Starting Over

They had no lawyers clamoring to take their cases, no support groups and, in some cases, scant financial means to rebuild.

They rolled the earthquake insurance dice and lost.

More than six years after the Northridge earthquake, insured homeowners are still in the news because of ongoing disputes over payments and controversial settlements with insurance companies made by former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush.

But an estimated 50% of the homeowners in the San Fernando Valley areas closest to the epicenter had no earthquake insurance, according to a state-funded study.

They are the forgotten earthquake victims.

“People do not generally want to talk about the fact that they had no earthquake insurance,” said Mary Comerio, a professor at UC Berkeley and lead author of the 1997 study “Residential Earthquake Recovery.”

An oft-quoted estimate of $25 billion in property losses is based on money paid out by insurance companies and government agencies, Comerio said. But she said no one knows for sure the amount of uninsured losses.

“Many homeowners either contacted their bank or mother-in-law, but they’re not in the public domain,” she said.

The best estimate is about $4.7 billion--the money federal agencies paid out in residential grants and low-interest rebuilding loans, Comerio said.

Officials believe that most of this money went to uninsured homeowners, but neither the Federal Emergency Management Agency nor the U. S. Small Business Administration compiled specific statistics on the issue. And, they point out, government help goes only so far.

“None of the government programs--federal or state--will make you whole again,” said David Fukutomi, FEMA disaster recovery manager. “We cannot replace what you could get from insurance.”

Many people, with repairs exceeding the value of their homes, simply walked away, their homes falling into foreclosure. But others stayed to rebuild.

‘I Don’t Wallow in Things’

Seconds after the shaking that tore his house from its foundation finally subsided, Roger Campbell jumped into the fire boots he always kept by the bed, grabbed the rest of his fire gear and led his family outside.

“I’m the assistant fire chief,” he said. “That comes with responsibilities.”

He rushed to the Fillmore Fire Station--which he couldn’t enter because of quake damage--and began setting up an outdoor command center. Campbell, also a Fillmore city councilman, helped with rescues, setting up a housing shelter in a school gym and surveys of the devastation to the small Ventura County town.

Campbell glimpsed his home only briefly, and it was a painful sight. The house--built in the 1920s--tilted so badly that it threatened the relatively undamaged home of a neighbor.

After two days of helping others, he confronted the situation on the home front.

“I think that’s when it started to sink in: ‘I got some serious problems here,’ ” said Campbell, 49, who didn’t want to pay the extra expense for quake insurance.

Friends had already helped by salvaging what they could from the house, which was a total loss.

“No one was supposed to go in, but they did--about 50 friends. They stripped everything they could out of it,” Campbell said. “It was real moving.”

But Campbell, who describes himself as a “human dynamo,” decided within days of the earthquake to rebuild. “You make a decision and go on. I don’t wallow in things,” he said.

He studied SBA loan policies in detail, arriving at the agency’s offices with paperwork in hand to get an expedited loan to cover all rebuilding costs. Within a few weeks, he had selected a house from a model and signed a deal with a contractor.

He declined to say how much he spent to rebuild, but a recent county assessment put the value of the replacement house around $74,000, excluding land value.

“Before the earthquake, I had only nine years left to pay off my house,” he said. “Then, suddenly, it was 30.”

On May 18, just four months and a day after the earthquake struck, he and his family moved into the new two-story, four-bedroom house.

He did not take out earthquake insurance.

“I had it built to withstand an 8-point earthquake,” he said with confidence, standing in front of the house.

He does not go inside because he and his wife, Katherine, are in the middle of a divorce. She lives there, while he lives a block away in a small, Spanish-style rental.

In separate interviews, both said the quake did not play a role in their separation.

They did have opposite views on one house matter, however.

“Once the divorce is final,” his wife said, “and if I am fortunate enough to be blessed with being able to keep the house, I will be looking for quotes for earthquake insurance.”

‘I Just Want to Move Forward’

Jaspal Jammu sat on the sofa in his small, dimly lit apartment, holding a 1994 insurance check for $7,999.

He didn’t have earthquake insurance when the Northridge quake rocked his family’s three-bedroom Granada Hills home so hard that it left floor cracks more than 6 feet deep.

