Meadows Finally Falling : Quake: Demolition crews take most of the day bringing down the third floor. Relatives are allowed to retrieve items.

It took nature just a few seconds to flatten 40 first-floor apartments at Northridge Meadows. It took demolition crews most of the afternoon Friday to tear down four third-floor units.

The first section of the 163-unit complex on Reseda Boulevard came crashing down at midafternoon, kicking up clouds of concrete dust. Earlier, relatives of some of the 16 people killed there during the Jan. 17 quake had been allowed to burrow into the pancaked first-floor units to retrieve belongings.

Bill Runnings, 28, whose mother Karol died in Apartment 108, found the Raiders jersey she had ordered for him for Christmas. “She was bummed she didn’t get it in time,” he said.

His sister, Julie Tindall, 29, was happy she had been able to retrieve their mother’s diamond watch and wedding and engagement rings.

Next door, at Apartment 109, Marcee Murray broke down and cried when she saw the mess where her mother, Bea Reskin, had lived. It looked like a cave. “The whole kitchen is smashed. You can’t see anything,” she said.

Around the corner in Apartment 103, Bill Cerone unearthed his mother’s wall clock, its hands still pointing to that fateful hour, 4:31, when Ann Cerone, 80, was crushed to death in the apartment where she had lived nearly 20 years.

“Here’s my grandson’s puzzle. Here’s some more,” Cerone said. “Jesus.”

Cerone was up to his hips in rubble. His mother’s former apartment looked more like a crawl space. It was dusty and dark.

“It’s hard to breathe in there,” Cerone said. “Apparently in all the units there was a lot of spoilage, so it doesn’t smell particularly great.”

Cerone wasn’t able to retrieve much on Friday, but he said he will be back. “I’d just like to get the rest of my mother’s things, photographs and other things I know are under there. I’d rather get to them than have them bulldozed under.”

The relatives and survivors who gained access Friday were among a handful who had hired lawyers. Seven lawsuits have either been filed or are about to be filed accusing the Northridge Meadows owner and builder of negligence and poor quality construction.

When the family members had collected what they could, crews tore down sections of the third floor and dumped the debris into the swimming pool. The work is slow because care must be taken to preserve evidence and belongings in the still-buried units underneath, said Bruce Decker, owner of the Thousand Oaks company performing the court-ordered controlled demolition.

“You just can’t take a ‘dozer and drive over the top like you normally do because you’ll just squash everything and lose all the evidence,” Decker said.

Decker said he was amazed by the possessions left behind in the damaged apartments. “There’s a lot of stuff left here.” For now, Decker said, his workers are tagging what they can and moving it to the complex’s recreation center.

The demolition followed several days of evidence retrieval and study by scores of structural engineers and other experts.

The work to tear down the third-floor units resembled a monstrous dental extraction. Saws were used to cut the building into sections. Then, steel cable was wrapped around them. An excavator rammed through the stucco, then pulled the cable tight, yanking the third-floor apartments into the pool.

After the roof and walls tumbled, the apartments’ contents spilled over the sides. A kitchen sink tumbled, shattering clean plates that had survived the 6.8-magnitude quake and a 15-foot plunge in the collapse that followed.

About four families have made appointments to retrieve belongings today, when access to the first floor is expected to be better, said Allen Tharpe, attorney for complex owner Shasikant Jogani.

Excavation and examination of crucial evidence on the first floor are expected to begin early next week.