Earthquake: The Long Road Back : The 6.6 Fix : After the Quake, Doors Open, a Clock Ticks, a Bad Back Is Better

For all the havoc it wrought, all the rubble it left behind, the Northridge quake also fixed a few things.

A broken wall clock, for example, that began ticking after the temblor.

“It’s true,” said Sheila Shaler, whose Chatsworth home suffered heavy damage. “I have a Westminster chime clock and it hadn’t been running for six months. It really startled me when it chimed.”

There were other reports of resurrection by rock and roll. A chronically jammed door in Hollywood now swings freely. A Hermosa Beach car radio lost its irritating buzz. These and other such occurrences supplied quirky justification for that time-honored home remedy: If something doesn’t work, jiggle it.

Or, as Shaler said of her clock, “I think the earthquake shook the you-know-what out of it.”

Of course, such minor miracles pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in damages. In the past two weeks, appliance shops have been overwhelmed with requests to replace everything from shattered oven doors to torn water-heater pipes. Scores of television sets and computers required attention.

But there have been silver linings.

A troublesome photocopier now performs without a hitch.

“It was the feeder, the thing that feeds paper into the machine,” said Robert Manuwal, a Ventura Boulevard attorney. “I had a copier guy coming every other day and he couldn’t fix it. Now it works fine. It’s really strange.”

Strange but not unexpected. Repairmen say that quake-inflicted repairs often involve electrical contact points that had fallen out of alignment.

“Have you ever had a flashlight that didn’t work and, if you shook it, you could get it to switch on?” asked Scott Kassner, general manager of a North Hills appliance store. He explained that shaking sometimes causes contact points to reunite. “You make just enough of a circuit for the power to flow through.”

The same thing may have happened during the quake.

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Not all the repairs were mechanical, though.

Phillip Frazier of Cerritos had suffered from an aching back for 10 years. “It hurt him every morning he woke up,” said his wife, Shirley. Every morning, that is, until the day of the quake. Since then he has felt no pain.

“He thinks maybe the shaking of the bed shook something into place in his back,” his wife said.

The shaking also caused larger adjustments. Some rigid plates that make up the Earth’s outer shell were suffering from a good deal of strain before the quake provided relief. Crooked house frames were similarly jarred into alignment.

Marty Brastow of Topanga Canyon reports that the crack in her front porch, opened by a previous quake, has now closed considerably. She can tell because kitty litter from the cat box on the porch no longer gets stuck in the crack.

In other homes, doors and windows that had been sticking now open. For homeowners who suffered the reverse--jammed doors--there may be hope.

“I tell people to wait till the next one and maybe it will straighten itself out,” said John Smith, who owns a Los Angeles carpentry service. “Nature works in funny ways.”

The effects also extend beyond the purely practical. For the past year, artist Kilgore Bohorquez has been hard at work in a West Hills garage, assembling a massive piece that blends wood, metal and various other materials in a cross between classical sculpture and debris.

“The whole garage settled and shifted,” Bohorquez said, explaining that his artwork suffered partial damage but, in the process, became aesthetically complete. “The earthquake added a finishing touch. It added an element that I love, the element of spontaneity. There’s no way I can be as spontaneous as an earthquake.”

And the picture quality of his aging color television set improved to boot, he says.

But earthquake-caused repairs may prove short-lived. Reunited contact points are likely to shift out of touch again. Pendulum clocks that were given a jump-start by the shaking will probably run down.

Dave Coffey, a Granada Hills clock repairman, says it reminds him of a radio evangelist who broadcast in Bakersfield during the 1950s. The evangelist claimed to repair broken watches if listeners would lay the watches atop their radios during his show.

“He did this when the weather was cold. People didn’t realize that some watches don’t work in cold weather, the grease gets too hard inside,” Coffey said. “When his hour show was over, the watches were all warmed up and running. But they eventually stopped. It’s the same with clocks that were fixed in the earthquake. They’ll only work for a while.”

Shaler’s clock, alas, stopped ticking several days ago. However, while clearing broken glass and the rubble of fallen chimneys, she can take some comfort from the unusual silence in her home.

“My refrigerator used to sound like a small diesel truck,” she said. “A repairman came out twice before the earthquake and said the sound was normal. Now, it’s purring like a kitten.”