Science, Sentiment Mark Day of Quake

While nearly 3,000 people gathered Saturday morning at Caltech to listen to public lectures and see computer displays on the latest advances in earthquake science, Margaret Yobs marked the 10th anniversary of the Northridge temblor in what has become her private, poignant custom.

Every Jan. 17, she buys two long-stemmed red roses and drives up narrow roads to 3855 Sherwood Place. There a steep, vacant lot and a front porch slab that leads to nowhere are the eerie remnants of her son’s Sherman Oaks view home, which collapsed and slid down the incline, killing him and his fiancee a decade ago Saturday.

As Yobs slipped the roses into a chain-link fence in front of the lot, she took in the spectacular north-facing view of the San Fernando Valley that had prompted her 32-year-old son, Marc, to buy the house. She took a breath and looked at the patch of cracked driveway, recalling not the pre-dawn phone call that alerted her to the tragedy, but her last goodbye to her middle child two days before the quake.

“I remember standing right there on the driveway, hugging, waving goodbye to him,” she said. The family had just celebrated the birthdays of Margaret Yobs’ three children with a dinner at Lawry’s The Prime Rib. “We had opened presents. I had stood on the balcony taking in that view.”

The Yobs’ loss has become entwined in the staggering statistics of the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake, the state’s costliest natural disaster: 57 dead, $40 billion in losses, 89,000 structures that were rebuilt or repaired.

For years afterward, Margaret and her husband, Henry, were involved in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the group of investors that sold their son the house, alleging that it had withheld a critical engineering report that noted a serious deformation in the foundation. The couple said the lawsuit was settled, but they could not disclose the terms.

They said they have long since lost contact with the parents of Karen Osterholt, who would have been their daughter-in-law. But for the first time Saturday, they met several of the Sherwood Place neighbors who had rushed to the scene of the collapse and helped search for Marc and Karen, killed while still in their bottom-level bedroom.

Every year, said neighbor Bob Silverman, the roses left on the lot have been the ritual reminder of that disastrous morning. He assumed family members left the roses, but this year he waited to see. When the Yobs arrived, he rushed out to meet them.

“I knew Marc and Karen,” Silverman said, introducing himself. “I remember that morning, how we were all out there searching.”

Then, in a way that only the passage of a decade could allow, they managed to laugh while reminiscing. The lost couple’s cockapoo, known for its barking, had made a mad commotion that morning. They recalled how Marc, a rising manager in a film production company, was constantly washing his sports car.

It bothers her a bit that the jagged, sloping foundation of the house is still visible, that the incline is so rough and ugly after all these years. The neighbor directly across the street, Noriko Takeshita, bought the lot when Takeshita bought her house eight years ago.

She said in a telephone interview Saturday that she has left it vacant to preserve her own view of the Valley. Perhaps someday she will sell it to a developer, but for now the view is worth more to her.

As the residents of Sherman Place talked of how the intense vertical shaking shattered their lives in seconds, about 20 miles away in Pasadena, a large crowd gathered at Caltech to watch computer-generated models of buildings shake and sway, sometimes off their animated foundations.

Along with U.S. Geological Survey scientists, Caltech professors lectured to a packed auditorium, explaining why the ground can shake so hard, how ground motion affects buildings and how energy from seismic waves tends to become trapped in the L.A. Basin.

Outside, about 20 exhibitors, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Seismic Safety Commission and California Department of Conservation, set up quake-related booths as hundreds of visitors crowded into the plaza, bringing a fair-like air to the “Earthquake Awareness Event.”

“I’m definitely going to go home and lock my file-cabinet drawers,” said Brad Smith, 39, of Granada Hills, who had brought his 5-year-old daughter to the event.

Debbi Hernandez, 48, of Chino Hills, studied a color-coded map that estimated there would be $30 billion in economic losses if a 7.1-magnitude quake struck along the Puente Hills fault.

“It makes we me want to go home and strap everything down,” she said. “It makes me want to up my quake insurance.”

John Donlin of Los Angeles asked Darryl Young, director of the state Department of Conservation, to call up a liquefaction and landslide map on a computer, wondering if the house he wants to buy in Sunland was in a danger zone.

“How do you know whether a place you want to live is going to be safe?” Donlin asked.

As long as you prepare for an earthquake, anyplace “is a good place to live,” Young answered.