Los Angeles Times Special Quake Report: One Year Later : Still Shaken : A Resilient Los Angeles Seeks to Retrieve Its Future

That Monday morning, we awoke to the roar of rock grinding 11 miles below the surface of the Earth. A year later, we awake to the roar of hammers banging a few feet below our windows.

From Simi Valley to Sherman Oaks to Seal Beach, the sound of construction splits the air as Southern California pounds back from the costliest natural disaster ever to strike North America.

In the first few weeks, it appeared as if in reconstruction we could rebuild the very idea of our region--resurrect the hope of unending prosperity, revive the magic lost in the riots, retrieve our future with a rack of rebar and some elbow grease.

“It seemed like it would be a catalyst for healing the city,” recalls Sheryl Gold, a music industry attorney who suffered more than $70,000 damage to her home in Studio City.

The catalyst would be fear, sure, but also contrition. Feeling guilty that we had not prepared enough for a quake, either at home or work or in the public infrastructure, we collectively vowed to get it right this time.

Local and national government led the way, responding with the most splendid emergency assistance program in U. S. history--far surpassing their reaction to the Loma Prieta earthquake or the Los Angeles riots.

Firefighters and police risked their lives to save hundreds of imperiled apartment dwellers. Elected officials efficiently mobilized municipal workers and the National Guard to deliver food and water to hastily assembled tent cities. Cabinet officers jetted in from Washington to grant millions of dollars in aid on the spot, direct the rebuilding of freeways, protect ruined neighborhoods from looters and commiserate with the dying, the wounded, the homeless, the bereaved.

At the quake’s bittersweet anniversary this week, a grateful and remarkably resilient Southland salutes their fast action, bravery and skill--and mourns the loss of lives, homes and peace of mind.

But one might also wonder where all that energy and vision went in the past 12 months.

For all the initial high hopes, an attention deficit quickly developed as the world’s wheel of crisis kept spinning and spinning: Within weeks, the media arrow pointed to Rwanda, Haiti, O.J. Simpson, baseball strikers, midterm elections, Chechnya and now flooding.

In the process, futurism seemed to give way to fatalism. Just five months after the Northridge temblor, California voters badly defeated an earthquake bond measure. By year-end, around the country the Northridge quake was not even considered among the top five U. S. news stories of 1994.

Yes, we knew that rebuilding would not be easy--Loma Prieta and Hurricane Andrew taught that lesson. And as a region we are not given to self-pity, despite the suffering of Biblical proportions directed at our rich land by flames, tectonic change, rainstorms, even flesh-eating bacteria and those locusts in the bond market.

But it is human will, not divine will, that has really tested our patience.

More than a few Southern Californians have been worn down by intransigent insurance companies and contractors more artful at the fast buck than fast work. Far from demanding permanent institutional change in the way building is regulated, schools retrofitted and neighborhoods prepared, we are now just thankful if the city debris-hauling trucks make their rounds on time, and if the check from the insurance company arrives.

“The quake has not changed much about the way we live and plan,” laments Edward W. Soja, chairman of UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning. “It should have been a breakthrough moment that created new ways of doing things, but it didn’t. We have slipped into old ways, just as we did after the riots.”

More than ever, it has become evident that geography is destiny. How you perceive the area’s rebound depends on where you live or work or visit.

Drive through the post-apocalyptic Kingsbury Street “ghost town” in Granada Hills and you will find a Stygian tableau of recycling and renewal, where scavengers stalking mountains of discarded carpets share the road with landlords like Denis O’Sullivan vowing to bring tenants back to bombed-out buildings.

Drive down Carlton Way in Hollywood and you will find shattered bungalows listing at satanic angles, and a plucky Romanian immigrant named Nick Anita who has dismantled, board by board, the building he bought a month before the quake.

Take the Universal Studios Tour and you might hear, as a colleague did, the sudden sobbing of a Valley resident who didn’t think the earthquake ride would bother her.

In these places, and hundreds like them, the chain-link fence has surpassed the Hollywood sign as a symbol of the Southland, and the quake remains as much as ever an instant topic of conversation among strangers.

Elsewhere, however, whole blocks appear untouched--and their residents unmoved. It is even possible to hear people call reports of the earthquake’s vast damage a myth, the recovery complete, the U. S. government’s continuing investment a waste, or even a fraud.

