GROUND ZERO : Quake Victims Share Tears, Fears--and Hope

In one jolting moment, their lives were battered, broken and bound together.

It happened to Fillmore homeowner Henrietta Zamaripa, whose home snapped in two as a result of the Northridge earthquake.

And Simi Valley druggist Al Siegel, who reopened Tapo Pharmacy two months after the quake, only to find that business isn’t what it used to be. And Rory Maus, a Fillmore resident whose first job out of college has been to help rebuild the homes of people who couldn’t afford to rebuild themselves.

Before Jan. 17, the three had little in common. But now, a year after the disaster, they are among thousands of county residents who share the bond of earthquake recovery.

They join others in telling stories that are tragic and heroic, filled with sorrow and hope.

AL SIEGEL

Siegel owns two drugstores in Simi Valley. And he lives in Northridge.

“I really know how to pick them,” he joked about the earthquake-ravaged communities.

It took him nearly two months to reopen Tapo Pharmacy, which he established in 1959. His other shop, Medical Center Pharmacy on Sycamore Drive, came through the earthquake relatively unscathed.

But a year later, business has dropped off at his Tapo Street business, so much so that he has had to shorten weekend business hours.

“I think the whole world changed,” Siegel said. “Everyone’s shopping patterns changed. The earthquake stopped all the traffic out front. Plus, it’s not exactly like it’s ‘House Beautiful’ out there.”

Out there, as Siegel puts it, are two neighboring businesses, guarded by chain link and preserved nearly in the state they were in moments after the earthquake hit. The windows of one are broken and the walls of the other are supported by long wooden planks.

Siegel used to count on customers from both stores to patronize his. That doesn’t happen any more. “Now, already this year we’ve had these floods,” said Siegel, 56. “I don’t like the first of the year anymore. Instead of things getting better, they’re getting worse.”

STEVE TOPPING

When the earthquake hit, Steve Topping was already planning to give up selling shoes. For 25 years, he had “measured feet and waited on people” at Topping’s Footwear on Central Avenue, the only shoe store in Fillmore. He was approaching 70. He was ready to retire.

Then the quake shattered his 1912 brick building. Topping found himself shoehorned into a tiny retail space in a big aluminum tent with nearly a dozen other businesses.

“It’s been a miracle. What would I have done with my inventory? The tent has been a godsend,” he said. But it changed his sales style, making the store more of a self-serve discount house, he said.

And it pushed his plans for retirement up a year. Earlier this month, he held a massive sale, prices slashed, everything must go.

“We’re selling off our merchandise at reduced prices, and we have a couple people who’ve expressed interest in the business,” Topping said. “I’ve enjoyed my work, and we’ve had a good business.”

ROB BROWN

When the land bounced, so did Rob Brown’s home in Simi Valley. But that’s all it did.

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His modest white trailer home was one of the few in the Friendly Village of Simi mobile home park not shaken off its jacks by the earthquake. That is because it was one of the few fitted with earthquake shocks--blue diagonal trusses with wooden skids bolted firmly to the bottom of the trailer.

“The trailer moved over into the driveway a foot or two . . . and the drawers came out of the dressers,” said Brown, a 22-year-old security guard who shares the mobile home with his mother. “A lot of other houses were in worse shape than ours.”

Some neighbors faced thousands of dollars worth of repairs, covering holes that jacks punched in their floors and patching split water lines. Others just walked away, abandoning their trailers to repair companies that fixed and resold them.

Brown said he and his mother haven’t gotten around to making the only repairs they needed--buying new aluminum skirts to hide the shocks.

JOHN AND DORA WASHINGTON

At the other end of the spectrum sit John and Dora Washington--kept out of their Simi Valley house, they said, by a mass of bureaucratic regulations and a reluctant bank.

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In their way stand a slew of “nos.” No insurance. No SBA loan approval. No FEMA grants. And no indication the Bank of America will lend them the $90,000 needed to repair their utilities and patch the crazy lacework of fissures in their walls and concrete floor. In addition, they may have to raise the house 6 or 7 feet to meet FEMA flood zone requirements.

“FEMA recommended a total teardown,” said John Washington, 45. “If the bank would give us some support in putting it back together, I would. But if they give us no support, I have no choice but to put it in default.”

The earthquake put some of their neighbors in the same dilemma.

“It created a lot of unity among the homeowners, but there are some of us who want to rebuild and get on with our lives and start anew,” said Dora Washington, 44. “The holidays were very depressing.”

VERNON AND MARY DEVITT

One of the things Vernon and Mary Devitt remember most about that January morning was the road being on fire.

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Their home at El Dorado Mobile Home Estates on the outskirts of Fillmore had broken in two. Along with other residents in the senior citizens’ park, they were herded to a vacant lot across California 126. It was cold, and they were in their pajamas.

Then a natural gas line exploded, ripping a 10-foot-wide crater in the highway and shooting a ball of fire into the sky.

“The flames, they were just sky-high,” 80-year-old Mary Devitt said. “I remember we were about to freeze, and then the flames just made everything so hot.”

Their 25-year-old coach was destroyed by the quake and had to be carted off. Just as devastating, the temblor destroyed a building that housed a thrift shop in downtown Fillmore that the couple ran.

