Our impressive response

Earthquakes are the most democratic of our disasters. More than mudslides and wildfires, they happen to everybody. When the Los Angeles Basin shakes, it shakes in Brentwood and Bell Gardens, for the rich and poor alike. It happens to you, not on TV. Which makes the earthquake experience -- the thrill-ride effect of having faced danger and survived -- uniquely storied.

We guess the magnitude of every bounce and carry around earthquake memoirs and mythologies, even if we’re relative newcomers to L.A., ready to share our first and our worst, what we did, and how unconsciously brave or dumb we were. If you’ve lived here your whole life, you’re even more intimate with earthquakes, the shivers that pass through your childhood as a warning, a secret test of courage and a knowledge to be mastered.

Maybe because we’re learning the right things to do -- or maybe because we were sick of apocalypses after the Rodney King riots of 1992 -- but the Northridge earthquake revealed how competent as a community Los Angeles can sometimes be. People in other places reach out to help their neighbors with depressing frequency each year: after tornadoes in the Midwest, blizzards in the East and hurricanes along the coasts of the South. We sit alone in SigAlerts.

Our L.A. is supposed to be incoherent and feckless as a community and uniquely dangerous as well, a Disneyland of disasters that should be red-tagged now, before another fault slips under the lofts and condominiums of downtown’s housing boom. But the experience of the Northridge earthquake tells a different story, not heroic in the conventional sense, but more reassuring. We have our faults, below and above ground, and some of them are scary, but when we have come together, as we did 10 years ago, we’ve shown that we’re surprisingly resilient.

In the still, cold hours just before dawn, the ground under our feet -- and under our homes and freeways and hopes -- bucked and shivered for a few seconds as a blind fault nine miles below the city hunched upward. After the shaking was over and when we had picked up our broken dishes and fallen mirrors, when the morning news had brought us the grief of the real victims (57 deaths) and the desolation of broken neighborhoods ($40 billion in damages), we did something unexpected. Each of us then, blind in our own way, reinforced our compact with this place. Somewhere between the terror of waking in the dark with the ground in revolt and the boredom of the snarled drive to work that Monday morning, we put ourselves back into the fractured picture of L.A. from which collectively we had been shaken loose.

After the shaking stopped, the injured and suddenly homeless were helped from the ruins by fellow survivors, now no longer strangers, who made sure that pets were corralled, the gas turned off and some comfort given. While we were still standing in the street calming fears, other Angelenos made their way to fire and police stations, hospitals and municipal emergency operations centers. A lot of them you would expect to be there, firefighters and police officers, for example, but many of them were otherwise unremarkable -- senior citizen volunteers, utility employees and the men and women who work in local governments and who are trained to mobilize as disaster workers. The response was like nothing that had occurred before. Recently developed urban search and rescue techniques reduced the number of deaths and made firefighters more efficient in clearing collapsed buildings. Better earthquake mapping put disaster teams where they were needed. And, unlike New York firefighters and police after the Sept. 11 disaster, L.A.’s public safety units had both the equipment and experience to communicate across departmental and jurisdictional boundaries.

Still, most of the aid that came to the victims that morning didn’t arrive with sirens and flashing lights. It came from Neighborhood Watch block captains, off-duty nurses, construction workers and the managers of fast-food restaurants who did what was necessary to protect lives, shelter families and feed the disaster workers. The Goodyear company, with the help of the Los Angeles Fire Department, even displayed messages in English and Spanish on the blimp to reassure the masses of immigrant families huddled in city parks, afraid of aftershocks.

There were some shameful earthquake responses too. After 1994, Congress mandated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency deny housing assistance to future disaster victims who aren’t legal residents, putting more burden on city and community organizations to respond the next time. Insurance companies mishandled Northridge claims and then, in place of fines, were allowed to funnel millions of dollars into foundations that benefited State Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, who was forced to resign.

So our response to the Northridge earthquake wasn’t perfect, but enough order emerged from the chaos, much of it choreographed by Angelenos who took on jobs they hoped they would never have to do. The disaster planners, with grim certainty, say that the lesson of Northridge is that we’re all we have when the ground moves the next time. Maybe that’s enough.

D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” and a city official in Lakewood, where he helped staff the emergency operations center after the earthquake.