Quake Still Felt in Paso Robles

As Christmas approached, Bonnie Peterson festooned her Touch of Paso breakfast house with holiday finery. After 29 years, she figured 2003 would be her last in the restaurant business.

Then a magnitude 6.5 earthquake slammed the 112-year-old masonry house she had transformed into a popular gathering place, cracking red brick walls, sending customers diving under tables and flinging bricks from two chimneys into a parking lot.

“This was supposed to be my retirement; I’m 73 years old,” she said last week amid the chatter of customers who had eagerly returned after a $200,000 restoration. “Now I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it.”

More than six months have passed since California’s strongest earthquake in five years shuddered through this Central Coast winemaking region, killing two women as they fled a clothing store, damaging dozens of historic buildings and prompting $239 million in losses in San Luis Obispo County.

That includes about $100 million in Paso Robles alone, mostly in a century-old downtown recognized recently by an arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the most successful traditional main streets in the country.

Since the Dec. 22 San Simeon earthquake, the Paso Robles community has generally pulled together: Merchants have shared storefronts with displaced shopkeepers. Local banks have granted cut-rate reconstruction loans. And $9,000 has been raised to build a statue honoring the women crushed to death by falling bricks.

At least a few quake victims, however, found fault with some quake-related developments: Merchants complained of landlords spiking new leases. Landlords complained of contractors inflating repair charges. And the parents of a 20-year-old quake victim filed a wrongful death claim against the city, insisting the owners of the building that collapsed on her should have posted a warning that the unreinforced masonry structure was dangerous.

Yet, hope and renewal are evident amid the destruction in El Paso de Robles’ historic downtown, which remains a vibrant cluster of banks, restaurants, theaters and small shops around a picturesque city park and town square.

In the center of that oak-studded square, the 1908 red brick Carnegie Library, though lined by jagged cracks and held up by metal beams and wooden supports, awaits a $2-million retrofit.

And across 12th Street from the library, large color illustrations show passersby that the destroyed Acorn clock tower and Marlow commercial building will be replaced with structures architecturally similar to those two landmarks.

At nearby storefronts, “NOW OPEN” banners announce a return of economic life, while crews at neighboring sites install decorative antique tin ceilings and shore up aging brick walls. Along the sidewalk, posters tell customers where they may find relocated shopkeepers.

Indeed, nearly all of the 42 businesses displaced from 27 seriously damaged buildings have reopened somewhere, and many are back at their old locations.

“I don’t want to diminish the losses, but from a long-term perspective, and given what it could have been, it’s a bump in the road,” City Manager Jim App said last week. “It’s unfortunate and tragic, but it’s not the San Francisco earthquake [of 1906]. It’s something we’re recovering from.”

Mayor Frank R. Meacham, a financial advisor whose office is about a block from the crumpled Acorn building, said he thinks the reconstructed downtown may be stronger than ever.

“We had a big wine festival and car show in May. We just had a glowing economic forecast,” he said. “And a year from now I think you’ll see a dramatic improvement in the downtown area.”

But if this quaint city of 27,000 residents, and its surrounding communities, are rising from the rubble, hundreds of home and business owners have paid a price.

In downtown Paso Robles alone, three commercial buildings have been razed and two more face demolition, meaning 13 businesses can never return.

Throughout San Luis Obispo, county emergency officials report losses totaling $239 million, including about $125 million to businesses in income, inventory and structural damage and nearly $77 million to government agencies. That includes $10 million to $20 million for the city of Atascadero to repair its landmark City Hall and at least $13 million to repair a Paso Robles middle school.

In addition, 25 homes were destroyed or had to be fully rebuilt, while hundreds more were seriously damaged. Total homeowner losses were $35 million, the county reported.

A small portion of the overall loss has been covered by federal emergency relief. About 3,000 quake victims received more than $8 million in grants for emergency housing and other essential services.

By July 1, the U.S. Small Business Administration had also approved $18.5 million in loans to quake victims, with nearly half of that amount going to Paso Robles homeowners and businesses.

But those numbers don’t reflect the human toll.

Marilyn Frost-Zafuto, 55, and Jennifer Myrick, 20, employees in the 111-year-old Acorn building, were killed when the two-story unreinforced brick structure pancaked onto them as they fled to the street.

Their families are pushing for a new state law that would punish owners of about 25,000 old masonry buildings who fail to display legally required placards warning that a major earthquake could damage the structures. A recent state survey found that only about 1% of such buildings carried the notice.

At an April hearing of the state Seismic Safety Commission in Paso Robles, Frost-Zafuto’s 19-year-old daughter, Allison, pleaded for stronger laws.

“Earthquakes are a natural disaster,” she said. “But the death of two people is tragically, in part, an act of man.... I know that my mom and Jennifer Myrick could never have imagined that working in a clothing store in downtown Paso Robles would lead to their deaths.”

New unreinforced masonry buildings were banned in many parts of California after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, which killed 120 people. A 1986 state law strongly recommended seismic retrofitting, but left deadlines to local officials.

Before the December quake, the owners of about three dozen unstrengthened brick or block buildings in downtown Paso Robles had until 2018 to retrofit. Eight other owners had already completed the work, and those buildings rode out the quake with little or no damage. The City Council now requires all brick buildings to be seismically strengthened by January 2007.

The Mastagni family -- pioneer Paso Robles farmers who bought both the Acorn and Marlow buildings in the 1970s -- had received a $90,000 city grant to begin fixing the Acorn building when the quake hit. The family, like most quake victims, had no earthquake insurance, members said.

Karen Horzen, the daughter of Acorn building owner Mary Mastagni, said the family plans to erect new buildings in place of the old by next summer.

“It’s been very tough, very difficult on my mother who is now almost 81,” Horzen said. The family has endured little finger-pointing, she said. “We’re hoping it doesn’t start. We’re all in this together.”

That could have been Paso Robles’ motto in recent months.

Bonnie Peterson, for example, received a large 3% loan from a friend to take down every interior brick in her breakfast house, install 2-by-6-foot support beams, then put the bricks back up. A disaster fund established by local banks provided the rest of her $200,000, also at a 3% interest rate. Five months later, when Peterson reopened, 10 of her 13 employees came back. Her chief cook, Victor Ballin, who had worked for her for 25 years, spent his time off fixing up the restaurant. “Digging and cleaning bricks six days a week,” he said.

But if one post-quake story speaks to the best of Paso Robles, it could be the one told by the employees of Nick and Patricia Sherwin, owners of Pan Jewelers for 31 years.

The Sherwins’ shop crumpled beneath the Acorn clock tower Dec. 22. But none of the jewels or glass display cases were lost. Even the clocks kept running. So the Sherwins had a decision to make.

They had intended to retire this spring and turn the business over to their daughter and three employees. Now they had to decide whether to reopen at all.

The couple decided to take out a home equity loan to pay the $25,000 it took to relocate the business a block away. They also drew from their savings to pay the employees’ full salaries for the three months it took to get back in business.

“Nick paid us out of his own pocket,” said Tanya Jones, 27, an employee for eight years. “He used his retirement to help us out.”