Many in Orange County Heard Quake Coming--on L.A. Radio Stations

Stephanie Williams knew an earthquake was coming Friday morning even before it rattled the high-rise building where she works.

She isn’t telepathic, but like thousands of people in the far reaches of the Southland, Williams heard radio announcers in Los Angeles react to a quake mere moments before it rolled through Orange County.

“I heard it on the radio first, and then we started to feel it,” said Williams, a receptionist on the seventh floor of the Home Savings building on El Toro Road. “It was going pretty wild and very shaky. Even after the earthquake stopped, the building kept swaying for about another 10 seconds.”

The strong tremor, which sprang out from a fault deep beneath the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, frayed little more than the nerves of Orange County residents as it rolled from the mountains to the sea. Emergency officials throughout the county reported no injuries or damage--not even a shattered window or cracked wall.

At magnitude 6.0, the temblor--the strongest in Southern California since 1987--was powerful enough that it could have inflicted damage throughout the region, but much of its muscle was deflected by the mountains, authorities said.

Whether stuck in commute traffic at 7:43 a.m., at home in bed or drinking their first cups of coffee at work, county residents got an early-morning call to attention on a lazy Friday, leaving many on edge for the rest of the day.

Audrey Redfearn, a Laguna Beach political consultant, said she was stricken with a throbbing headache immediately after the quake and could not bear driving to work.

“Usually when an earthquake hits, I stay in bed and pull the covers over me,” Redfearn said. “But I was more affected today than ever. The thought of driving to (an office) in Santa Ana was too much.”

She worked out of an office near her home instead.

Some county residents said the quake shook their homes or offices so hard that they thought the epicenter was just around the corner. But others took it in stride or barely noticed the tremor.

At a summer day-care center in Irvine, 25 youngsters did not even look up from their games when the building shivered. Jonas Calicadan, site director at the Irvine Community YMCA, which is in a portable, prefabricated steel building at Brywood Elementary School, said: “I looked over at the kids to see if they were feeling it. But they seemed to be so busy in play, none of them noticed it.”

Calicadan said he did not want to worry the youngsters, so he did not tell them, but he did add earthquake drills to their day’s agenda.

“I always thought that kids would be more susceptible to the movement of a quake,” he said. “But I guess when they’re playing, they sort of lose track of things.”

But the earthquake was the talk of Latino elected officials from all over the nation, convening in Anaheim.

“I was asleep, and I woke up,” said Texas State Rep. Greg Luna of San Antonio, who was staying on the 15th floor of the Anaheim Marriott. “The whole bed was shaking. I thought maybe I had activated a bed vibrator.”

He said he had never been through an earthquake before and never wants to be in one again.

But it was just as scary for Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez, a longtime resident of earthquake country, who was staying on the 19th floor of the hotel for the annual convention of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

“I think I was as scared this morning as I have ever been in my life,” he said, “and it takes a lot to scare me.”

He was shaving but quickly grabbed a shirt and shoes and shot out of his room “like a bullet,” running down 19 flights of stairs.

Throughout the county, police and fire officials said the quake triggered scores of false alarms and several auto accidents, as well as jangling the nerves of residents who kept emergency dispatchers busy.

“Whenever an earthquake hits, the dispatchers scream in unison,” Garden Grove Police Officer Richard Morales said. “The phones started jumping like crazy.”

Four fender-benders occurred simultaneously in Garden Grove right after the quake, although no injuries were reported, Morales said.

“They all went bing, bang, bong, all at the same time,” Morales said.

In Laguna Hills, Barbi Porter was sitting at her desk next to a window when the office mini-blinds began swaying side to side.

“My boss walked in at that moment, and I said, ‘John, listen, the building is making that cracking noise.’

“I said, you know, it’s really stupid to sit here next to the window,” said Porter, 45, a broker at Coldwell Banker’s four-story building.

Mark Ezell was operating a crane on the Costa Mesa Freeway, where workers are building a new 4th Street overpass, when all of a sudden he felt “a small roll, nothing too sharp.”

“We almost thought it was road vibration,” he said. “But it was lasting too long and no semis were going by us. We sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Nah, it couldn’t be.’ Then we looked up, and the line was moving a little bit. We just smiled and said, ‘Here we go.’ ”

At the construction site for the new Huntington Beach pier, crews felt the shaking as they stood on a work trestle next to the pier but just let it pass and resumed their work.

“One guy was mad because he didn’t feel it,” said Bill Kopp, foreman of the Reidel International Inc. crew. “I’m just glad I wasn’t out over the water (at the end of the trestle), or I would have jumped in, and I would have been all by myself, looking ridiculous.”

As soon as the earthquake hit, firefighters throughout the county moved fire engines and ambulances out of the stations and waited for word of emergencies, which never came. But the trucks rolled out anyway to inspect neighborhoods for hazards.

County phone lines and equipment were undamaged, but the system did have a post-earthquake gridlock from “too many people picking up the phone and overloading the network,” said Linda Bonniksen, a spokeswoman for Pacific Bell.

At the sprawling McDonnell Douglas plant on Bolsa Avenue in Huntington Beach, most of the company’s 8,000 employees staged an orderly evacuation when the earthquake struck, even though there was no damage. By a fluke of timing, some McDonnell Douglas workers had received earthquake emergency training Thursday morning.

“Once we got over the initial shock, some of us were joking that we didn’t realize the earthquake plan would be implemented so quickly,” said Ann McCauley, the plant’s spokeswoman. “But it was good to see that everybody knew what to do.”

Times staff writers Bill Billiter, James M. Gomez, Lanie Jones and Gebe Martinez and correspondents Len Hall, Erik Hamilton, John Penner and Shannon Sands contributed to this report.