GROUND ZERO : 1 Year After the Earthquake, Residents Are Still Pulling Their Lives Together and Coping With the Effects of Stress

Only a few thought the recovery could stretch on so long. One year after the Northridge earthquake shook Ventura County, the region is still crawling slowly out of the wreckage.

Some houses still are unrepaired. Some businesses are crippled. And some residents still suffer from rattled nerves.

“I think after the original repairs everybody was so excited about getting things done, and some people got things done very quickly,” said Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton.

“But they found out that their houses were more damaged than they thought they were,” Stratton said. “Or it’s more difficult than they thought to get things done.”

In Fillmore, Darrell and Gerrie Garner wonder why they still must sell hardware out of a puny temporary shop in a donated tent. Repairs to their fractured Central Avenue building have barely begun.

In Simi Valley, John and Dora Washington wonder how they can untangle the snarled web of bureaucracy holding their yellow-tagged house hostage. They have lived with relatives all year.

In Piru, neighborhood council Chairman Al Gaitan wonders when someone will finally lift the first trowel of mortar to patch the tiny yet vital business district there. It still looks like a ghost town.

In nearly every city, Ventura County residents are coping with less visible fallout: mental and physical ailments boiling up from stress that the more stoic quake victims clamped inside all year.

And with the latest countywide property-damage estimates hovering around $600 million, officials have just begun to probe the injury done to the county’s economy.

“We’ve had one incredible year,” said Carolyn Leavens, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn. “A lot of businesses who have not gotten funding still have not been able to pull back together.”

VCEDA and county officials are drafting damage reports and recovery plans. And some San Fernando Valley companies have moved out of quake-damaged plants and into Ventura County, she said.

But these cannot bring back small businesses that the earthquake forced out of the county or shoved into bankruptcy. Nor can they mend an economy weakened by the departure of large, high-tech firms such as Abex and Northrop, Leavens said.

“I really think the final effects of the earthquake have not been erased yet,” she said. “There’s an awful lot of people trying to pull their lives back together.”

With harsh, upward jackhammer blows, the Northridge earthquake slammed eastern Ventura County into this long-lived state of disorder.

Damp soil liquefied and sank beneath entire neighborhoods. Steel-framed buildings twisted and danced. Wooden houses caved and cracked. Block walls and brick buildings tumbled to rubble.

In all, 9,001 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In Simi Valley alone, more than 200 streets buckled. Repairs are still ongoing.

Every month, fresh leaks are found in pipes feeding water from the Calleguas Municipal Water District to Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Oxnard and Camarillo, said General Manager Donald Kendall.

“We’ve found over 200 cracks, separations and ruptures in our system,” Kendall said. “We’re still making repairs. We got jolted pretty bad.”

Simi Valley

The violent vibrations in Simi Valley nearly matched the full force of gravity, leaving 810 buildings so damaged that officials posted yellow tags forbidding unauthorized entry.

Another 175 buildings were red-tagged--completely uninhabitable.

The day of the quake, Simi Valley insurance agent Bob Larkin said he plugged his spare Princess phone into a jack by the back door and began taking damage claims.

Nearly a year later, he is busy paying out $8 million on about 500 claims.

And to this day, Larkin said, clients in Simi Valley are still finding hidden damage and revising their claims--or even filing new ones.

“A lot of people thought they couldn’t even make their deductible,” he said. “(They) said, ‘I just had some little cracks in the block wall, little cracks in the house, little cracks in the wallboard.’ And all of a sudden their chimney is damaged and their house needs painting. And all of a sudden, they’re over the deductible.”

Hidden damage also is turning up in Simi Valley Unified School District buildings.

The quake left a dozen sites with defects ranging from fallen ceilings to structural fractures, said Lowell Schultze, a district business manager.

Last winter, the repair bill was an estimated $6 million, which compared favorably with the $7 million to $8 million needed to repair plaster, lights and other relatively minor damage at the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Then Simi officials looked closer. They found severe structural damage in several buildings, pushing the cost--so far--to $16 million.

Just last month, workers had to shore up parts of Atherwood Elementary School after learning that another severe quake could drop light fixtures and entire sheets of stucco onto students’ heads, Schultze said.

And Simi Valley High students still must eat lunch from food carts in the breezeways and play sports at other schools while the badly damaged multipurpose room and gym await $2.2 million worth of repairs.

Classes are often shuttled around while classrooms undergo repairs, but the students take it in stride, said Assistant Principal Denise Vale.

“It’s just always frustrating to be planning or moving or making changes,” Vale said. “As long as they’re being educated, that’s the important thing.”

For many private property owners, repairs have been slowed to a crawl or stopped cold by newfound damage and seemingly endless paperwork.

