Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Shaking Wanes but the Tales of Terror Remain : Disaster: The quake was felt by many, but the stories that have emerged are as individual as the people who survived, and will last beyond the next aftershock.

The rumbling, rocking and rolling from the Northridge earthquake still hasn’t stopped--and neither have the incessant questions asked of local residents from frantic friends and relatives around the world:

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“What does an earthquake of that magnitude feel like?”

Since the 6.6 temblor struck--followed by countless aftershocks from mere shimmers to real shakers--survivors across the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere have used a colorful, often dread-inspired lexicon to describe the quake that hit literally beneath their feet.

And it wasn’t just their proximity to the fault line that figured prominently in the earthquake experience of many residents. It was the backgrounds they brought to the event that also colored their tales.

Several East Coast transplants compared the trembling to being on the platform of a major subway station, feeling the frightening force of a train 10 sizes too big coming at them, refusing to stop.

“It was like Boom! Boom! Boom! “ said native New Yorker Elizabeth Teicher, whose Encino condominium was condemned after the quake. “It was one subway train after another. It was terrible.”

Coastal dwellers used terms that applied to their own world: Many described the earth’s movement as like riding a surfboard in their bedrooms, their house feeling the ebb and flow of a major ocean wave.

Small children described monsters--like those that might crawl out from under their beds at night--picking up their homes and shaking everything inside. From the religious community came descriptions such as the “hand of God reaching down” to rattle houses, lives and nerves.

“People draw from their own pasts to describe even the newest of traumas,” said Dr. Peter Swerdlick, a psychiatrist and medical director of the San Fernando Valley Treatment Center for Anxieties.

“Fear makes them think, sometimes even more creatively. And many people are still afraid. I have patients who are still rushing their bowel movements because they’re afraid the next quake is going to catch them on the toilet.”

Some survivors described feeling like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” when her entire house took its fantastic flight. Still others described a house possessed, kitchen cupboards flying open, emptying their contents onto linoleum floors, some of which became flooded with a soupy mixture of Jack Daniels, vinegar and hot sauce.

Those who were awake when the 4:31 a.m. quake hit described the weird sensation of at first hearing the rumble, like a clap of thunder or herd of animals thundering toward them on an open plain. Then the room began to shake with a topsy-turvy, up-and-down, back-and-forth, frenzy, the mayhem getting stronger and stronger, reaching its unsettling peak before finally easing off a seeming eternity later.

Others said they felt like they were punched in the darkness. They felt the quake was only happening to them, not millions of others around them as well.

There were other images--some terrible, some as manic and breathless as describing a roller coaster ride in the dark: “It felt like a truck had smashed into the side of our house,” said several residents who lived near the quake’s epicenter.

At least one Van Nuys resident said he wasn’t sure if he was being jolted by an earthquake or whether it was indeed World War III unleashed upon the land--Armageddon at last.

“You know those movies, those re-creations of atomic blasts?” he said. “Well, that’s exactly what was going through my mind.”

Indeed, in the aftermath of the quake, images of the war’s destruction were impressed upon the minds of many people.

In the days following the Jan. 17 natural disaster, amazed state geologists reported that the Northridge temblor may have shaken the ground far more violently for a sustained period than any earthquake ever recorded.

Scientists who measured the quake said instruments on the ground found that the earth moved with extraordinary force--far more than they previously believed possible in a 6.6 magnitude quake.

Indeed, the force was enough to collapse apartment buildings like concrete pancakes. At one local hospital, a patient undergoing stomach surgery at the time of the initial quake was thrown from the operating table and disconnected from this anesthesia. As the lights went out, panicked doctors scrambled to replace the man on the table and immediately abort the surgery.

Dr. William Bakun, geophysicist for U.S. Geological Survey, said several reasons accounted for the violent shaking, in addition to the fact that this was a major quake hitting directly beneath a metropolitan area.

Rather than fault lines moving against one another, this temblor had one side moving up and over the opposing fault line, resulting in the up-and-down movement, he said.

“This earthquake had very large vertical accelerations, which lasted several seconds. That’s unusual. We’ve never recorded them,” he said. “As a result, the ground is moving up and down, rather than just side to side. That might explain some of the characterizations of this event because they were sensations that few of us had ever felt before.”

An earthquake’s trembling can be likened to a rock being thrown into a pool of water. The people nearest the epicenter feel the most violent jolt, as though they are part of the water being displaced by the rock. Then the trembling travels away from the epicenter like the waves moving away from the spot where the rock hit the water.

It’s for this reason, scientists say, that people farther away from the quake’s source feel only a slight rolling motion--one that decreases over distance, like the waves in a pool.

“However, the makeup of the earth isn’t static like the water in that description,” Bakun said. “There are rock formations that distort the spread of the energy, blocking it, sending it in different directions, sometimes back on itself--which is why the shaking is a very unpredictable thing.”

Experts say the reason people believe they can hear an earthquake coming is that the temblor sends off sound waves that travel faster than the motion of the ground.

But while most people can articulate what they feel during an earthquake, one quake consultant and author says they don’t always exactly know what it is they’re describing.

“Many people are confused between the concepts of magnitude and intensity--especially journalists,” said Peter Yanev, chairman of EQE International, a firm that consults in earthquake risk analysis, and author of the 1974 real estate guide “Piece of Mind in Earthquake Country.”

“I recently described it this way to a business reporter: The magnitude is the Dow Jones average of the entire event. The intensity is how your individual stock did that day, or what you felt in relation to how far you were from the epicenter.”

Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, said scientists are obviously more technical in their descriptions of quakes and instead find themselves counting silently to measure the length of the event.

At the Oxnard Street Elementary School in North Hollywood, they don’t bother counting--they head right for the space beneath their desks. All week, teachers at the school drilled students in earthquake response. Some described the quake to rock-music-crazy students as “the Earth doing the twist.”

Like Cold War children from an earlier era, they practiced scrambling under desks and covering their heads, some taking the exercise as a joke, others with worried looks in their eyes.

“My mother told me that Mother Nature was responsible for all this damage,” first-grader Travis Lamm said. “But I don’t even know who Mother Nature is.”

In many classrooms, children drew their impressions of the quake. Some drew volcanoes ripping through the ground. Others colored monsters breaking freeways in half, or trees ripped out by their roots.

With the caption “See the earthquake! It moves things!” Lamm drew a chaotic scene of both cars and people being swept into the air and buildings cracking. At the top of the illustration appeared an image no doubt appreciated by both surviving child and adult alike the day the big quake hit: The sun was weeping. Tears streamed down its face.