A Truckload of Terror : Crash: They thought it was the Big One when a runaway garbage truck smashed into a hillside home in Brentwood.

At first, Martin Lubner said, he thought it was the Big One.

“It felt like an eight-pointer,” the Brentwood resident said as he recalled the moment of terror Tuesday morning when parts of his house came crashing down around him.

The problem, it turned out, was much more local than an earthquake. Lubner’s house on a hillside cul-de-sac had been hit by a runaway 14-ton Los Angeles city trash truck.

The truck not only crashed through the wall and into a bedroom, it also destroyed the Lubner family’s two cars and sheared a water pipe. It crushed a shed where Lubner and his wife, Lorraine, both artists, stored paintings, and the flood from the broken pipe caused extensive damage to their studio.

Lubner estimated that at least a third of the nearly 150 paintings that he and his wife kept in the house were damaged or destroyed. “Some were soaked and others were flattened like pancakes,” he said. Some of the paintings had been on exhibit recently at Mt. St. Mary’s College.

There were no serious injuries. The driver of the truck, Lester Moore, bailed out before the crash and had only a few scrapes. Late Tuesday, Bureau of Sanitation officials and others were still trying to determine what caused the mishap in the 900 block of Stone Hill Lane.

“We are checking out the brakes, but anything could have gone wrong,” said sanitation supervisor Oscar L. Gamble. “These kinds of accidents seldom happen. We might break a tree limb or something like that, but nothing to this extent.”

Lubner said he was less troubled about the damage to his paintings than he was gratified that an even greater tragedy had not occurred.

“I’m just thankful my son decided to spend the night at his girlfriend’s,” said Lubner, pointing to the room sometimes used by his son, Sean, 27, a law student. “Because if he had been home, he would have been killed.”

Neighbors on the cul-de-sac also were jolted by the explosive sound of the truck hitting the house.

“I ran to the doorway,” said Catherine Griffin, 23. “We knew it was an earthquake until we went outside and saw the truck in the house.”

Sanitation workers say that maneuvering the heavy trucks up and down the narrow streets in hillside neighborhoods can be a risky job.

“You have to take your time,” said Joe Douglas, a sanitation worker who has picked up trash in the Brentwood area for years. “These routes can be tricky. That truck could have taken that house right over the hill.”