, offering services at wildly varying prices. By this score, Dennis and Lynn Ward were among the luckiest of earthquake victims and--though they would not know it until the end of the day--about to get even luckier.

“I don’t know how people get things done unless you have these ties,” Ward said as he looked up the number of a Kiwanis member who is a structural engineer. He would ask this man to write a letter describing the condition of his house, a document he believed he would need when he lined up to apply for assistance. “The only way you get something done at a time like this is to know somebody.”

He needed to drive back to the house to check messages on his telephone answering machine. He headed east on Whittier Boulevard, then up toward Beverly, a tree-lined street just north of Whittier’s heavily damaged Uptown business district.

Words of Hope

The car was not damaged. It was safe, a place of refuge, a place where he could search for perspective. Here he was, a veteran cop, hardened by examining life’s worse truths, surprised that he keeps waking up in the middle of the night with flashbacks about the quake. And here he was, trying to take heart from the words of a woman who has a quadriplegic son and whose friends seemed to be bothered by the fact that she was not sufficiently upset by the quake’s damage.

“She said to me, ‘Dennis, this is reversible ,’ ” he said.

He drove up Beverly. Very few neighbors were home. Most had been forced out until their homes could be repaired. Neat piles of Spanish tile and gray and red brick lay in the street, waiting to be picked up. A jackhammer throbbed a few houses down.

Yellow “Caution” tape ringed the ivy-covered chain-link fence that surrounds the Ward home. A neighbor, angered by the passing cars of curious people, had posted a cardboard sign on Ward’s fence:

Gawkers Go Home. Send Money, Not Relatives.

“You know what they told me happened the other day?” Ward said. “A (tour) bus drove by. A bunch of old people taking pictures. Some of the kids in the neighborhood tried to block it.”

Then there was the real estate broker from Cerritos who had come by and left his card on the fence, inquiring on the back: “Would you like to sell, or do you need a contractor?”

“That really pours salt on the wound,” Ward said.

He unlocked the padlock on the iron gate and walked up the driveway, then across the small, attractively landscaped front lawn and up the porch, whose beams were in precarious shape.

“Walk carefully,” he said.

He opened the door and began describing how it felt to be standing in his study when the quake hit, to look up and suddenly see scores of cracks on the ceiling, to come back each day and feel the countless aftershocks and the simple passage of time take their toll.

“Every day I come back here, and I see a little extra plaster. It’s like the death of an old person with cancer.”

That evening, another real estate agent in Ward’s office, Margie Gilchrist, told him some surprising news. She had organized the Friends for Ward Earthquake Fund. Title companies, escrow companies and other real estate-oriented businesses were donating prizes. A raffle was being organized. Tickets will be sold throughout Whittier among business and volunteer groups that Dennis and Lynn had worked with. Organizers thought they could raise a minimum of $25,000.

Earlier in the day Ward had talked with amazement about the help his friends had offered from moments after the quake. Perhaps 50 of them had come to help him salvage and move, he said. “I didn’t call a soul. I’m deeply in debt to them.”

But he had expected nothing like this. He felt a wave of relief. And then he cried.