Outtakes From the Earthquake

Despite its awesome power and potential for severe, long-term repercussions, the earthquake is becoming, well, a bore. Michael Jackson and the skaters creep ever forward in the nightly news lineup. The Lakers are again a concern. Images of crudely bisected freeways and shattered apartments no longer elicit gasps. Stories of survivors no longer seem as riveting.

It’s usually this way with natural disasters. It’s usually this way with about everything. The collective attention span runs about three days, a few more for truly spectacular disasters. Then it all gets old. The process is natural, and probably in its way a form of healing. But it can have consequences.

As familiarity takes hold and tedium sets in, the television satellite trucks rumble away to wherever it is that television satellite trucks go when the world isn’t ending. And after the cameras exit, so do the politicians and the insurance company field teams and all the rest of the good-neighbor brigade. The rhetoric returns to earth. The contractual fine print is re-examined. Promises are hauled away with the rubble.

And has anyone been up to the fire zones lately?

*

A presumption about Los Angeles is that everybody lives in a ranch-style house--just like mom, dad and the Beav. In fact, the percentage of single-family-home dwellers citywide has been in fast decline over the last decade or so. Today only about half of residents live in their own houses.

Most of the rest are apartment tenants, and to thousands upon thousands of these renters, the earthquake’s impact can be measured in days. Specifically, 13 days: The quake hit on Jan. 17; rent commonly was paid up until the month’s end. Thus, outside uninhabitable apartment buildings all over town, the complaint last week was the same:

“I was paid up in rent,” a Northridge tenant explained, “until the end of the month, right? So the owner owes me 13 days of rent. That’s about $400. I need that money to move into a new place. But he hasn’t been around since the earthquake. I can’t find him. And what about my security deposit? Do you think I will ever see that money?”

*

Nine days later, and the earthquake’s enormity remains difficult to grasp. Six-point-six means nothing. Thirty billion dollars is impossible to comprehend. Flying into Burbank, tents and National Guard convoys and some empty parking lots can be seen. Still, it doesn’t look so bad.

Only on the ground does some sense of scale emerge. I drove Monday for hours across the Valley, from Burbank to Studio City, from Reseda to Northridge. I didn’t stop to talk to many people. Mostly I just looked--at cracked apartment houses, tumbled mini-malls, condemned office buildings, shattered storefronts, vacant shopping plazas.

No, they are not all down in a row. No, they do not appear, at least from the outside, as pulverized as the Northridge apartments where so many people died. And yet they are wrecked all the same. And that was just the Valley. There wasn’t enough daylight to explore the other side of the hill.

*

Yes, Orange County supervisors, backed by Gov. Wilson, really did apply for federal disaster relief because the scoreboard fell down at Anaheim Stadium. People who know baseball suggest a bigger disaster in Anaheim might be found any season in the Angels’ bullpen, but that is a sports story.

*

When Metrolink debuted not long ago, passengers were allowed to ride free. This grace period helped them grow accustomed to both the trains and an excessively complicated ticketing procedure. Well, the grace period came and the grace period went, and then so did much of the early ridership.

Last week, because freeways broke where they did, Metrolink found itself positioned to attract some badly needed business. Demand increased tenfold overnight. So, did Metrolink officials let the new commuters ride free? They did not.

As a result, the first, crucial images of the train system after the quake were TV shots of frustrated novices trapped in three-hour lines, waiting for an opportunity to figure out the ticket machine. No wonder so many Antelope Valley commuters decided to take their chances on the two-lane.

*

Who would have imagined that the federal government could ever run short of bureaucrats and forms? That, of course, was what happened last week at the FEMA centers. This week it is different. This week the engineers of government are back on their game.

“This line,” a sign at Balboa Park announced Monday to baffled earthquake victims, “is for current appointments and teleregistration returnees with CONTROL NUMBERS ONLY.”

Now, that’s government in action, whatever it means.