“I have been shaken more by public denial than by the earthquake itself,” says state Sen. Tom Hayden, who believes that quake damage ought to be blamed on institutional failure, such as lax building codes, rather than on Mother Nature. “There seems to be a very deep human need to return to an absurd normalcy at all costs.”

On the other hand, there are many hopeful signs of recovery 363 days after 6.7 at 4:31: * A drive north on the Golden State Freeway in Newhall Pass reveals a new stack of motor ways that look like Disneyland’s Autopia: Streamlined federal contracting rules and around-the-clock shifts made the area’s long detours and army of arc welders seem as transient as a summer storm.

* Federally subsidized rent vouchers helped thousands of low-income residents move from wrecked rooms in Fillmore, Pacoima and Santa Monica to fine apartments in parts of the region spared from ruin.

* A new coalition of community-based nonprofit organizations called Emergency Network Los Angeles, set up by Mayor Richard Riordan soon after the quake, has established permanent bonds of cooperation among many of the Southland’s volunteer care-givers and philanthropists.

But few snapshots taken on the eve of our bittersweet anniversary are so attractive.

Ask the Rev. Steve Bangs how far he has come in the past year, and the Cahuenga Pass homeowner names his insurance carrier as his “biggest disappointment.”

“I thought I had the best,” he said of the firm. “Big mistake.”

The former Army officer’s yellow-tagged home, decorated with dozens of wooden angels collected on trips around the world, is on its sixth adjuster (“they expect you to educate them”), still has no heat downstairs and has walls riven by corner-to-corner fractures.

Bangs and his wife, Cate, are no patsies. They have compiled an incredibly detailed record of negotiations on their $292,000 claim, including a one-inch stack of documents complete with footnotes for a single $100 reimbursement request alone.

“Why do they have to make it so hard?” moans Cate.

Why indeed. Their plight, according to Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, highlights the fact that despite $5 billion spent so far by federal agencies on residential and commercial relief, the area’s long-term rebuilding effort is a financial problem, not a governmental one.

“The insurance companies have made government look entrepreneurial,” Yaroslavsky says. “Every clause and every semicolon of every contract has been a war.”

The skirmish among government assistance, private insurance and individual responsibility is waged nowhere more brutally than in the 17 communities so badly damaged that they have been labeled “ghost towns.”

At the spectral neighborhood centered on Willis Street and Natick Avenue near bustling Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, nearly 30% of apartment building owners have not yet applied for a permit for demolition or repair. A debate rages over who should help them.

“If two or three of every 10 buildings on your block are collapsing, they are a cancer,” says Yaroslavsky. “Our objective should be to get 100% rebuilt as soon as possible.”

Not so, says Simon Greitzer.

The semi-retired engineer is the homeowner association leader for a horribly disfigured 54-unit condominium complex on Natick. He battled State Farm for eight months before striking a $5.5-million reconstruction deal. Now he pridefully battles with Yaroslavsky--objecting to the former city councilman’s plan to have the Community Redevelopment Agency bail out with taxpayer funds building owners who were not so far-sighted as he.

“A helping hand is a marvelous thing,” Greitzer said. “But handouts don’t work out.”

*

Advocating a few ounces of prevention over billions of dollars of cure, Hayden and other social critics would like Southland residents to recognize that the Northridge quake--which occurred along a hidden thrust fault previously known only to a few petroleum geologists--showed that we are all “epicentral.”

Another major quake, up to magnitude 7.6, could happen at any of a dozen more blind thrust faults that crisscross the seismically adolescent ground beneath our feet.

They want us to demand more regulation from state and local authorities cowed by the construction and insurance industries. They suggest education as an amulet:

* Require warning labels on all major public and private buildings listing the date of last inspection, and a safety ranking.

* Build public “quake parks” to teach geologic history and risk.

* Turn the attention of anti-crime Neighborhood Watch groups to quake defense.

* Require seismic zoning statewide, forcing builders to construct homes more strongly in liquefaction zones than on bedrock.

Most of all, though, this outgoing, gregarious capital of entertainment and enterprise might have to turn inward for a change.

Over the past year, we have rejoiced and begun to rebuild. In the coming year, perhaps, it will be time to reassess our view of Southland life as a roulette wheel.

Real change is within our grasp. The Big Spin will bring us the Big One someday. A hammer then may not help.