Hearts of L.A. / How the Quake Rocked Our Spirits and Changed Our Lives : TAKING CHARGE : ‘Then I realized, “That’s the first floor! My God!” ’

There were eight of us sleeping in the dormitory on the second floor of the station house and, like everybody else, we got jolted out of bed. Actually, I was thrown out of bed. It was just like a bomb hit us.

I crawled over to a doorway 10 feet away. All the ceiling tiles and T-bars that hold them up had fallen down. I cut myself on this T-bar. Then I finally got under the doorway until the shaking stopped.

Some of the firefighters were getting under beds. Some were trying to ride it out in bed. Some were screaming and yelling. As soon as it stopped, people were yelling, “Is everybody all right?!” It was pitch-black. No lights. I was scrambling around looking for my turnout boots and pants. You couldn’t see anything. I finally located my boots and stuck my foot in one of them. Then I had to take it out because the boot was full of pieces of ceiling tile. It’s kind of comical. I had to dump my boots out before putting them on.

We ran out of the dorm. I was the first one on the pole. Some guys took the stairs because they didn’t trust the pole. It was still pitch-black. There were a couple guys running around with little flashlights. I went to get the doors open because we needed to get the rigs out of quarters before we could do anybody any good. We went to the front doors. They are electric doors. Without power, you have to pull a lever and engage the manual override. You pull on a chain. We started to raise it, but it was jammed and we broke the chain. We couldn’t get out the front doors, so we had to go around to the rear doors.

I drive a long hook-and-ladder. We got it and the rest of the equipment out of quarters safely and split into two companies. The engine company took one half of the district and we took the other.

As soon as we rounded the corner, we saw people standing there from apartments from across the street asking for help. We told them to help their neighbors and do what they could for themselves and said, “We’ll be back for help as soon as we can.” We told them, “Do not go into the fire station. It’s not safe.” It would have been a natural refuge.

We drove south on Reseda Boulevard, and about every building we came upon, we encountered another group of people in the street asking for help.

In an earthquake, we have to do this assessment. It’s kind of a triage. We have to make an assessment of the major dangers in our district before we can commit ourselves to any particular emergency. We drive a specific route. Ours was south on Reseda to Nordhoff. As we went south on Reseda, we wrote down just about every apartment address. The street is lined with apartments, and people were complaining they had stuck doors and some damage and needed help.

We drove south and actually went by the Northridge Meadows apartments. It was pitch-black out. You couldn’t see the outlines of buildings. All you could see were people in the street, and we shone a spotlight on them. The building looked fairly normal, so we told the people to go help their neighbors get out, to try and find out who they were and that we’d be back.

We didn’t realize the Meadows had collapsed.

As we got to Tampa, we noticed a single-family house on fire. We decided to go and try to make a quick knockdown of that fire so we wouldn’t lose the whole block. We have lot of shake wood roofs in that neighborhood, and they go off like matchboxes.

But we didn’t have any water in hydrants, so we had to use our 500-gallon tank. But that lasted only about three or four minutes. We had to write off the house that was on fire. The owner was there. We told him, “We can’t save your house.” He understood. Reasonable.

As we were driving and taking assessment, my thoughts were about where this thing was centered, and I said to myself, “My God, if it’s centered toward Ventura, my house is worse than these houses here.” I live in Simi Valley. My wife and kid could have been buried in rubble too. All I could do was pray to God that they were fine, that He would keep them alive. As it turned out, they were just fine.

The engine company that went to the north end of the district had a set of townhomes completely engulfed in fire and spreading to adjacent ones. They needed help bad, but we had to tell them we had to check out these other apartments.

At this point, we still didn’t realize the magnitude of Northridge Meadows. We were just driving south on Reseda and, knowing we had reports of people trapped, we went back down there. This seemed to be the most important place for us to be. Sure enough, we had a lot of people saying there were people trapped under the building. I couldn’t imagine that. I was thinking, “How did they get under the building?”

As we pulled up, there were guys with hammers tearing at the building, trying to get people out from under there. I’m going, “Is there an underground parking garage here? What are these people doing under there?”

Then I realized, “That’s the first floor! My God!”

I compared the height of that building to one next to it, and it was a full story shorter than other one. Then the magnitude hit me: “We’ve got a whole floor down there. How many people could be trapped under here?”