“We were just getting that going,” said Mary Devitt of the shop, which benefited a local church. “They tore the building down.”

The couple now lives in a new coach, set on a different lot. There is still work to be done on their new home, and the couple still has belongings in storage.

“We wanted to leave the day this happened,” Mary Devitt said. “But we’re tied up here. Our money is all tied up in this place. You just can’t walk away and leave what you’ve worked all your life for.”

PHILIP AND CHARLOTTE MACIEL

Philip and Charlotte Maciel’s Simi Valley house was yellow-tagged, but they were able to stay in it because their floors and utility lines were spared serious damage.

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Severe cracks in four surrounding houses left the Maciels with the only occupied home in their cul-de-sac and with the unnerving pastime of waiting for their neighborhood to reappear.

The neighbors are seeking loans, federal aid or permission from the city and FEMA to rebuild their houses without stilts or earthen mounds that could cost up to $30,000 more. But who knows how long that will take or whether the houses will be rebuilt seven feet off the ground, said Charlotte Maciel, 42.

“It would be weird with our house at ground level and all the others up in the air,” Maciel said. Of the long recovery, she added, “It’s not so much crazy as it is drug-out. You can’t come back from this right away.”

Most of the other houses are doomed to be demolished and replaced. Demolition alone could cost $6,000--an expense the neighbors never took into consideration, she said.

“We went to the Fire Department and asked if they could do a controlled burn on the houses,” she said. “But they said no, some of them might have asbestos levels, and it’s fairly dangerous.”

RORY MAUS

Rory Maus worries that people have forgotten about the earthquake and its victims.

As director of Mano-Y-Mano, a nonprofit group that helps folks in Fillmore and Piru repair or rebuild earthquake-damaged homes, he guarantees that plenty of people still need assistance.

“It’s just been so long since the earthquake and people have kind of forgotten about it,” said Maus, a 23-year-old Fillmore resident. “There are still people out there who need help.”

In the past year, Mano-Y-Mano has helped rehabilitate 34 houses in Fillmore and Piru. The group has three projects under way and plans to start rebuilding five more houses.

But money is running low, Maus said. He said the group once had $30,000 to $40,000 to work with, but the budget has dwindled to a few thousand dollars. The group last received a contribution more than two months ago.

Maus said he had no idea when he graduated from Cal State Northridge in December that he would be involved in earthquake recovery. He was looking for a job as an urban planner when the quake hit.

If the money runs out, he said, he may again be scouring the job market.

“It’s kind of hard to tell when we’ll shut down,” he said. “We’re just going month-to-month now.”

DARIO MARTINEZ

On Stow Street in Simi Valley, a 37-year-old factory planner, spent part of his holiday vacation with his head under his toilets, tiling floors and hooking up plumbing.

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He and his wife, Rosalinda, have spent six months repairing their cracked driveway, floors and walls.

“We had an SBA loan, they came through real fast for us,” said Rosalinda, 35, a medical transcriber. “It was a $23,000 loan. I think it’s going to cover everything. A lot of it, my husband’s doing it himself.”

The couple repaired ruptured pipes in one bathroom soon after the earthquake, and they recently repaired the other bathroom to make way for a tenant who will be renting a room. There is still work to be done, though, carpeting to be replaced and paint to be slapped on

“I want to be done by the end of summer,” she said. “I thought it’d be done by Christmas, but it takes longer than you think.”

SHIRLEY WRIGHT

Shirley Wright’s Mirage boutique moved back into her old store in mid-December, just in time to feed her some brisk holiday business and make her grateful that her landlord worked so hard to repair the place.

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Wright, 56, owns one of the few businesses to have moved out of a billowy metal tent set up for Fillmore shopkeepers displaced by the quake.

Her store has changed dramatically since the earthquake left the building red-tagged.

Thick support beams costing $10,000 each now bracket her doorway, helping to brace the other shops in the Central Avenue building. And a drop ceiling hides the ornate tin ceiling from which slowly whirring ceiling fans once hung.

But Wright said she loves the way the workers left the brick wall exposed after the plaster fell off it. And the store smells of fresh white paint and new emerald green carpet.

“I have a tanning salon, and I’m getting ready to put the tanning beds back in,” she said. “I’ve had people calling and saying, ‘Are you tanning yet?’ ”

HENRIETTA ZAMARIPA

Even while stuck inside her broken central Fillmore home minutes after the quake hit, Henrietta Zamaripa said she never thought of leaving the city where she was born and raised.

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The earthquake split her home in two, trapping Zamaripa and her husband, Andrew, inside. Flustered and scared, they stayed indoors until daybreak. They wondered later why they simply didn’t open a window and climb out.

The past year has been filled with sawing and hammering, as volunteers have helped repair the back portion of her house. She now has a new bedroom and laundry room.

“I just feel like I lost a year,” she said. “It’s hard. It just seems like a never-ending year.”

The volunteers, part of a nonprofit group dedicated to repairing or rebuilding earthquake-damaged homes, started work on her living room this month.

“I go back and look at pictures where my house was on the ground and I count my blessings,” said Zamaripa, 60. “I think the worst is really over. It really is.”