Moments after the quake, a gas line exploded along Balboa Boulevard in front of the house, sending 20-pound asphalt slabs through the window and starting a fire on the roof.

The insurance check was for fire damage. But Jammu--a divorced father with custody of three children--never cashed it.

“When you have lost everything, what is $8,000?” he asked quietly. “All my life savings, everything, I had put into the house.”

Jammu, 58, and his then-wife bought the 2,000-square-foot home in 1982. They began divorce proceedings in 1993.

He said he was awarded the home Jan. 14, 1994--three days before the earthquake struck.

If he had had more time before the disaster hit, he said he might have bought earthquake insurance. “I think maybe I was waiting for the divorce to be final to do anything like that,” Jammu said.

He still owed about $160,000 on the house. Engineers later told him that it would cost at least half that much to make repairs, he said.

Jammu also did not have a job. Two years earlier, he had been laid off from a management position with Xerox. Because of the recession, he said, he was unable to find another corporate position. Without a salary, he couldn’t qualify for an SBA loan.

FEMA grants totaling $3,400 provided rent money for him and his children for several months. When that money ran out, they moved back into the unrepaired house on Balboa.

“I tried to make the mortgage payments for a while, but with no income, I could not,” Jammu said.

The house was eventually lost to foreclosure. Jammu was evicted in July 1995, and he and his children moved to the two-bedroom apartment on a downscale Northridge street where they still reside.

“I had been living an average-plus life,” he said, while in the courtyard nearby, a couple was having a loud argument. “This apartment--there is so much noise, trash outside.”

He has still not found full-time work, although he said he occasionally picks up temporary jobs as a financial consultant. His oldest daughter works as an accounting clerk and helps with the rent.

Contributing to the unsettled feel of the living room were several boxes stacked along one wall. He said most held items salvaged from the house and never unpacked.

“The dream is to move back into a house, someday,” Jammu said. “I just want to move forward.”

‘No Room for Feeling Sorry for Yourself’

“I love my home,” said Irene Boyd. And what’s not to love?

The Spanish-style, 5,700-square-foot house sits behind electric gates in Northridge. There’s a balcony overlooking the swimming pool and tennis courts, a sunken billiards room, Jacuzzi in the master bath, children’s walk-in wardrobe and a terra cotta-tiled kitchen with a high-end range and two dishwashers. The several living and family rooms have high ceilings and the woodwork is oak.

By all appearances a palatial Southern California manse of an earlier era, it is only 4 years old.

“The best compliment I’ve gotten is that this does not look like a new house,” said Boyd, 48.

The original house--on the same footprint and of almost equal size--was red-tagged after the earthquake, meaning that inspectors had determined it was too dangerous to enter. (Inspectors also issued yellow tags, which allowed residents to enter for short periods of time to retrieve possessions.)

Boyd and her husband, Stuart, had bought the house, on almost 2 1/2 acres, in 1989 from comedian Richard Pryor, who had famously set himself on fire in one of the bedrooms during a 1980 freebase cocaine binge.

Accepting higher payments in order to pay off the house faster, the couple refinanced the mortgage just three months before the earthquake.

“We were doing well at the time,” Irene Boyd said. She was a lawyer who had just left a high-paying position at a corporate firm; he is a urologist and medical professor at USC.

Upon refinancing, they also dropped their earthquake insurance, which would have cost $15,000 a year for a policy with a $150,000 deductible. “We said, ‘There will never be an earthquake that bad in Northridge,’ and if it did happen, we assumed the government would step in.”

There was, and it didn’t. The only major government help they received was when the city condemned the house and leveled it, saving them demolition costs.

The Boyds were suddenly in the same position as other uninsured homeowners who had lost their homes. Except they had money.

They were approved for SBA loans, but not nearly the amount it would take to rebuild a home of the same size. They ended up paying for about two-thirds of the project out of their savings and earnings.

“It helped that my husband took on extra work as an expert witness,” Boyd said.

She declined to detail the financial arrangements, but said out-of-pocket expenses exceeded $500,000.

The budget was high, but strict. “I didn’t have the luxury to make any mistakes,” said Boyd, who used materials salvaged from the house when possible.

