After Shocks

People go about their business. But for almost everyone who lived through the biggest earthquake in California since 1906, life remains different a year after.

The differences can be subtle. People may jump when a truck rolls by, or when the washing machine spins and shakes the house. Many people need more time to gain their composure when a small temblor rumbles through. Some people still won’t cross the Bay Bridge. Some people have moved away. No one who survived the earthquake on that warm evening last Oct. 17 ever wants to experience another one like it. For people who came close to death, whose homes are no more, who saw up close the destruction the quake wrought, the effect will remain forever. Times Staff Writer Dan Morain talked with some of those people. Here are their stories. . . .

‘I don’t think we’re expecting too much’

In better days, Jimmie and Frances Smith always gave their fair share to charity. When the earthquake struck, they needed some of that charity back.

“We did receive some help,” Jimmie Smith said, sitting in the apartment they moved into in March after spending five months in shelters. “If we didn’t receive it, we’d be in even more of a mess than we are. But these organizations breached their promise to the public.

“It’s almost a year. They still have not paid for most of what we lost.”

Late last year, after the Smiths had been in the Mercy Manor shelter in Oakland for more than a month, a legal aid lawyer asked them to lend their names to a class-action lawsuit seeking to force the government to help people like themselves. They quickly agreed. Jimmie Smith, et. al, v. Federal Emergency Management Agency, et. al, was filed.

The Smiths had been living in an old hotel in downtown Oakland for only nine days when the earthquake struck. The building, constructed of unreinforced masonry, was condemned the next day. The quake destroyed more than 2,000 low-rent hotel rooms like the Smiths’ quarters in Oakland, Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

Making matters worse for the residents of aging buildings, FEMA regulations said people must have lived in one place for at least a month before they could qualify for rental assistance. The regulation ignores the fact that poor people often move before a month has passed, the suit says.

Almost a year later, Stephen Ronfeldt, of the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, said the suit may be close to settlement. FEMA seems willing to pay the millions needed to replace housing for thousands of poor, occasionally homeless, people displaced by the quake. But the lawyer said the litigation “has been a war.”

Complex government regulations were only part of the Smiths’ problem. Jimmie Smith, 54, said lines for assistance always seemed to be two or three blocks long. People offering help never seemed to give straight, simple answers. The Smiths still have not been allowed back into their apartment to retrieve their books, their clothes, their mementos. From what they have heard, the building has been looted.

In the nights after the earthquake, they slept in a high school gym. The Red Cross gave them vouchers to stay at hotels. The vouchers ran out, and they moved into the shelter run by Catholic Charities. They received $1,000 from FEMA in December for clothes. The check didn’t cover what they had lost.

It all took its toll. Frances Smith, 50, has not been able to get rid of a rash she developed at the shelter. Jimmie Smith has diabetes and his eyesight is failing. In March, he checked himself in at a Veterans Administration hospital, was diagnosed as having colon cancer and underwent surgery.

The Smiths never have become accustomed to living below the poverty line. For most of their lives, they were part of the middle class. He worked in sales, and they raised three sons in Fremont, south of Oakland. Then he came down with a succession of ailments and couldn’t work. The insurance ran out, they lost their home and they began living in low-rent rooms.

For all their troubles, at least they could think clearly. Some people they met in the shelter simply didn’t have the capacity to deal with the system and are on the streets. “I kind of shook the cage,” he said.

Catholic Charities helped the Smiths find their apartment, a small one-bedroom place in a retirement home a few blocks from where they had lived. When her husband went into the VA hospital, Frances Smith left the shelter and moved into their new apartment. She slept on the floor until their furniture, paid for partly by the government, arrived.

They will gain nothing from the suit, except some satisfaction. Perhaps because they gave their names to the suit, FEMA and the various charities will be more understanding the next time disaster strikes.

“I don’t think we’re expecting too much,” he said. “Just the basic things.”