COLUMN ONE : ‘This Was a Year of Survival’ : They escaped the Northridge Meadows collapse. But they cannot escape lingering injuries and painful memories from the morning that changed their lives.

One year after he was snatched from death in the quake-flattened void of his apartment at Northridge Meadows, Steve Langdon still is waiting for the sky to fall.

He is too vigilant to sleep much, afraid he’ll wake up again in that disastrous nether world where 16 of his neighbors were crushed in their beds by the top two stories of an apartment building that collapsed last Jan. 17 during the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake.

“I’m always looking--no matter where I am--at what can fall on me. If I’m in a strange building, my first inclination is to look up,” said Langdon, 46, who was trapped for five hours. “I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours at a time, and I wake up in a sweat.”

Jerry Prezioso, 68, spent Christmas in the hospital because his arthritic knees, which were pinned by his collapsed bedroom wall, were acting up again. He’s been bedridden for a month, and he misses his freedom.

The places where the tumbling walls and beams of Apt. 110 crushed Alan Hemsath’s arms and legs still are numb. The 38-year-old contractor has endured half a dozen operations, the most recent on Dec. 12, and faces more surgery. Now, he has to concentrate when he grips a hammer with the hand that was pinned beneath his body for nearly seven hours.

Langdon, Prezioso and Hemsath were the last people to leave Northridge Meadows alive, carried out after firefighters literally lifted the building off them.

At the quake’s first jolt, Langdon was making coffee, Prezioso had just returned to bed from the bathroom and Hemsath was half awake. They survived because they were able to react quickly, unlike the 16 first-floor tenants who died in their beds as the quake brought the top two floors of the 164-unit complex crashing down.

One year later, the survivors talk about their quake experiences as moments that changed their lives. They’ve learned to live for today, to reassess the priorities in their lives. Some have come to believe in destiny, that they were spared for a reason. And some have forged friendships with rescuers or fellow survivors.

Langdon lives with Don Stein, the reserve police officer who heard the muffled cries from Apt. 106 and summoned help. Prezioso, Langdon’s former roommate, lives with friends. Hemsath has moved back into his parents’ Northridge home, and says the past year has given him a new appreciation for his family and friends.

Northridge Meadows, the temblor’s symbolic epicenter, is a vacant lot. The sign advertising “luxury apartments” still stands on Reseda Boulevard.

There are no memorials to the agonizing deaths the 16 tenants suffered as the ceilings squeezed the life from them. No reminders of the terror others on the upper floors felt as their beds dropped out from under them, or of how the lives of more than 200 tenants are still fractured one year later.

The survivors struggle daily to recover from their injuries--both physical and emotional. Relatives of tenants who died look for answers and accountability, a search that continues this year as nine lawsuits against the owner, builder, architect, engineer and subcontractors head toward trial in June.

The wrongful death and personal injury suits allege that poor design and shoddy construction caused the fatal collapse. Attorneys defending the landlord acknowledge construction defects at Northridge Meadows, but claim that even a perfectly built structure could not have withstood the power of unprecedented forces, which they contend lifted the complex off its foundation and tossed it 10 to 15 feet to the north.

Hundreds of miles from the epicenter, near Phoenix, a deep friendship has blossomed between Julie Tindall and Marcee Chatow Murray, the daughters of two women killed in the collapse. Their mothers, Karol Runnings, 48, and Bea Reskin, 71, used to sun and chat together by the pool. The daughters met while trying to retrieve mementos from the shambles of their mothers’ apartments.

The disaster, which injured more than a dozen tenants, instantly transformed ordinary people into victims and heroes.

For Erik Pearson, a 27-year-old resident of the third floor, it confirmed a career choice. An emergency medical technician at the time, Pearson tossed fire hoses to trapped neighbors, and crawled under the building to help a woman who eventually was fatally crushed.

He enrolled in nursing school last year, confident that even under the most wrenching circumstances, he could help others.

“I learned that I can handle it,” Pearson said. “When I think about rescuing the people it gives me a good feeling, something I always wanted to do if it ever came to that point. . . .

“I like to think that people helped each other out when they really needed it.”

Mike Kubeisy and Patricia Silden found love among the ruins. They had exchanged hellos in the parking garage a few days earlier. After the quake, he rescued her from her third-floor balcony. A few days later, he gave her a hug as she stood forlornly in her ravaged apartment.

They were married Dec. 10.

But for many, the road to recovery has not been smooth. Some survivors find their experiences easy to recall, and they talk about them freely. Others, like Hyun Sook Lee, who lost her husband and one of her two sons in Apt. 101, prefer not to share the painful memories with outsiders.

The three men pulled from the catacombs that had been the first floor of Northridge Meadows lost everything they had and still face mounting medical bills. They battle the bad memories that can surface at any time without warning.

For Langdon, even raisins can trigger a flashback. He always kept raisins by his bed, and the morning of the quake he picked the spilled raisins off the floor and ate them while pinned, face-down, against his bed.

“I thought about dying, but I wasn’t ready to go,” Langdon said. “There were too many other things I have left to do. I flipped back and forth between being positive and wondering how bad it was out there. Do they know we’re here? How much time would they spend to look at this location? Was this the earthquake that leveled the whole city?”

