SIMI VALLEY : Residents See Things Getting Better, Slowly

A red tag still flaps on the blond wood door of Mike Hernandez’s broken Simi Valley house.

Six months of sun have faded the red dye to tan, but the bad news remains the same.

“I’ve got to knock it down and rebuild it, that’s already been told to me,” said Hernandez, straddling a 2-inch crack in the concrete floor.

Overhead, the kitchen ceiling splits jaggedly from the walls, and a hole in the living room ceiling yawns 3 feet wide.

Hernandez is like so many other Simi Valley residents--still recovering from the Northridge earthquake.

* At the Simi Country Mobile Home Park, Victory Stewart worries that her insurance company will never pay back the cost of righting her toppled trailer and repairing its broken pipes.

* In Golf Meadows Court, Mickey Norihiro looked at his parents’ gutted living room, where half-finished windows gape and stacks of wallboard wait, and sighed: “It’s mind-boggling. Of the 13 homes on this cul-de-sac, 13 had damage.”

* Carpenter Dave Hall--when he gets a minute free from the repair jobs that land in his lap almost faster than he can handle them--would really like to repair the 250-foot gas line to his Cochran Street house. The cold showers, he said, are getting old. Yet many businesses and homes in Simi Valley are well on the way to recovery or are fully rebuilt, thanks to strong infusions of cash and sweat.

The three huge Whittaker Electronics buildings on Voyager Avenue--one of the county’s largest defense contractors--got shaken hard.

The tremor knocked thick concrete pillars loose. It toppled heavy machines. And it dropped the ceiling in chunks to the floor, where water from a broken underground main dissolved it to mush and damaged underground wiring, said Joseph R. Botta , vice president of operations.

Facing hard deadlines from buyers who wanted battleship electronics and high-temperature cables delivered on time, he said, the company set to work.

“We really had a lot of work to do inside,” Botta said. “We almost had to gut the entire building.”

With up to 60 workers at a time pulling double shifts, Whittaker shoveled out the debris, bolted in reinforcement beams and restarted its assembly operations, Botta said. It took just two months and $12 million.

Without help from the city--such as inspectors who were willing to check plans and work on their time off--it would never have come off in time, Botta said. “It seemed like it was taking forever when we were doing it.”

But Whittaker had insurance.

Many others did not, and some are still waiting to repair their homes until the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Small Business Administration process their federal aid checks.

The city of Simi Valley finally announced Friday that people can take down the faded green tags from buildings that passed initial inspection. But those with yellow or red tags must wait for visits by city building inspectors, who will remove the tags as repairs are made and inspections conducted.

*

For every swift recovery in Simi Valley, another creeps along, hindered by shriveled bank accounts, crooked builders or broken spirits.

In the hard-hit east end, many residents also are awaiting soil tests that the city requires before it will issue rebuilding permits.

Some homeowners complained after a state geologist said the earth had stopped moving. The soil beneath their homes was still settling, they insisted, and cracks in their floors and walls were widening by the day.

The city plans to do a more focused soil stability study within about two months, but homeowners still must provide test results on their individual lots to win approval to rebuild, said Assistant City Manager Mike Sedell.

Sally Stevens owns two houses on Sabine Circle in the hard-hit east end. Together, they need $165,000 in repairs, Stevens said, and she may just start work without waiting for the city study.

A couple of homeowners have left, others who own red-tagged homes are awaiting word on the soil, she said, and “most of us here in the neighborhood want to get on with our lives.”

Mike Hernandez, the man with a red-tagged home, is sanguine. “To be honest with you, nobody lost their lives here,” he said. “Everybody got out safe. This is a house, it can be rebuilt.”

His wife, daughter, sister and her two children have finally moved out of their parents’ house in western Simi Valley to a rental home, and they are awaiting a city-funded soil study before planning to rebuild.

“It sucks,” Hernandez said. “But like I said, we’re healthy.”

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On Golf Meadows Court, where all 13 homes sustained earthquake damage, repairs are moving slowly but steadily.

The Norihiro family shares a builder with six other damaged homes around Simi Valley, including the one owned by cul-de-sac neighbor Mithilesh Amin.

“The (original) construction was lousy,” said Amin, standing on a layer of plastic film shielding his carpets from three months worth of wallboard dust. “I went to the city to get a copy of the plans for the house, and they were completely different.”

The carpenters had nailed horizontal braces between the studs 8 feet apart instead of the required 4 feet in 1988, and they did not even attach the frame to the foundation, he said.

Without anchoring, the house danced and twisted in the earthquake, splitting the joints in its living room walls from floor to cathedral ceiling, Amin said.

Another month of work lies ahead before he can move his wife and two children back home from the cramped three-bedroom house they have been sharing with four relatives, he said.

“It’s unpleasant, but we can manage,” Amin said. “I’ve never had this kind of experience.”

Simi Valley’s trailer parks proved to be even more unstable. The quake knocked hundreds of light mobile homes off their metal jacks--even destroying some.

Allen and Josephine Smith had to buy a new mobile home and scrap their old home of 25 years at the Crest Mobile Home Park. In the quake, said Josephine, 76, “it went 4 feet in the air and then came down and shook to pieces.”

Shiny black earthquake braces provided by FEMA shore up the mobile home of the Smiths’ neighbor, Kay Larson.

“I don’t know how I happened to be such a cool cat getting out of here, but it hit me later,” said Larson, who remembers she hurriedly grabbed a coat and blanket and then spent nearly four months living with her daughter while waiting for the repairs.

Her contractors treated her well, she said, but other mobile home owners have been beset by dishonest workers, whom she called “scum” and “vultures.”

Victory (Vickie) Stewart said that one such crook visited her double-wide trailer at the Simi Country Mobile Home Park during repairs that lasted until May.

He barged into the trailer, announcing he wanted to fix her home. Then he began pulling family pictures down off the wall and smashing them with his bootheel, she said.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he says, ‘Trying to get you a new carpet,’ ” recalled Stewart, 75, pointing to a still-broken family portrait. “I said, ‘Get out of my house!’ ”

He finally left when she threatened to call her son, she said. “I have cut myself two times on glass where he broke it.”

Remembering how she slept for 2 1/2 months on her daughter’s floor awaiting repairs, she cried a little. Then she said, “Everybody has their own problems.”