Disaster Expert Learns From the Past, Steadies Herself for the Next Temblor

There’s nothing like a magnitude 6.7 earthquake to shake a disaster expert’s self-confidence.

That’s what happened to Barbara Lewis a decade ago when the Northridge quake pulled the rug out from under her emergency preparedness plans. “I thought I had done everything right, that I was ready for an earthquake,” Lewis says. “But I wasn’t.”

Now she is, she says. That’s because Lewis has figured out a way to keep her quake preparations close to her vest. She stores everything she needs to survive an earthquake, in fact, in a real vest.

The year before the Jan. 17, 1994, Northridge quake, Lewis headed the Roscomare Valley Assn., which represents 850 families in Bel-Air. In that post, she had co-written a neighborhood disaster plan, recruited block captains willing to assist in an emergency and helped place a container of emergency supplies at a local elementary school.

In her own home, she had followed the conventional advice to keep a pair of shoes under her bed, a flashlight in the nightstand drawer, her china plates on a low kitchen shelf and a gas cutoff wrench near her water heater.

But when the shaking stopped, her shoes were gone -- tossed across the bedroom and buried under toppled furniture. The flashlight drawer was jammed shut, her dinner plates were smashed and natural gas was spewing from the water heater closet, where the wrench was nowhere to be found.

In the shambles of knocked-over bookcases and shelves, Lewis had also lost her eyeglasses and her car keys. When she tried to call family members to assure them she was OK, she found the telephone speed dial that contained their numbers wouldn’t work without electricity.

Her address book was in her home office, buried beneath equipment and files that were spilled open. The same jumble hid insurance papers, her checkbook and other important documents. When she set out to pry open jammed drawers and closets, the tools she needed were in a closet whose door was stuck shut.

“I had done what people said to do,” she says. “But I found out what the experts suggest sometimes doesn’t fit with reality.”

Now a 55-year-old business consultant living in Sherman Oaks, Lewis is convinced she would fare better if a similar earthquake were to strike again. She has extra eyeglasses stored in a hard case tucked between her mattress and headboard. A pair of sneakers are wedged beneath the mattress at the foot of her bed. A large flashlight hangs from a hook next to the nightstand.

A closet enclosed by a decorative Japanese rice-paper screen, which Lewis can kick open if necessary, holds the tool chest. That’s also where her earthquake vest hangs.

The vest, similar to those used by fishermen and photographers, has pockets jammed with emergency supplies: a radio, flashlight, fire extinguisher, gas valve wrench, spare house and car keys, prepaid phone card, gloves, photocopies of important documents, $100 in small bills, an extra pair of shoes, a prying tool and pliers, a whistle, a first-aid kit, a signal mirror, matches and a water bottle.

The vest weighs about 10 pounds. But it takes a load off Lewis’ mind when she thinks about earthquakes.

People are so intrigued when she shows it to them that Lewis briefly considered manufacturing the vests. One major department store was interested in ordering half a dozen to sell for about $90 each, but Lewis scrapped the idea after calculating she would need to sell 1,000 of them to break even.

After moving to Sherman Oaks in the late 1990s, Lewis set up a disaster plan for her new street. Fifty of the 65 families on Beverly Ridge Drive helped her compile a resource book listing such things as residents’ medical skills, those with four-wheel-drive vehicles and ham radio licenses and families’ telephone contact numbers. Block captains were also named.

Like Lewis, those on the street had been jarred into safety-consciousness by the Northridge earthquake.

Two homes on Beverly Ridge Drive collapsed in the quake. The quake’s youngest victim died in one of the homes.

Four-year-old Amy Tyre-Vigil was killed when her family’s home slid down a hill. Her parents, Nancy Tyre and Anastacio Vigil, were injured and trapped for more than an hour before other residents found them. It took another hour for rescuers to free them.

So her neighbors don’t laugh when Lewis pulls out her vest, or when they see how her china plates, stored on a shelf near the kitchen floor, are now cushioned with Styrofoam picnic plates interspaced in the stack.

Last year Lewis was invited back to the Roscomare association to discuss her preparedness efforts. Joan King Chamberlin, current president of the group, says residents are increasing the number of containers that hold community emergency supplies and are setting up a neighborhood emergency shortwave radio system.

Wiser ones have also taken Lewis’ home tips to heart, she says.

“Barbara’s place was really turned upside down by the earthquake,” Chamberlin says.

So was her sense of safety.