Langdon spent five months recovering from his injuries, went back to his job at a Van Nuys sportswear distributor for six months, then was laid off two weeks before Christmas.

He’d worked for the company for seven years, and the job loss hurt. Langdon is looking for work, and thinking about moving to the Bay Area.

He has good days and bad days.

“One minute I’m positive and I’m glad I’m alive,” he said, “and then the next minute I’m flashing back and thinking about the earthquake. One thing this has taught me is there is very little in life you have control of.”

It is a recurring theme among the survivors.

“God must want me here for a reason,” Prezioso said. “He keeps throwing me back.”

“I’ve been told I’ve used up all my bad karma for the rest of my life,” Hemsath said. “You either give up, or you move on,” he added. “This is what I’m dealt now. I don’t know what else to do.”

Prezioso said when he wakes on the anniversary Tuesday morning, “I’m probably going to light a candle.” He and Langdon have stayed in touch with the firefighters who pulled them out. Prezioso still makes Italian sauce for his rescuer, Mike Henry, and drops it off at city Fire Station 70, a few blocks from where Northridge Meadows once stood.

“That’s a friendship I’ll have the rest of my life,” he said.

The firefighters used hydraulic cushions to lift the building off the men. Langdon and Hemsath had broken bones and collapsed lungs. Prezioso suffered a huge gash on his calf, and nails pierced his chest and abdomen.

The firefighters of Task Force 70 had been the first to arrive at Northridge Meadows. They say that when the Fire Department sent counselors to talk to firefighters after the quake, their company somehow was overlooked.

They will be on duty again at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17.

Hemsath was the final survivor freed, and his recovery has been the most physically arduous. He said he was never much of an athlete. Now, after months of physical therapy, he spends hours at the gym and walks regularly, three and four miles at a time. He’s been patched up so many times, he looks like the bionic man.

“I had crushing injuries, and I still have a lot of numbness,” he said. “My knuckles and joints are stiff and pop a lot. I’m numb around a large area of upper left leg and both arms, the areas that they operated on. Now, we’re trying to close up skin grafts they took off my legs.”

He remembers running upon the first jolt, and being hit on the back of his head and pushed to the floor. It was so dark, he thought he’d gone blind. Hemsath was trapped face-down under a beam, an electrical panel and his microwave. His lung collapsed, his collarbone snapped and the blood supply to his limbs was cut off. He was unable to move in the 14-inch-by-6-foot space.

At 6 a.m., his battery-operated alarm clock went off. About an hour later, rescuers heard his cries for help. It took another four hours to find him and free him.

The rescuers briefly considered amputating his left arm, pinned under the panel, but decided against it.

Hemsath said he tries not to think about his ordeal.

“If you dwell on something long enough, I think it’s going to get to you,” he said. “Who wants to be stuck in a dark place, with no room to move, just being locked in there?”

Now, he said, “what gets to me is the fatigue.”

While the world watched the rescues on television, Julie Tindall, 30, flew from her home in Tempe, Ariz., to Los Angeles, frantic with worry over her mother, who lived in the apartment complex.

She arrived at Northridge Meadows about 6 p.m., but no one could tell her anything. She wouldn’t learn that her mother was among the dead until 3 a.m. the next day.

“The worst was not knowing, that was just the most traumatic part,” Tindall said. She said she was hung up on more times than she wishes to recall.

“The Red Cross called me a week later to tell me my mom was killed,” she said. “I told them, ‘I know.’ ”

Since New Year’s, Tindall has been eyeing Jan. 17 on her calendar. She’s getting a puppy to help her cope with the anniversary. Her other puppy died last year.

“I was starting to feel that everything I love was going to die,” she said.

“You feel better some days and other days you feel like you’re not even dealing with it,” Tindall said. “A year’s gone by and I haven’t seen her. As more time goes by, you start dealing with it.”

On Christmas Eve, Tindall and her brother, Bill, hung their childhood Christmas stockings, which they dug out from under the rubble of their mother’s apartment.

When things get particularly tough, Tindall said she picks up the phone and talks with Murray, 39.

“My mom sold Avon products to Bea,” Tindall said.

“This was a year of survival,” Tindall said. “I’ve been reacting to everything. I feel like I’ve just been getting through each day. I think I’m waiting for some magic to happen, like the new year is going to turn over and magic is going to happen.”

“Marcee understands,” Tindall said. “I find a lot of times we’re in the same place. You swing back and forth, and you do feel alone. This is a lonely process and if you can have someone with you, it helps.”

“Our moms would be glad we are friends now,” Murray said.

Tindall and Murray say no one else in their families understood what drew them to Northridge Meadows in the days and weeks after their mothers’ deaths, their desire to investigate, to understand what happened.

Now, they have no wish to revisit the vacant lot at 9565 Reseda Blvd. on the anniversary.

“I don’t want to see nothing, “ Murray said. “There’s nothing there but dirt. Nothing to tell you they were there. It’s done and gone and that’s that.”

Earthquake Memories

* The TimesLink on-line service provides a forum to share memories, thoughts and fears about last year’s magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake. Sign on and “jump” to keyword “TimesLink BB.” Select the topic “Quake Anniversary.”

Details on Times electronic services, A4