A Reporter on the Wrong Side of Disaster

It was a different kind of terror I felt that morning, as dawn broke and the rumble of aftershocks seemed to subside.

We had survived. Our house was still standing, though strewn with rubble. The children were safe, though trembling inside.

But as my neighbors and I huddled on the lawn, around someone’s battery-powered TV set, I realized the worst might be yet to come. For the carnage that flashed across the screen--of collapsed buildings and burning streets--was being shot just a few miles from my home.

“It appears the epicenter is in Northridge,” the newscaster announced, as another aftershock rolled beneath our feet.

We felt silent, our status confirmed: Victims at Ground Zero, in Southern California’s most devastating earthquake this century.

*

In 20 years as a newspaper reporter I’ve covered my share of natural disasters. I’ve tromped through mud to find flood victims, shuffled through the ashes of fire-ravaged homes, trolled Red Cross shelters for poignant stories of the havoc wreaked in victims’ lives.

It is our job to poke and prod, to prompt tearful victims to recount their horrors, tally their losses, account for their survival in the midst of tragedy. Then we pick through their memories--using some, discarding others--to weave accounts of disaster that readers will feel compelled to read.

It felt odd, frightening even, to be on the other side of that process this time . . . one among the hapless victims whom reporters were duty-bound to descend upon.

And worse still to realize what our victim status meant. By nightfall, I figured, much of the city would be back to normal--phones working, water running and electricity restored. We would stumble along for days, relying on battery power and bottled water, counting our blessings by candlelight.

Still we knew we were lucky to be alive, as we surveyed the destruction around us: The collapsed apartment building that killed 16 people. The gas main ruptures that destroyed an entire block of homes. The freeways that fell, the parking garage that crumbled, trapping a man beneath 20 tons of concrete. All told, 61 people were killed and more than 8,000 injured. Damage estimates reached $20 billion.

The reporter in me wanted to start taking notes, to record my neighbors’ stories, recount our fears, recall the terror of those moments when we wondered if we’d make it out of our homes alive.

But the mother in me was too busy rummaging through the ruins of our kitchen pantry, searching for something undamaged for my children to eat. And trying to coax a frightened 5-year-old to enter a bathroom littered with broken tile and shattered glass, to use a toilet that would not flush.

And when our phone service finally came back on, it was not The Times’ city desk I called, but my sister back in Ohio.

“Thank God,” she sighed, at the sound of my voice. “When they said Northridge . . .” I heard a sob catch in her throat.

“It was awful,” I told her. “But we’re all OK.” And we both held on to the phone and cried.

*

It took us weeks to repair the broken windows and fractured walls; to haul away the wreckage of what had been a china cabinet, my late husband’s album collection, the dishes we’d received as wedding presents, my children’s hand-painted, ceramic dolls.

It took months more for us to muster the courage to return to our bedrooms; to trust our lives to the staircase that had shaken so violently that night as we descended to the safety of our front yard.

So we improvised . . . ate from paper plates and slept crowded together on the sleeper-sofa in the den--me, three children and one dog.

And we learned to make the best of our survivor persona, to enjoy, even, the odd sort of status it gave us outside the boundaries of our neighborhood.

There was, we learned, a certain cachet evoked by mention of our hometown. Forced to shop in places like Glendale and Culver City because of damage to our local malls, we grew accustomed to the notoriety evoked by a glance at the address on my driver’s license: “You live in Northridge, huh,” the sales clerks would say. “So, what was it like?”

And we began to feel less like victims and more like heroes, wearing our survival like a badge of courage, considering it a triumph just to have survived.

Now, almost six years later, we know better . . . The two-steps-forward/one-step-back process of moving on has been both rewarding and painful, acquainting us with unimagined personal strengths and dormant vulnerabilities.

And if we are not heroes, we are no longer victims either. Like millions of earthquake veterans around the world, it is enough to say that we survived.