25 Die, Many Hurt in 6.6 Quake : Freeways Buckle and Buildings Collapse : Disaster: Epicenter is in Northridge, where three-story apartment complex pancakes. Ruptured gas lines erupt in fire in modern L.A.’s strongest temblor.

A deadly magnitude 6.6 earthquake--the strongest in modern Los Angeles history--ripped through the pre-dawn darkness Monday, awakening Southern California with a violent convulsion that flattened freeways, sandwiched buildings, ruptured pipelines and left emergency crews searching desperately for bodies trapped under the rubble.

The 10-second temblor, which was not the long-dreaded Big One but erupted so fiercely that it initially seemed every bit as intense, was blamed for at least 25 deaths--more than half of which occurred when a three-floor apartment complex near the epicenter in Northridge collapsed into two stories.

Triggered by a fault that squeezed the northern San Fernando Valley between two mountain ranges like a vice, the 4:31 a.m. earthquake swamped hospitals with hundreds of injured people and left thousands more homeless as fires, floods and landslides dotted a landscape that has been visited by destruction with disturbing regularity in the last two years.

The major developments:

* The death toll continued to grow throughout the day. Fourteen bodies were discovered in the rubble of what had been the Northridge Meadow apartments. Among other quake victims was a Los Angeles police officer who drove his motorcycle off a sheared freeway, a Skid Row resident who hurled himself out the sixth-floor window of a Downtown hotel and a Rancho Cucamonga mother who slipped on a toy as she raced to check on her baby, striking her head on the crib.

* In a painstaking rescue, firefighters worked more than seven hours to save a critically injured maintenance worker who was trapped under 20 tons of concrete that crumbled at the Northridge Fashion Center’s parking structure.

* Highways across Los Angeles County buckled and crumpled, wiping out major commuter thoroughfares and ensuring that life in this car-dependent region will be disrupted for months. Hardest hit was the Santa Monica Freeway, the nation’s busiest, which caved in at the overcrossing of La Cienega Boulevard, and the Golden State Freeway, which collapsed at its junction with the Antelope Valley Freeway in the Newhall pass.

* Ruptured gas lines and propane tanks sent fiery balls bursting through asphalt roads, burning up to 100 mobile homes at three San Fernando Valley trailer parks. Meanwhile, a broken water main on Balboa Boulevard shattered 100 square feet of pavement, converting the street into a geyser.

* The temblor, felt as far as Oregon and the Mexican border, left tens of thousands of residents without power, gas or phone service. In the historic Ventura County community of Fillmore, where brick facades had undergone extensive earthquake renovation in recent years, virtually every downtown business was damaged.

* Late in the day, Mayor Richard Riordan initiated a citywide curfew, making it illegal for people to remain on the streets from dusk to dawn. President Clinton pledged immediate federal assistance while the National Guard was mobilized to prevent looting in blacked-out neighborhoods. Gov. Pete Wison, touring the area in a helicopter, said: “You begin to wonder how much Angelenos are expected to take.”

* Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, touring areas hit hardest by the earthquake, predicted that local authorities will proclaim many older apartments uninhabitable. He said thousands or tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents may be made homeless.

Had all the shaking not struck on a holiday, or if it had begun a few hours later, seismologists fear, the damage would have been far more devastating. Even so, Southern California seemed to shudder to a terrifying halt Monday, a day of frantic waiting, dramatic rescues, empty highways and fraying nerves.

“It was a 6.5 on the ‘Richter scale,’ but a 10 on my fear scale,” said Nick Stevens, 40, an Australian tourist staying at the Hollywood Downtowner Motel. “We had been planning to go to Universal Studios, where they have the earthquake ride. Now we won’t have to bother.”

‘Come Down and Pray’

Throughout Los Angeles, there were tales of courage--of strangers helping strangers because, as one man said, “it seemed like the right thing to do.” Salvador Pena owes his life to that spirit.

Caught during his early morning shift driving a street sweeper along the bottom floor of a three-tier parking garage at the Northridge Fashion Center, Pena talked with rescue workers for more than seven hours as they blasted through slabs of concrete to extricate him.

Firefighters had little trouble locating him because of his loud cries for help, which they could hear even through the mountain of rubble. To reach Pena, rescue workers used jackhammers to drill through two layers of concrete. Then they inserted air bags and wooden blocks to lift a concrete beam off his limbs, feeding him oxygen as they worked. Once they cut him out of his vehicle, they carried him on a backboard through eight feet of debris.

