Quake Ends, but There’s Still Some Trembling in Upland

Bob and Yolanda Fry, who have lived for nearly three years in a white, two-story home overlooking San Antonio Dam and the valley below Mt. Baldy, were just sitting down in front of their big-screen TV to watch the afternoon news.

A moment later, as a 5.5-magnitude earthquake struck on Wednesday, they became a part of it.

“Let me tell you, the epicenter was right underneath this house,” a shaken but nervously exhilarated Fry said afterward. “It knocked everything off the mantle. The TV fell off the shelf. The VCR toppled. It wasn’t a roller--it was more like an explosion. It was like a loud bang.

“It scared the hell out of us.”

The quake caused widespread but generally minor damage in Upland--fallen power lines, ruptured water and gas mains, toppled chimneys and cracked roofs. One home was destroyed in a fire that broke out just moments after the quake, but city officials late Wednesday reported only minor injuries.

The Frys, who keep eight horses on property that includes a trout pond and waterfall, live in the last house on Mountain Avenue, a two-lane road leading toward Mt. Baldy. They were among those closest to the point where scientists pinpointed the temblor.

As the jolt hit, the family--including two of their three grown children and a granddaughter--was gathered in the cozy, beamed-ceiling living room. A party was planned later to celebrate Bob Fry’s 55th birthday. Yolanda Fry was preparing to put a dinner roast in the oven.

The quake put an end to the plans.

As she tried to flee the violently rocking house, Yolanda twisted a knee, which later became painful and swollen.

“I was running out the door and the jolt just shook me into the doorway. It swayed me to one side,” she said. “I twisted my knee and scraped my elbow. But mostly I was just scared to death.”

She planned to have the knee X-rayed today. Dinner, meanwhile, was scaled down.

“I kind of lost my enthusiasm,” Yolanda Fry said. “Instead, we’re heating up burritos that we had in the fridge.”

The strength of the quake was clearly visible in the rugged valley, which holds the dam and the dry-bed San Antonio River. Looking out from their hillside, the Frys could see vast dust clouds kicked up by the shaking. The dust engulfed their home, they said.

“This whole valley was a big cloud of dust,” Yolanda Fry said. “You couldn’t see a thing.”

At the same time, hundreds of rocks and boulders--some as large as four feet in diameter--rained down from the hillsides onto the roadways. Bob Fry, seeing rush-hour traffic swerving dangerously to avoid them, worked outside his home to clear many of the rocks away. Caltrans vehicles later cleared the rest and reopened portions of the road.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, residents gathered in their yards to talk.

Maria Bugarian, 27, who lives in a modest house on Mountain Avenue overlooking the dam, said she also was in her living room watching television when the shaking started.

Her 2-year-old son came running in from the kitchen, horrified.

“I was terrified,” she said. “Little china birds fell to the ground and broke and glasses in my kitchen fell too.”

She had moved to Upland just eight months ago. After experiencing the 5.9-magnitude Whittier earthquake in 1987, Bugarian had prepared for this one by putting aside batteries, a first-aid kit and a flashlight. As it turned out, she didn’t need them this time.

“But now we’re really going to get prepared,” she said, still visibly shaken about 90 minutes after the earthquake.

The quake caught some people near the epicenter in more vulnerable positions than others. Muffler mechanic Robert Smith, 25, was in a shop on busy Foothill Boulevard, working underneath a car--but not for long.

“I was doing the brakes on this car and the car suddenly started rocking like mad,” he said. “I got out of that building quick. It was a hell of a shake.”

William Purdy, 29, a snowplow operator at Mt. Baldy ski lifts, said he felt a solid jolt and could hear rocks beginning to fall from the mountains and the sounds of a landslide around him.

“I kind of like it. It reminds me that this is God’s Earth,” he said. “I just kind of roll with it.”

Purdy said he looked around and saw no serious damage at the ski area. So he took a snowplow and went down to help clear rocks and dirt from Mt. Baldy Road.

Purdy said parts of the road were completely covered.

“The rocks, they were monstrous,” he said.

Former San Bernardino County Supervisor Cal McElwain, who lives on Mountain Avenue just an eighth of a mile from San Antonio Dam, was in San Bernardino at the time of the quake and quickly drove home to check for damage to his single-story stucco home.

He had a radio blaring and was inspecting a framed needlepoint picture that had fallen off the kitchen wall and broken. Outside, a sheet of plexiglass had torn away from the framing of a greenhouse.

“Mostly, I’ve just got pictures fallen off the walls and cupboard doors that fell open,” McElwain said. “I must have closed about a dozen drawers, but I don’t seem to have too much structural damage.”

Along Foothill Boulevard, a main thoroughfare into downtown Upland, concerned residents crowded around public telephones, since phone lines at many homes were not working. Mostly, they seemed relieved that the shaker hadn’t been worse.

Bill collector Vickie Thurman, 26, was one of them. She had just reached her husband and learned that he was safe.

“It seems like everything I own fell to the floor, and I’m scared, I’m jittery,” she said. “But I think we all know it could have been a lot worse.”

Warren reported from Upland and Ferrell from Los Angeles.