Many were lucky enough to find contractors, get quick insurance payouts and start rebuilding soon after the dust had settled.

But some, like homeowner George Bennett, watched simple repair plans bog down on several fronts.

While the tremor toppled Bennett’s block walls and carved a two-inch gash through the cement floor of his entire house, the home was structurally sound.

“It got real tough between the 17th and when people wanted to start doing work,” said Bennett, 50. “The contractors were just booked.”

Then the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared that Bennett’s neighborhood along the Arroyo Simi drainage channel, according to a 1991 law, was in a flood zone. This meant that any house with repairs costing more than 50% of its market value would have to be demolished and rebuilt on stilts or elevated ground in case of a 100-year flood.

But was that to be figured in 1994 dollars or 1969 dollars?

After halting repairs to thrash out the math with FEMA, Bennett said, he finally won approval to keep his house intact and repair it.

While Bennett and his wife and son lived in one bedroom, contractors gouged a channel one foot wide and nine inches deep along the length of the crack, re-poured the floor and replaced the carpet and tile.

By the time the work was done--to the tune of $47,000 in insurance money and $4,500 in FEMA aid, summer was already over.

Bennett said he spent Christmas week repairing his fence and rebuilding his block walls. Looking more than a little relieved to see an end to the repairs, he added: “We’re just now getting our furniture moved back in.”

Other homeowners, however, are still trapped in bureaucratic limbo.

Four houses lie ruined at the bottom of Sabina Circle, in the middle of the FEMA flood zone.

Two of the families recently moved away for good.

The other two are sharing a house in the city’s west end, while they feud with Simi Valley officials over the FEMA flood law and soil-stability tests that stand in the way of rebuilding.

“We’re just waiting,” said Dora Washington, who is sharing a rented house with her husband, John, their two children--and her brother, his wife and the couple’s son. “It’s very frustrating,” she said.

The city is caught in the middle, said Assistant City Manager Mike Sedell.

“Their frustration is very well taken. We’re as frustrated as they are,” he said. “We’re continuing to debate this with FEMA at its highest levels.”

But only a dozen or so homes are stuck in that situation, while the bulk of damaged homes around Simi Valley have been repaired, Stratton said.

“Our gut feeling is that probably 75% to 80% are back,” he said. “But when you talk about 20% of the buildings that are still in a state of flux, that to me is a lot for a year later.”

Repairs to the city’s infrastructure also are dragging on.

Most of the water and sewer systems have been made watertight again, and federally funded main roads such as Los Angeles Avenue and Cochran Street were repaired quickly, said Public Works Director Ron Coons.

But $1 million worth of block walls have not been rebuilt, and only 40% of the smaller streets are fixed, he said.

Each job must be pre-approved by FEMA, Sedell said. “I don’t think anyone could have envisioned the bureaucracy that’s entailed in this process. It’s going to go on literally for years.”

Fillmore

Repairing Fillmore’s quake-battered business district also could take several years, as did the rebuilding of Santa Cruz, Coalinga and Whittier, said City Manager Roy Payne.

“We were told upfront to expect at least five years before you’re fully recovered,” he said. “I think we’re doing better than that.

Yet even now, sales tax revenues are down l5% from pre-quake times, and the city government is losing even more revenue by waiving building permit fees for earthquake repairs, Payne said.

Temporary shops lent to the city saved displaced Central Avenue merchants from total ruin, but Fillmore’s recovery has suffered a disheartening setback. Officials learned last month that they significantly underestimated the cost of building a new City Hall, a building that would have served as new temporary quarters for many of the ousted merchants.

“We had five general contractors who bid, and the low bid was $1.1 million over our estimate,” Payne said. “We’d estimated $2.2 million, and it came in at $3.3 million.”

The architect is trying to shave costs from the building and ready a plan for the Jan. 24 City Council meeting, Payne said. Meanwhile, about two dozen merchants and businesses must keep working in loaned trailers and drafty aluminum tents.

Three hairdressers’ shops operate side-by-side in one trailer, their names posted outside on small, plain signs.

“There’s no sign, no windows,” said Maria Ramirez, giving a dye job to the sole customer in her temporary shop. Walk-in business has been painfully slow because no one knows she is there.

“My salon is on the side of the theater, and they don’t know when they’re going to reopen it,” Ramirez said. “My customers call and say, ‘Hey, Maria, where are you?’ ”

The chemical reek of hair treatments seeps down the airless hall to assault the nostrils of Martin Farrell, publisher of the Fillmore Gazette.

Bounced by the quake from its home in the Masonic Lodge building--now razed--the gazette’s office stayed briefly in a garage, then a concrete plant. Now it is crammed into 600 square feet of the trailer.