Throughout the ordeal, paramedics remained at Pena’s side beneath the parking deck. “He was in a lot of pain and he kept saying, ‘Come down and pray with me, come down and pray,” said Rey Lavalle, a Los Angeles city firefighter who spoke with Pena in Spanish.

When a helicopter finally airlifted Pena from the busy mall’s rubble-strewn parking lot and headed to UCLA Medical Center, onlookers cheered and applauded. Late Monday, he was in serious condition with crushed legs and a partially dislocated spine.

“I almost cried--I was elated, we all were,” said Capt. Jim Vandell of the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

Meanwhile, at the three-story Northridge Meadow apartments, firefighters and urban search and rescue squads crews hunted frantically for anyone who might have survived the collapse of the bottom floor.

“Do you hear any voices? Have you gone around and yelled?” a firefighter asked residents, some of whom stood in the street in bathrobes.

The search continued until nightfall, with rescue workers using sonar equipment sensitive enough to detect even the shallowest breath amid the rubble. Those who had died were left inside the building so rescuers could concentrate on extricating survivors.

For four hours, Hyan Sook Lee stood vigil by an oak tree, peering in the apartment that had been her upstairs neighbor’s. Her own apartment was now below ground.

Lee, a registered nurse, said she was able to crawl out of her apartment with her 12-year-old son, Jason, who broke his leg. But her husband, Pil Soom Lee, 47, who had been dressing for his job as a mechanic, and her son Howard, a 14-year old visiting for the weekend from boarding school, were trapped inside.

“It was a big shaking,” she said. “Everything fell down.”

The bad news came at 8:30 a.m. as chain saws still were still whining.

“Ma’am, listen to me. Your son, how old is your son?” paramedic Dave Thompson asked. “This son is dead, ma’am. He is dead.”

Lee dissolved in tears, her shoulders racked by sobs. An hour later, Thompson told her that her husband was presumed dead too.

Onlookers and journalists applauded when Alan Hemsath, 37, was freed--conscious and in stable condition--after diamond-bladed saws chewed through concrete and wood for 90 minutes to reach into the collapsed first floor that had become a tomb. Firefighters heard the man cry out as they tramped through the demolished building, pounding on floors and calling out to any survivors.

“He was just face-down--pinned by the whole building,” rescue worker Doug Rogers said.

Lights Still Flashing

The quake wrapped its powerful hands around roadways and shook and shook, giving some motorists the most terrifying ride of their lives.

Mike Reynoso, 24, and his family drove their car off a sheer, four-foot drop where the Santa Monica Freeway buckled and partially collapsed near Fairfax Avenue. The Eastside couple and their 2-year-old son were up early and heading across town to get a good spot in line for a radio station promotion for Power Ranger toys.

The couple’s small sedan was approaching Fairfax, traveling about 60 m.p.h. in the fast lane when it began swerving erratically. “It was like all four tires had blown,” said Reynoso, a county health department worker off for the government holiday.

“I thought he was playing around,” said his wife, Patricia Reynoso. “I said: ‘Stop it. Drive right.’ “‘

As Reynoso began to slow down, freeway lights flickered and everything went black. “It was blue lights exploding all over,” apparently electrical transformers arcing and flashing, he said. Crossing Fairfax, the road was still swaying and the significance of the sudden dip did not immediately register. But they were atop a block-long section of the freeway that had collapsed, flattening and crushing its three-foot-thick, concrete and steel supports like ice cream cones.

“Just stop!” Patricia began calling out. But her husband, focused on the safety of the freeway shoulder, continued on, working his way over--unable to make out the rift in the roadway ahead.

The car nose-dived over the edge, jamming Mike and Patricia Reynoso into the dash and windshield. The momentum pulled the car forward as the metal undercarriage scraped over the ledge and the rear end crashed down. With its gears jammed, the car wouldn’t move.

“It didn’t hit us until it was too late,” Mike Reynoso said, back home by midday, achy but safe after a detour at the hospital.

The only freeway death came more than an hour after the temblor when a Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle officer, Clarence Wayne Dean, 46, plunged off the end of a destroyed Antelope Valley Freeway bridge as horrified motorists watched from the pavement 30 feet below.

