Temblors Jolt Residents’ Nerves on Anniversary of <i> Their </i> Quake

As the earth shook Sunday from two strong quakes to the east, a sense of deja vu pervaded the San Gabriel Valley.

And again Monday, when a smaller, but much closer, magnitude 3.9 temblor struck from under Pasadena.

Sunday’s quakes came one year to the day of the Sierra Madre quake.

Local damage was minimal, mostly occurring Sunday in the eastern San Gabriel Valley where some stores had merchandise knocked to the floor, several workers were injured in a gas leak and two public buildings were temporarily closed because of damage that was later classified as cosmetic.

“The county as a whole had very little damage to speak of,” said Bob Garrott, assistant manager of the Los County office of emergency management.

Still, the coincidence of the timing and dates of the quakes did not fail to arouse a sense of superstitious anxiety.

“Our nerves are shattered right now,” said Kev Tcharkhoutian, Sierra Madre’s director of public works.

“Isn’t it weird that on June 28 this year that this thing happened at 5 a.m.?” Tcharkhoutian said. Last year’s Sierra Madre quake also occurred when a lot of people were waking up--at 7:43 a.m.

Sunday morning, Tcharkhoutian turned on the television and heard news anchors trying to remember the date of the Sierra Madre quake. One said it was June 25, he said, and another said June 29.

But like many other San Gabriel Valley residents, Tcharkhoutian said he could “remember very clearly” the day and time.

In an attempt to soothe those jangled nerves, he said, some Sierra Madre employees plan to attend earthquake counseling workshops this week sponsored by Pasadena for its city workers.

In Pasadena, city officials said, the quakes combined to create an emotional jolt as much as a physical one since they came a year after the Sierra Madre shaker. “It was pretty amazing,” said Tom Wilkins, a senior administrative analyst in the Department of Planning, Building and Neighborhood Services.

“Obviously there has been some minor damage, things being knocked off walls,” he said. “But we’ve had no reports of structural damage.”

The most extensive disruption caused by the Sunday temblors appeared to be the temporary closure of a five-story Covina building occupied by the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services.

Engineers concluded that the building was structurally sound but that all five floors had some damage, said Brian Berger, who heads the agency’s disaster team. Windows were broken and unseated. File cabinets tipped over. Ceiling tiles fell.

Except for some offices on the building’s first floor, the agency shut down operations in the building Monday and Tuesday. Most of its 500 employees were dispatched to offices in Pasadena, Pomona and Santa Fe Springs, Berger said. And this situation was expected to continue for at least several more days, he said.

At Cal Poly Pomona, the Sunday quake cracked exterior and interior walls of the university’s library. Most of the damage, estimated at $3,000, was cosmetic. The five-story building, which dates from 1968, remained closed during its usual hours Sunday. Engineers and university officials conducted tests and inspections Sunday and Monday and the building reopened Monday afternoon.

In the City of Industry, an industrial accident attributed to the quake exposed eight people to harmful gas vapors that escaped Monday from a company that makes products such as foam cups. The leak was caused by equipment malfunction as a result of a quake-triggered power failure Sunday at Packaging Corp. of America.

No one at the plant was injured, county Fire Department officials said, but eight workers at another business breathed the gas of ethyl benzene, a solvent. Three were treated at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina.

Seventy-five other employees from three businesses were evacuated for about 90 minutes.

In the case of a Sierra Madre landmark, damage from last year’s earthquake was aggravated over the weekend. The 1920s Spanish-style monastery of the Passionist Monks is in worse shape than it was after last year’s quake, when the religious order decided to demolish, rather than rebuild, it.

“From eyeballing the building, I see more damage,” said Father Clemente Barron. He said there were new cracks from the roof to the ground in the three-story building.

Although no damage to houses had been reported to Sierra Madre this week, the quakes prompted at least one person to rethink plans for rebuilding from last year’s quake.

A man came into City Hall in Sierra Madre on Monday and asked if he could change his plans to reinforce the foundation of a house he is building on the lot where his old home stood before it was heavily damaged last June 28.

“He wanted to make it even stronger than the code required,” Tcharkhoutian said. “I said to him if you over-reinforce that’s not good either.”

The incident illustrates, Tcharkhoutian said, that at least the recent quakes have made people take more seriously the strict, earthquake-inspired building code requirements “that once seem far-fetched.”