Earthquake Recovery Proves a Shaky Proposition : Many in Whittier Remain Unsettled Even After 2 1/2 Years

Fifteen seconds of earthquake can last a long time. Just ask Brenda Merrill or Pete Wilson or Julia Gonzales.

When Whittier started shaking on Oct. 1, 1987, Merrill first thought a bomb blast was leveling her Spanish-style, three-bedroom home. “All I could imagine was the house falling down around me,” she said, “and I couldn’t get out.”

Although it wobbled, cracked, shifted and separated, the house did not fall down.

Two and a half years after the 5.9-magnitude temblor, Merrill has not put her home or her life back together again.

Merrill is among a dozen or so earthquake victims who have waited a year and a half or more to receive promised government aid. First these homeowners applied unsuccessfully for federal loans. Then they faced a protracted wait for state money, a situation that has proved to be more than an inconvenience.

Merrill’s house on Jackson Street, which is being rebuilt, remains practically

uninhabitable. Yet that is where the clothing store manager lives, crammed into one bedroom with her two children, her new husband and her pregnant cat, Samantha.

Their problems are not unique. Gonzales lived for two years in a house teetering on the edge of its foundation. Wilson remarried and brought a newborn home to a house that was partly roped off because of safety hazards.

These homeowners did not qualify for federal loans administered by the Small Business Administration, which has supplied $93.2 million to 7,035 homeowners.

SBA runs disaster relief programs for the federal government, including those covering homeowners.

“We look for repayment ability,” said Richard Jenkins, a public information officer for the business agency. He said that there is no simple formula for loan approval and that officials deal with applications case by case. “We take a very liberal approach for that, but we don’t want to create undue hardships on the borrower.”

Merrill, 30, says her “child support and alimony were not considered income” and her income at the time, as the manager of several photo-developing stores, did not qualify her either.

Merrill was judged too poor to be helped, a category that single parents or retirees on fixed incomes could and did readily fall into.

Those rejected by Washington could apply to the state for loans with a 3% annual interest rate. Such loans do not have to be repaid until the house is sold or inherited. About 400 homeowners have received this aid.

Whittier residents were targeted for about $4 million from a fund established for quake victims. Homeowners had to wait their turn, however, because the state did not budget the money all at once, said O. L. Lewis, Whittier’s building rehabilitation manager.

“In the beginning,” Lewis said, “it was real quick turnaround” for a state loan. “Two or three months.”

The more recent the disaster, the easier it is to obtain aid, said Lewis, who adds that “as the earthquake diminishes in the minds of people it takes longer” to get help--as long as eight or nine months.

Merrill waded through the federal and state loan process for a year and a half before receiving the money she needed to rebuild.

So she had to live with her son and daughter, now 7 and 5, in a house with few windows (most popped out of the frames) and no central heat (the bill for using space heaters to warm one room was $300 a month).

For a time, she rented her couch as a sleeping space to pay heating costs. The boarder stole her jewelry.

Merrill said just one inspector ever entered her house, and he told her that he could not determine whether the home is safe. Merrill confined her family to the rear of the house after her chimney collapsed, dragging down a front supporting wall with it. The quake also caused the largest supporting beam (also in the front of the house) to drop an inch and a half.

The city never included the house on its list of structurally unsafe buildings. In general, city officials are reluctant to force families out of homes unless they face an overwhelming safety hazard.

For insulation, Merrill nailed sheets and blankets over the windows and holes in the walls. For security, she kept a gun at her bedside.

Receiving state aid hardly ended her problems. Her $50,000 state loan, based on a hasty estimate, will pay for only part of the $90,000 job, she said.

Similar problems forced Gonzales, 42, and her daughter to remain in a house that seemed so unstable that neither would invite friends over. “The floor would give. You could feel every step,” Gonzales said. “A man couldn’t walk through there. That’s how we felt.

“All they said was they were out of funds. I was No. 12 on a list up for funding.”

The courtroom clerk received her state loan late last year, two years after the earthquake. In February, contractors razed her white, two-bedroom, wood-frame home. For the moment, she lives with her mother and worries about the corners she has cut on her new Gretna Avenue house, now being built.

“By the time I did get funded, the contractor that had given me a low bid backed out,” she said. “The contractors that were really reliable wouldn’t touch me because the bid was so low.”

Lewis says 67 houses are still being repaired. He says two homeowners still await loans that have not yet emerged from the budgeting pipeline. At the same time, he guesses that 35 to 40 homeowners, mostly elderly, never understood how to get aid they still need.

It took two years for Pete and Joy Wilson to get a $57,000 loan from the state. “If we hadn’t nagged them every week, we wouldn’t have been on that list,” said Joy, 33, who decorates cakes at a supermarket bakery in Santa Ana. “We don’t let anybody step on us any more. We don’t take no for an answer.”

The first earthquake knocked their house six inches off its foundation. An aftershock sent it back an inch the other way. Because the rooms became crunched inward, the doors now open or close automatically, depending on which way the door frame tilts.

Pete Wilson, a design engineer, says the contracting work for rebuilding his home on Washington Avenue is two months behind schedule already, and the house isn’t half-finished.

The Wilsons, who have a 7-week-old baby and part-time custody of two other children, have done without an oven, stove and hot water. Last week the electricity had to be shut off during rewiring; leaks in their gas line remain a problem.

Then Wilson, 52, discovered that his house contained asbestos, a carcinogen once commonly used in tiles and insulation. Its costly removal was another unexpected expense. Wilson said a Whittier official had assured him earlier that his home contained no asbestos.

When Merrill made a similar discovery, she could not afford professional asbestos removers. So her husband, a 34-year-old Montebello fire station captain, removed the asbestos himself--without safety gear.

Because the Merrills’ loan will pay for just 55% of their costs, Randy Merrill’s firefighting buddies have become volunteer plumbers, electricians and carpenters in their spare time.

“I wish I could pay my husband for his labor,” Brenda Merrill said.

The Merrills must also economize in other ways. They will replace the handmade French doors and odd-sized window frames, which were unsalvageable, with more commonplace varieties. And Brenda Merrill can’t afford to re-create the tile-decorated fireplace she remembers growing up with. It was enough to rebuild the walls, ceiling and foundation, which had to be brought up to code.

Still, she intends to rebuild, more or less, the childhood home she bought from her parents in 1984.

“I love this house,” she said of what is now a frame-skeleton structure in a yard full of ditches and rubble. “My husband is very positive. He says it doesn’t matter if it takes 10 or 20 years.

“The earthquake is nothing. It’s the hell you have to live through for three years later.”