Rebuilding Their Lives After Quake : Recovery: Victims of Sierra Madre temblor take stock one year later.

A year ago last Sunday at 7:43 a.m., the Sierra Madre earthquake sent shards of glass from ceiling-high windows flying into empty pews and hymnals of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Monrovia.

It has taken a year--exactly--for the 298-member congregation to rebuild its sanctuary. With banners and brass ensemble, church members celebrated the end of their yearlong recovery from the 5.8-magnitude quake last Sunday.

The church’s dedication represents a symbolic milestone in the recuperation process for thousands of people--most of them in the western San Gabriel Valley--whose ceilings and walls cracked, chimneys collapsed, plate-glass windows exploded or houses shifted on their foundations.

Officials in the five hardest-hit cities say that the recovery is mostly complete. Thousands of panes of glass have been replaced, hundreds of chimneys rebuilt, and dozens of houses and public buildings touched up with everything from new beams to stone fascia.

“It’s certainly not forgotten,” Sierra Madre’s public works director, Kev Tcharkhoutian, said of the quake. “But basically, the healing is in the final phases.”

The rebuilding process has helped heal the emotional wounds too, though all this happened before the last round of quakes in Southern California.

“A year, it’s a long time. But we’ve come out better on the other side,” said the Rev. James Thompson of St. Paul’s. “Our people have really drawn together to resolve the problems created when all the glass came tumbling down.”

Reiterating comments made last fall, officials last week said the total dollar damage may never be precisely compiled. Donna Butler, Arcadia’s assistant planning director, said, “There’s no way of getting exact figures.”

Across the San Gabriel Valley, at least $50 million has been spent rebuilding structures such as houses, businesses and public facilities, mostly in Altadena, Arcadia, Pasadena, Monrovia and Sierra Madre.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has granted $41.9 million in loans to 1,500 applicants. Three-fourths of this money is going for residential repairs.

The state’s emergency disaster loan program--for those who cannot qualify for any other loans--has approved lending $10 million, an amount authorized in March and not subject to the current budget debate in Sacramento.

But, here and there across the San Gabriel Valley, gaps in the recovery remain. The damage to some buildings may take years to repair.

One is the house in Monrovia where the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair lived from 1942 to 1966. The owners had wanted to demolish the 68-year-old concrete structure because it sustained such heavy damage.

Preservation questions arose, however, because the residence is a National Historic Landmark, one of only 2,000 in the nation, according to Monrovia assistant planner Vance Pomeroy.

Now, after months of debate, Pomeroy said, the owners plan to restore the house, pending approval from a host of authorities.

In Arcadia, a motel is still closed and the post office has temporary supports holding up the walls. Plans have only recently been submitted to rebuild the Arcadia Motel 6, where commodes were splintered and showers ripped from the walls. And the main Arcadia post office is to be relocated by August so that repairs can begin.

At the Huntington Library in San Marino, small repairs were completed right after the quake, but the museum is still $200,000 short of raising $500,000 needed to repair an 84-foot, two-story wall of the art gallery, Huntington spokeswoman Peggy Bernal said.

On the human plane, there may be no way to measure the turmoil the quake has visited upon the lives of its victims, even when insurance was paying the bills.

Typical of those with more than a toppled chimney, the five-member Doyle clan of Baldwin Avenue in Sierra Madre spent October to March living at the expense of their insurance company in a Residence Inn while $63,000 in repairs were made to their two-story house built in 1905.

“It really did take us a year to recover,” said Sharon Doyle, a 43-year-old television scriptwriter. The grades of her three children have now improved, she said. “I don’t have earthquake dreams anymore. The Episcopal church up the street is being rebuilt. People almost never talk about the earthquake anymore.”