She said she closely monitored every expense, such as the selection of kitchen counters. “We considered marble, which was $30 to $100 a linear foot. Flagstone was $35 a ton. We went with the flagstone and I sealed it myself.”

During the three-year rebuilding project, the Boyds and their three young children lived in a one-bedroom guest house on the property. It was a stressful time, but Boyd said she tried to keep it in perspective, especially for her children.

“It was important to tell them that even with what happened to us, we were still far better off than 98% of the world’s population,” she said. “There was no room for feeling sorry for yourself, not in our circumstances.”

Now, with both the mortgage and SBA loans to pay off, the family has had to make cutbacks. Family travel has not been as lavish, and they have not thrown the kind of themed bashes they used to have for as many as 300 guests.

Another item that does not fit into the budget: earthquake insurance.

“We think the house is more sound than the one that got hit by the earthquake,” she said. But the decision came down to the cost of the insurance, which would have been about the same as when they looked into it pre-quake.

“The medical system has changed; you don’t make the kind of money you used to in the field,” she said. “We have three children to put through college.”

‘You Can’t Live in Fear’

For two people born of the Depression, Charles and Joyce Hamlin counted themselves lucky to buy their own home.

As a boy growing up during the Depression, he moved to La Puente, where his mother found work in a laundry for 25 cents an hour. Joyce, who has American Indian ancestry, was born in Montebello and went to a boarding school for Native American children in Riverside while her mother worked in a factory during World War II.

Charles worked for 53 years at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys, while Joyce had jobs at several of the electronics factories that used to dot the San Fernando Valley.

In 1963, they paid $20,750 for a new four-bedroom, California ranch-style home in Simi Valley, where they raised three children.

After paying off the mortgage in 1986, they let the quake insurance lapse; too expensive, they thought, as they neared retirement.

Joyce gave a tour of the modest, immaculate house. On a wooden table in the living room was her post-earthquake collection of miniature tea sets depicting Santa’s workshop, Betty Boop’s street corner, the Nativity and other scenes.

Wasn’t she worried that an earthquake could ruin the collection?

“You can’t live in fear,” she said with a boisterous laugh.

After the earthquake, mementos, treasures and pictures accumulated during more than 40 years of marriage had to be hauled out by the shovelful. And there was far more serious damage--buckled walls, cracked counters, ruined heater, smashed furniture and a gap where the chimney jolted away from the house.

But it was a loss they could put in perspective.

Along one bedroom shelf were several older, porcelain pieces that were cracked and chipped. They had belonged to their middle daughter, who had lost a long struggle to cervical cancer in 1993.

A few months later, after the earthquake, Joyce had crawled through the wreckage of the room to gather every piece she could find of her late daughter’s favorite childhood keepsakes. She painstakingly glued them together.

“You go on, one step at a time,” Joyce, 68, said.

Recovery from the disaster on fixed incomes was not easy. Though in failing health, Charles, now 74, did most of the interior repairs, teaching himself how to lay tile, work on cabinets and plaster cracks.

They budgeted so carefully that they only spent $24,000 of the $30,000 they received in SBA loans, sending the rest back in a lump sum.

They said the amount spent was drastically less than an insurance company would have given them had they had a policy.

Because of their SBA loan payments, they now cannot afford earthquake insurance. And they said that because of health problems, they don’t expect to live the 10 or so more years it would take them to again achieve the American dream of being debt-free.

Joyce resumed the tour, pointing to the seamlessly repaired dining room counter.

“The way my Chuck filled in the cracks, the tiles will be here when nothing else is left,” she said with another laugh. “Like ancient Rome.”

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Northridge Quake at a glance

* Occurred: 4:31 a.m. Jan. 17, 1994

* Magnitude: 6.7

* Deaths: 57

* Injuries: 11,846

* Total government residential grants and loans: $4.7 billion

* Number of FEMA emergency repair and housing grants: 397,815

* Total amount of FEMA grants: $821,481,982

* Number of SBA loans: 124,261

* Total amount of SBA loans: $4.05 billion

Sources: California Division of Mines and Geology, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U. S. Small Business Administration, state Department of Insurance, U. S. Geological Survey