“It’s like working out of a shoe box. There are real privacy problems,” Farrell groused. “You get four or five of these little beauty shops cooking, and it’s hard to breathe. But this beats the hell out of somebody’s garage.”

The earthquake changed Fillmore forever, Farrell believes.

“It’s a different place. We lost a lot of landmark buildings. Many small businesses were displaced, with no certainty of where they’ll go in the near future.”

Many pin their hopes on the 1915-vintage Towne Theatre, which the city bought and plans to repair with a $450,000 grant from the state Historical Preservation Office.

It could be done by autumn, Payne said, with help from an upcoming celebrity auction to raise money for a historically accurate renovation and a state-of-the-art projection system.

The theater is more than a symbolic center for Fillmore’s rustic downtown. Its two-story bulk is also holding up several neighboring stores, Fire Chief Pat Askren said.

“This is the center of the community. It’s like having a hole knocked in your teeth and you have a front tooth missing,” he said.

Touring the damaged theater, Askren pointed out the lofty backstage that will be renovated for live shows. And he nodded at the mezzanine, chuckling, “I can remember throwing spit wads from that balcony when I was a kid.”

Payne predicted downtown’s recovery will take at least one more year.

“It’s been quicker than the norm, but it’s not as fast as everyone would like it to be,” he said. “Expectations and reality are two different things.”

Piru

In the past year, expectations and reality were not even distant kin for Piru.

Community leaders said they expected help for the hamlet’s damaged business district to arrive almost as soon as it did for neighboring Fillmore.

But downtown today looks much as it did the week after the earthquake--two rows of brick storefronts boarded up behind sagging rows of cyclone fence and small drifts of windblown trash.

The biggest blow, say the merchants who remain, was the loss of Citizens State Bank.

Hundreds of fruit pickers used to cash their paychecks there and buy groceries across the street at Guevara’s Market, the only place in town to get fresh meat.

After the quake the bank closed for good, and Mary and Ignacio Guevara hung on, selling food from a cramped temporary trailer.

But after several months of disappointing business in the small, anonymous-looking building, the couple closed up and moved to Mexico, leaving nearby Elva’s Center Market to take up the slack.

Elva’s cashes a few dozen paychecks a week for farm workers unwilling or unable to get to banks in Fillmore, and business picked up when Guevara’s closed, said Manager Demas Hernandez.

But many residents wonder whether Piru will ever get back to normal.

“They’re fixing other things first, and Piru’s just kind of in the background,” said Hernandez, 26. “It seems like they just forgot about Piru.”

But the complaints have not fallen on deaf ears.

Last month, the County Board of Supervisors began setting up a redevelopment agency for Piru so the town will be eligible for community development block grants for repairs.

The county also bought the abandoned bank for $1, and plans to repair and resell it to keep the business district anchored, said Lois Calatrello, the county government’s recovery coordinator.

A $50,000 engineering grant is already being used to gauge the extent of the damage downtown, and the county expects to receive $380,000 more from the National Park Service to begin rebuilding, she said.

“Hopefully, we’ll see some movement,” said Gaitan, head of the Piru Neighborhood Council. “It’s been a year now, and this town has sat here, and it doesn’t really look like anything’s coming out of it.”

Ventura County

Grants to Ventura County are also paying for its psychological recovery--$4.2 million for mental health outreach.

Helen Diehl said she still remembers the noise of her trailer home being shaken off its jacks at the Trade Winds for Mobile Homes park.

“It’s been horrible for me,” said Diehl, 73. “I can’t get over the sound. I still hear that terrible crash.”

Mental health workers visit her regularly, she said.

“I don’t really believe in psychiatry, so I don’t know if they’ve helped me,” she said. “We just sit and talk, we laugh and we have some fun.”

So far, mental health workers have made nearly 15,000 contacts with children, 18,000 with adults and 7,800 with elderly people traumatized by the quake, said Kenny Aragon, who oversees the program.

For some, she said, the mental strain has only just begun to show in adults who shared their beds with frightened children for months or went to sleep bone-tired after working all day and repairing their homes all night.

“Some of them have been so busy taking care of the logistics of everything,” Aragon said, “that they weren’t able to take care of their own emotional needs until now.”

Now, she said, the fear, anger and frustration they held inside for so long are erupting into heartburn, headache, insomnia, overeating, under-eating and anxiety.

“I think some people are uneasy,” agreed Vicky Howard, the recently retired Ventura County supervisor from Simi Valley.

“They keep saying to themselves, ‘I don’t know where else I’d go to live. They’ve got tornadoes in the Midwest and hurricanes in Florida,’ ” she said.

“But the majority of them are staying,” Howard added. “When we stop talking about it, when we stop mentioning, ‘Where else can I go?’--then I’d say we had emotionally recovered.”