A Survivor Returns: ‘I Am Not Beaten Yet’

Immediately after his release from a hospital Saturday, Alan Hemsath drove by the Northridge Meadows apartments, where 16 of his neighbors died--and where he was nearly killed.

“It’s amazing that I made it out of there alive,” said Hemsath, who was trapped for nearly seven hours in the earthquake rubble of his first-floor apartment.

“It’s literally on the ground,” he said after briefly surveying the crushed apartment he once called home.

Hemsath, 37, a general contractor, had been in St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank since Jan. 17 when the three-story building collapsed around him, pinning him to his kitchen floor. At the hospital, he underwent surgery to save his arms and legs, which were held down so tightly by debris that the flow of blood was cut off for several hours.

“My left arm was pinned by an electrical panel. It didn’t crush a bone but it flattened my arm like a pancake,” Hemsath said.

He has regained use of his legs and although he said it is painful, Hemsath can walk with the aid of a cane. However, he has almost no use of his left arm and said that he has no idea if he will recover completely.

“It could be a week, a month, or never,” he said doctors told him.

Hemsath said he will continue with physical therapy while staying at his parents’ home in Northridge.

The morning of the earthquake, Hemsath said, he was awakened at 4:31 a.m. by the noise of falling objects and the apartment complex crumbling. “Bam! I woke up and my bed galloped like a horse and I was thrown out of bed,” he said.

Hemsath opened the bedroom door and ran until he tripped and fell. “My head hit the door and I felt like I was going unconscious,” he said. “I said a prayer and realized that I was conscious. Then I decided that I was just going to hang out.”

That is when he heard a man’s voice, crying out “Help! Help!” Then, suddenly, there was silence. He heard nothing other than traffic on the street until his alarm went off at 6 a.m. “It was comforting because I knew what time it was and I knew the world, it’s going to be up and about,” Hemsath said.

“I waited and waited. Thinking about seeing my family again was what kept me going. It’s not the way I wanted to leave. It seems like an unfair way to die, no warning, no time to make preparations.”

The aftershocks were creepy, he said. “The creaky noise, the debris falling down--that was weird. I couldn’t move so I shook with the ground.”

After two hours, he heard a firefighter’s voice and called out to him. “I was completely relieved. I knew I was going to make it,” Hemsath said.

He said he sang the alphabet to direct them. Finally, after hours of sawing and cutting through concrete and wood, rescuers freed him.

A native Californian, Hemsath said he will not live in a three-story apartment again, but he does not plan to move out of town anytime soon. “I am not beaten yet. I showed them this time,” he said. “I am not one to run.”