EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Day of the Low Bidders

There were about 50 of them. They wore hard hats of many colors and stood in a pack at a Cyclone fence. On the other side of the fence were the brick ruins of what had been the old Masonic Building. The hard hats squinted, gawked, asked questions. What about lawsuits? What about toxic materials?

“Right now,” said a man in the center of the pack, “you are supposed to get it done. If something else happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But right now, we just want to get it done.”

This man’s hard hat identified him as Bert Rapp. He works for the city of Fillmore, and on this day he was conducting a sad little tour of his town. Fillmore (pop. 13,000) is located in the Santa Clara River Valley, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. Built by railroaders, nurtured by orange growers and oil well drillers, the town came of age after World War I, and its architecture and ambience seem frozen in that time--a quaint, two-block downtown of brick; surrounding neighborhoods of fine California bungalows.

So much for Fillmore past. Fillmore present is a mess. Much of the town was wrecked by the earthquake. Damage has been estimated at $250 million, a figure that does little to convey the true sense of loss. For all the brave talk of rebuilding Fillmore, the first step will be to tear down structures that cannot be repaired. And this is what brought out the hard hats Monday afternoon. After the tour they would submit bids; to the low bidder goes the job of demolishing pieces of what had once been a town.

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“There was a newspaper office up there,” Rapp said, pointing to the rubble, “and there’s about 20 years of documentation in it that we want to try and salvage, and also an antique safe the historical society wants. And we want to save all the brick that we can.”

The contractors shook their heads. Plucking antiques and bricks from rubble would drive up the cost. A few put away their pencils. One got on his cell-phone to his office. He hung up and turned to a brother hard hat.

“Want to bid on a building in West Covina?” he asked. “We got until 3 this afternoon.”

“How big is it?” the other said.

“Pretty big. A Bank of America.”

They left.

The next stop was a pale green bungalow. The earthquake had flung it off its foundation. “We want to save that lamppost there,” Rapp said. “Also there’s a time capsule inside. We want to save that.” The contractors snickered.

“What’s in the capsule?” one asked the homeowner.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was there when we moved in. After we rebuild, I plan to throw a party and open it up.”

The owner was Roger Campbell, an auto mechanic and also Fillmore’s mayor pro tem. A few days after the quake, he pitched a media fit, complaining to every camera he could find that Fillmore had been forgotten in the focus on Northridge. Similar complaints can be heard across the region, as attention ripples outward from the epicenter. The full reach of the earthquake remains uncharted, and nobody understands this better than the demolition specialists who were gathered on Campbell’s lawn.

One of them, Doug Mueller of Oxnard, said he’d been on 16 of these tours since Jan. 17: “All over the San Fernando Valley. Santa Monica. Parts of Greater L.A. Thousand Oaks. As far south as Long Beach. As far north as Summerland. The amount of damage is amazing. I don’t think people are really grasping the whole picture yet.”

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The tour visited only an initial batch of demolition jobs. There will be many such batches. At each stop the hard hats made notes, took pictures, kicked beams, calculated. “Two days,” one surmised, poking with his foot at a rotted foundation timber of a house. “Mess it up one day, haul it away the next.” The owner stood nearby, politely answering questions. No, the shed could go too. Yes, he would like to save the garage but, since it was so much trouble, go ahead, “take it down, take the whole thing down.”

The tour ended at sundown, and the last to leave the last house was Rapp, the city engineer. He is a young, earnest man and, unlike the contractors, he knew the story of each house, each building. He knew the loss.

“The guy who used to live here,” he said, pointing to the splintered remains of a pastel pink Craftsman, “was one of those guys where everything had to be perfect. The floors, the drapes, the paint, everything perfect. And then, kaboom. Look at it. Crazy.”

Mess it up one day. Haul it away the next. It’s happening all over Los Angeles. A crazy time.