Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Santa Monica Dealt Hard Blow : Westside: Destruction skips around city, seriously damaging about 200 structures. Some landmarks are damaged.

Susan Kado stood in front of the ruins of her Santa Monica apartment Tuesday afternoon, waiting for a friend to pick her up. She had lost everything in the earthquake, including a sense of what to do next.

“I’m undecided what to do right now. I guess I’ve got to get my wits together,” she said. She chuckled, grateful for her borrowed clothes--”at least the shoes fit”--and neighborly kindness.

First her 14th Street building had moved, then it had exploded with a ruptured gas main. Finally it burned, one of about 200 structures seriously damaged in Santa Monica, the hardest-hit community on the Westside.

The destruction skipped around this seaside city from shops to homes to churches and a hospital, leaving 83 buildings uninhabitable, the majority of them commercial.

One tower of the Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center was evacuated because of damage. Broken glass and dislodged bricks kept scores of businesses along Wilshire Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard shuttered Tuesday.

The popular Third Street Promenade pedestrian mall, bandaged in plywood, was a sedate version of its usuallyfestive self. More than 250 quake refugees spent Monday night in a Red Cross shelter at Santa Monica College. Some 17,000 customers were still without gas service Tuesday afternoon.

At least two churches sustained major damage. The landmark steeple at St. Monica Church tumbled onto the street. And St. Augustine’s by the Sea, an eclectic parish favored by the young, the politically active and the homeless, was closed pending an engineer’s evaluation of an estimated $250,000 in structural damage.

Autos were banned from the Santa Monica Pier as inspectors scrambled to gauge foundation damage.

Next door to Susan Kado’s building, a two-story Spanish duplex had moved off its foundation. The fireplaces had peeled away, leaving gaping holes in the walls. Caryl Millen, 42, sorted through the shambles of her upstairs unit, “trying to make sense of nonsense.”

Millen awoke in the pitch black Monday morning to find herself trapped and just about blind without her glasses. The front door was blocked by a grandfather clock that had tumbled down the stairs. The back door was blocked by a fallen refrigerator.

“I started screaming and somehow a neighbor heard me and he came up to help,” said Millen, who runs a messenger service. “He pulled the refrigerator away from the door so I could get out and we ran out onto the lawn. I stood there on the lawn having an asthma attack. Finally a neighbor, Ken, crawled back in there and found my medication.

“People here were spectacular,” she said. “We see them every day walking their dogs, picking up their mail, but we don’t really know them until something like this happens. They comforted me and they helped me and they got me through a very terrifying time.”

Patients had streamed into the emergency room of the Santa Monica Hospital all day Monday.

“Everywhere you looked there were injured people--broken bones, cuts, crush-type injuries,” said Dr. Wally Ghurabi, the emergency room director. “It was like a war zone.”

On Monday, hospital officials evacuated a nine-story building because of structural damage, transferring a number of departments into an adjacent building.

City officials said there had been several hundred gas leaks in the city, one causing a fire that prompted the temporary evacuation of two residential blocks on the city’s north side.

Just over the border in Pacific Palisades, Andrew Wainrib gazed at the State Beach Cafe, which he co-owns. The second story of the 1930s brick building had collapsed. “It just gave out,” said Wainrib, who is all too familiar with loss.

“My house in Los Flores Canyon above Malibu burned in the fire. . . . But I feel fantastic,” Wainrib laughed. “It’s only stuff and I’m still here.”