“His lights were still flashing and he just came tumbling down,” said Andy Jimenez, 33, of Santa Clarita. “It was unreal.”

‘A Tidal Wave’ of Injuries

Hundreds of injured crowded hospital emergency rooms.

“We’ve seen heart attacks, dislocated bones, lacerations. A lot of blood,” said Toni Regalado, an emergency room admissions officer at Holy Cross Medical Center in Sylmar.

In Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was receiving “a tidal wave of walking wounded,” spokesman Ron Wise said.

At least 44 homes in suburban Sylmar were destroyed by fires unleashed by the quake. The neighborhood was reduced to rubble, resembling those destroyed by the Southern California wildfires only two months ago.

Sylmar was the epicenter of a devastating earthquake in 1971 that killed 58 people.

Fires fed by ruptured gas and oil mains destroyed other homes in the Valley.

Al McNeil, whose home in Granada Hills was destroyed by fire, said his “whole street was on fire. Even the tall palm trees were burning. It was a very frightening experience. We lost everything. We have nothing, but nobody was hurt.”

Dying for Coffee

Farther from the epicenter, reaction to the disaster was a mix of cool and concern.

At the dimly lit Hughes supermarket in Malibu, people were stocking up on bottled water and Pellegrino, Rice Krispies, cookies, London broil and hamburger meat. Although most people had merely lost their electricity, the fact that the quake came just two months after devastating fires made some wonder aloud if someone was trying to send them a message.

“My mom said when she first tried to call me there was a recording on saying ‘Due to an earthquake, the circuits are busy,’ ” said Janet Mullens, 32, who lives near Trancas Canyon. “We were joking that they should just keep part of that recording blank and insert whatever they need. Pestilence is probably next.”

John Lalanne, 32, a bartender at Alice’s in Malibu, was calling his apartment on Las Flores Canyon Road simply “the disaster capital of the world.”

“My whole apartment building was doing the hula,” he said, demonstrating with his hand the undulating motion he saw and felt. He shrugged it off. “I was born and raised here. I’ve been through them all.” But he moaned: “I’m dying for a cup of coffee, man, and there’s none to be had.”

At a 7-Eleven on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, the cravings were a little less refined. By 6:30 a.m., about a dozen people were waiting outside, placing orders to clerks who retrieved the items and charged the patrons at the door.

“Fritos,” hollered a blond woman in a black sweat shirt.

A clerk held up a bag of Lay’s rippled chips.

“No. Fritos,” the woman insisted.

As the clerk searched for the Fritos, the woman called out: “And a six-pack of Miller Lite.”

Nearby, three former residents of the Northridge Townhome Estates sat on the curb, watching the smoldering wood, pipes and other debris that used to be their homes.

Marian Bogrow said she and her husband, Milt, were saddened to see their home of 16 years destroyed, apparently after a gas line burst and engulfed 17 units within an hour. But she was heartened by the kindness of her neighbors.

“If I ate all the food I was offered,” she said, “I’d gain 20 pounds.”

Appetites also remained hearty at the Original Pantry Cafe in Downtown Los Angeles, which lived up to its motto: “We Never Close. Never Without a Customer.”

The restaurant, owned by Mayor Riordan, hardly missed pouring a single cup of coffee. As soon as the one-story structure stopped shaking and the lights went out, employees lit candles and continued serving hearty breakfasts to the usual mix of early risers headed to nearby offices and industrial plants. “No matter what, we never close,” Pantry cashier Laura Parra said. “Even during the riots, we stayed open.”

Glad to Be Alive

From the Westside to Ventura County, the quake toppled chimneys, littered streets with glass and destroyed some multimillion-dollar cliff-top homes that overlooked Pacific Coast Highway.

On Corona del Mar Avenue in the Palisades, the fronts of two neighboring houses toppled down a 100-foot sheer drop onto PCH. Both homes, which were deemed uninhabitable, were shambles.

An 81-year-old woman who owned one of the homes was awakened when 15 feet of the sun porch of her 65,000-square-foot home collapsed down the hill. If another five feet of the house had fallen off, it might have taken down the second floor, where the woman was sleeping, she said.

The house, which was built in the 1940s, looked like it had been looted, with furniture, dishes and glass toppled and strewn all over the floors. One- to two-inch cracks marked up various parts of the house, which shifted off its foundation during the quake, as well as the pavement near the house.

