Heeding the Earth’s Call to Wake Up : Temblors: Some area residents have assembled emergency supplies and shored up homes since recent quakes. Others remain unmoved, unlike the ground beneath them.

A hillside home in Glendale built in 1929 undergoes an earthquake rehab--with 5 1/2-inch-long bolts pinning its frame to the foundation--because, as owner Marilyn Gee puts it, “The last thing I want is my bedroom tumbling down the hill into my neighbor’s bedroom.”

A Van Nuys survival kit distributor named Quake Kare--which peddles three-day-supply packs of food and water with a five-year shelf life--gets so many new customers that proprietor Sherry Henning quips that the shop “looks like an earthquake hit the place.”

At Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, management has ordered virtually everything from sterilizers to file cabinets bolted to floors, affixed a shatter retardant called safety film on windows and glass partitions, tethered telephones to desktops and installed parking brakes on bed casters.

“But there’s a hitch with our beds” and intravenous feeding units, Chuck Herrera, the hospital’s director of engineering, concedes. “They must remain on wheels because we constantly have to move them from room to room.”

Nearly one month after Southern Californians were awakened by two major earthquakes, including the area’s biggest in 40 years, some residents painstakingly brace for the long-predicted and feared Big One, but many simply choose to do no more than sweat out the Next One, thinking, “It won’t happen to me.”

So far, many contractors say, their phones ring more than their cash registers, as shaken homeowners check out the cost of making their houses safer in quakes but only reluctantly take action.

As one Chatsworth contractor who does such work, Ray Garrisch, observed: “We’re getting a few calls now, but mostly people haven’t really woke up yet. They’re not smelling the coffee out there.”

Barbara Bengston got her wake-up call five years ago when the big Whittier quake shook her 1930s-vintage North Hollywood home so violently that cabinet doors flew open, china crashed, hanging plants plummeted and a 50-gallon fish tank toppled into pieces.

Estimated damage: $2,500.

She and her husband, Ray, hired a contractor for $750 to bolt down their 1,500-square-foot house.

“My sister lives there now,” Barbara said, “and she told us after the last quakes, ‘It’s amazing how this house doesn’t move now!’ ”

Today, the couple and their two small sons live in a Van Nuys house, built in 1947, with a bolted, sturdier foundation. Even so, they’ve taken no chances. They’ve put child-safety locks on cabinets and safety film on windows, secured all furniture to walls and installed a generator that operates two lights in a hallway to their boys’ bedroom in case of a power outage.

“This house didn’t shake as badly as the other one did,” Barbara Bengston said of the two quakes in June. “But the power went out all over the neighborhood until about 11:30 that morning. At least we had power. We even served coffee to half the neighborhood.”

A physician, who since the powerful 1971 Sylmar quake has stocked his home and car with freeze-dried food sealed in plastic in a nitrogen preservative, one-gallon jugs of water and other emergency supplies, agrees that most Southern Californians are “fatalists” about earthquakes, unable to picture the aftermath of a truly disastrous quake.

“If they think their supermarkets will be open in two or three days to feed 10 to 15 million people, they’re dead wrong,” said Sidney Naness, 58, of Arcadia. “And even then, the people who have food are going to protect it. They won’t give it out to those who don’t have it.”

Actually, the malaise doesn’t flourish just among those who blithely take earthquakes in stride or give disaster preparedness their undivided apathy. Many homeowners say bolting pre-World War II homes to their foundations is unaffordable, especially in an economy gone slack.

Some cost estimates to retrofit a 2,000-square-foot home range from $1,500 to $3,000, according to a random sampling of contractors who do the work.

But then, as homeowner Carol O’Brien, who is taking bids on bolting down her 1921-vintage Glendale frame house, points out: “Sure, it’s a big expense. But the alternative of an earthquake swinging your house off its foundation is a lot more expensive.”

Still, it’s clear that the June 28 shakers in Yucca Valley and Big Bear Lake have ignited small sparks of life in a construction industry immobilized by the recession.

Contractors report a flurry of inquiries from homeowners who want to know how they can make their homes more quake-safe. Most callers, says Paul McGrath of White Foundation Contractors in Woodland Hills, worry about their pre-World War II houses, which sit unbolted on foundations in older areas such as Pasadena, Hollywood and Silver Lake and south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

Some also call from the San Fernando Valley, he says, although most Valley houses were built since the mid-1950s when contractors began bolting frames to slab-style foundations.

“Many tell me the recent quakes jolted them to do something,” McGrath said. “They say, ‘I’ve been meaning to get this work done for some time.’ ”

California’s unusual succession of earthquakes since the 1987 Whittier quake has focused more attention on earthquake insurance.

“We always get a lot of calls after earthquakes,” said Lori Barrett, an underwriter with Flinders Insurance Agency in Burbank. “But we can’t write policies now because of the moratorium.” Many insurance firms refuse to write new earthquake policies for up to 60 days after a quake of 5.0 magnitude or greater.

And in Sacramento, lawmakers have approved Assembly Bill 200, which becomes effective in January, requiring sellers of single-family homes built before 1960 to disclose to prospective buyers whether these homes have been bolted or anchored to their foundations, whether foundation supports are adequately braced and whether water heaters are strapped, braced or anchored to reduce earthquake hazards.

Earthquake tremors are also being felt in the workplace. Institutions such as Great Western Bank, headquartered in Chatsworth, and Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, among others, have embarked on ambitious programs aimed at protecting resources such as customers, patients, employees and multimillion-dollar computer equipment.

“If you’re not scared of earthquakes, you’re crazy,” said Bob Lee, Great Western’s vice president and director of security, safety and emergency. Lee also is president of BICEPP (Business and Industry Council for Emergency Planning and Preparedness), which consists of 45 companies and agencies (including Arco, MCA-Universal, the Metropolitan Water District and Times Mirror Co.) and helps firms cope with quake-related problems as diverse as stress and hazardous waste.

“Most earthquakes are survivable--especially if companies have ample supplies of food, water, first-aid equipment and day-care facilities,” Lee said. “What we try to do is make sure that people’s comfort level goes up.”

For the most part, companies appear to be doing more than individuals about earthquake safety, experts say.

Gearing up for earthquakes is an “emotional business, with lots of ups and downs,” said Don Hubbard, whose Valencia firm, WorkSafe Technologies, helps corporations, hospitals and schools secure property and safeguard lives.

“We’re seeing a little more interest in emergency preparedness from companies,” he said, “but when you get right down to it, there’s still not a lot of business.”

Some barometers of post-quake activity are the phones at traditional disaster-response groups such as fire departments and the Red Cross, as well as commercial purveyors of emergency supplies such as Quake Awake of Calabasas, and Quake Kare and SOS Survival Products, both of Van Nuys.

Some things they can’t help with. According to sales representative Jon Singer of SOS, one caller nervously inquired: “Can you tell me when the next earthquake will be?”

“Things have picked up a bit here since the earthquakes--and, before that, the riots,” said Capt. Craig Morrison of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s disaster-preparedness section, which organizes community response seminars that he says are now booked a year in advance, instead of only a few months.

“People want to know where they can get portable three-day packs for their homes and cars--and we give them a list of distributors.”

Two days after the June 28 earthquakes, Mindy Menahen, a legal secretary who moved to Sherman Oaks from Florida 12 years ago and works in a Glendale high-rise, shopped at Quake Kare in Van Nuys for emergency supplies.

“If nothing else, they’ve helped me put a cap on my anxiety about earthquakes,” said Menahen. “I hope I never have to use any of this stuff.”