Ken Clark, Jack Lewis and I were racing around the rig, getting lights on, getting equipment. Our captain, Bob Fickett, was making a plan on how to attack this. Where do we start? What do we do? As soon as we got the lights hooked up, we got a little assessment of who was trapped and where they were. I went to a spot where civilians were tearing at the building with their hammers. They were talking to a man who was buried in the first floor. I had him tell me how many feet he was from the wall. I told him: “Stay calm. We’ll get you out of there in a few minutes.”

I stepped over a windowsill on the ground, which had been a second-story window. We got inside and started cutting. There is an inch and a half of concrete over the wooden subfloor. I was standing on the second floor and underneath me was first floor that had collapsed to about 18 inches. I had to cut through that floor.

I got a knife out and cut the carpet out of the way. Then I had to hammer through this inch and a half of concrete to get that out of the way. Initially, I tried my chain saw. But once I realized it was concrete, I got my ax out and started chopping.

My worst fear was that I’d cut through my victim--run a chain saw right over the top of him.

So I’d cut through a layer of concrete, a layer of wood and the floor joist. Then, there was the dry wall ceiling of the first floor. We punched through that and we were in the bedroom space of the first floor. It had collapsed to a height of only eight or 10 inches in places, and the only thing holding it up was the contents of the room.

As we broke through the drywall, we looked at him. He was trapped. He was on the floor. His leg was up over a file cabinet and he was pinned. Now that we located him, we had to enlarge the hole. But we had to be careful. Our saws were getting duller the more we used them, and we were getting tired. We had to make each cut count.

We enlarged the smaller hole and we cut over the top of him and told him, “Stay calm. Don’t move much.”

As soon as we got him out, he was very much relieved. He wasn’t bleeding. I think he just had a broken leg. We didn’t have an ambulance on scene, so we took a door off its hinges and used that to pass him out the window.

He said he was talking to roommates in another bedroom when the quake hit. He said that while we were getting him out, he heard them stop talking. We found out what their names were, and we started yelling for his roommates--and got no response.

At the same time, my captain was trying to find out if there was anyone else trapped and talking. He said, “I’ve got a family supposedly trapped in the next unit over. Mother got out, but her baby and husband are still in there.” That was our next rescue effort. It turned out that the baby was really a 14-year-old teen-ager, but the mother called him her “baby.” She was Asian, and there was a terrific language barrier.

We cut through three layers of stucco before we got to inside of their bedroom. That’s where we found this woman’s 14-year-old son--in bed. We ended up being right over the top of his face with this hole. He was obviously crushed to death. They found his father the next day.

In about another hour, we got a report of a man talking to people at the southeast corner of the building. We grabbed our saws and equipment and tore at that wall and uncovered a man in bed. His feet were sticking out of the building. The outside edge of the building was on top of his stomach. He was still in bed, lying right on his back.

We tried knocking the legs out from under the bed to lower him. It was too tight to pull the mattress out from underneath him, so we took our air bags--inflatable bags capable of lifting 11 to 72 tons--and we put these bags in there and put heavy timber up and lifted that building a few inches. It was amazing. That gave him enough relief so he could breathe easier. We got this thing shored up, and we lifted it to the bag’s maximum capacity. We cut some of the wood out and we took out a chain saw and cut three inches of wood from over on top of him. That gave us clearance so we could slide him off his mattress.

The first thing he said when he got out was, “Thank God, I’m going to see the Super Bowl.”

He had a roommate in the next bedroom to the north. He was pinned. His head was on top of the bed and a wall had collapsed on top of him and pinned his head. We pried him out of there and brought him out. He was just glad to see blue sky.

I was there until about 10 o’clock that night. We brought three out alive and, oh, three or four out dead. I wish we could have saved more people.

The rest of that day was real tough. Any time I was relieved, I’d go to the corner and use a pay phone, but I couldn’t get through to my family.

Here I am digging people out and I can’t help think but my family’s under the same kind of rubble. It’s tough. I just had to trust they were OK.

I finally got hold of my wife, Jo-Anne, at 2 the next morning. There are no words to express the relief I felt when I talked to her and she told me my kids are fine.

I spend a third of my life at the fire station. That’s a third of my time away from the family, and if this kind of thing happens, I’m not with them. But this is the career I’ve chosen. I have to live with it. I wouldn’t want to do anything else.