The woman, who would not give her name, is familiar with major losses. She lost a home in the 1961 Bel-Air fire, she said. The elderly woman was visibly shaken as she recalled the early morning earthquake. She managed to grab her cat and escape any injury from the earthquake with the help of neighbors.

“She’s just glad to be alive and to have her cat,” said the woman’s granddaughter-in-law.

In Ventura County, the cities of Simi Valley and Fillmore suffered the most serious damage. Virtually every business in downtown Fillmore was damaged as brick facades crashed onto sidewalks.

At one variety store, mannequins were thrown through a plate-glass window and landed in a gruesome pile on the sidewalk. At the Central Market, owner Harnek Sing Behniwal stared at the broken windows, fallen beams and strewn contents of his business.

“I just don’t know what to do,” he said. “This store was a diamond.”

City officials were particularly upset because the area had recently undergone extensive renovation. “Just when we’ve rebuilt it, we’ve had to declare it a disaster area,” Fillmore City Manager Roy Payne said.

Tough People

Mayor Richard Riordan was at his Brentwood home when the quake struck and said he only had time to check on his pet Yorskhire terriers before driving himself to the Emergency Operations Center beneath City Hall.

Stopping at a police station on Venice Boulevard to check quickly on the condition of the city, Riordan arrived subterranean command post by 5:15 a.m., wearing jeans and a Los Angeles Lakers sweat shirt.

He declared a state of local emergency at 5:50 a.m. and conferred immediately with Gov. Pete Wilson and President Clinton, who pledged immediate support and dispatched the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He also announced cancellation of the Martin Luther King Day parade to allow police, who were on tactical alert, to concentrate on the emergency.

“My No. 1 concern and our No. 1 priority is the safety of the city and throughout the region,” Riordan said. “the people of Los Angeles are resilient and know how to handle themselves in an emergency.”

Riordan also provided sustenance for his forces in the packed emergency center--ordering up 500 breakfasts from his restaurant, the Original Pantry.

Riordan said his “heart went out to people and the individual suffering.”

But he added: “We’ve had worse problems than this in the last 100 years and we’ve managed to rebound because we are a great city,” Riordan said. “We’re tough people and we have incredible leadership and people will be amazed how quickly we solve these problems.”

The Los Angeles Police Department declared a tactical alert before 5 a.m., even before the department’s chief, Willie L. Williams, could dig himself out from the damage in his own Woodland Hills home; a heavy armoire fell in Williams’ bedroom, missing the chief “by an inch,” he said later.

A National Treasure

Shortly after 10 a.m., Catharine Byl rushed to the front desk at Thousand Oaks’ East Valley Sheriff’s Station and, slightly breathless, yelled through the intercom to the watch commander:

“I have a national treasure that I need to put in the safe.”

As a certified aerospace educator, Byl has a collection of moon rocks on loan from NASA. She’s planning to show them to schoolchildren in Calabasas next week. But as soon as the earthquake hit, she wasted no time depositing them in a sheriff’s vault.

“I’m not supposed to leave them unattended at all,” Byl said. “I’ve been carrying them around in my purse. But today, I’m extra anxious to get them stored safely in here.”

A few treasures also were gone at the Sherman Oaks Antique Mall. Sixty display cases, housing the wares of 81 dealers, crashed to the floor. Rick Johnson of Granada Hills, who owns the mall, joked that one item that had survived was an autographed copy of Howard Stern’s best-selling book.

“I’ll just clean it up, put new glass up and start up again,” said Johnson, who has owned the antique business for six years. “We’ll certainly have a big sale.”

For the moment though, his main concern was getting someone to board up the building, so it would be secure. Although there had been only a few reports of looting in the area, he said that one of his assistants, who arrived at 5:30 a.m., saw “a couple of little old ladies making off with a a silver tea-service.”

Looters stole groceries at a convenience store in Arleta. They grabbed coffee mugs and T-shirts at the Wax Museum on Hollywood Boulevard. Down the street, they stole a 10-inch wooded spear at Bates Brothers Outdoor Sports and Taxidermy. A Tarzana dry-cleaner owner said he scared off a group of looters by waving a gun at them as they tried to steal dolls and stuffed animals from a nearby gift shop.

In all, police made about a dozen arrests.