Earthquake: The Road to Recovery : Survivor of Apartment Collapse Leaves Hospital, Revisits Disaster Site

A man who survived the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments during the Jan. 17 earthquake drove by the complex, where 16 of his neighbors died, immediately after his release from a Burbank hospital Saturday.

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

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

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

On the morning of Jan. 17, Hemsath said he was trying to get out of his apartment when the upper floors came crashing down around him.

“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’s painful, Hemsath can walk with the help 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 the doctors told him.

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

Hemsath said he was awakened at 4:31 a.m. on the morning of the earthquake 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, who was alone, opened the bedroom door and ran until he tripped and fell on his stomach with his nose pushed against a door.

“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’s when he heard a man’s voice he did not recognize, crying out “Help! Help.” Then suddenly, he said, there was total silence. He heard nothing other than traffic on the street outside 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,” he said.

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,” he said.

Two hours into his ordeal, 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.

But it took awhile for his rescuers to locate him. Meanwhile, he said he sang the alphabet to direct them.

After hours of sawing and cutting through concrete and wood, a rescue team freed Hemsath.

A native Californian, Hemsath said he doesn’t plan to move out of the area anytime soon, but said he won’t live in a three-story apartment again.

“I am not beaten yet. I showed them this time,” he said. “I am not one to run.”