Throughout Los Angeles, the sound of burglar alarms, car alarms and emergency sirens blended into a constant wail. Residents formed lines, filling buckets with water from a swimming pool and tossing the water onto their homes, hoping to prevent the spread of fire.Įlsewhere, motorists driving north from Los Angeles on the Golden State Freeway saw fires raging out of control on both sides of the road, red balls of flame exploding 30 feet in the air.įires also were reported in Sherman Oaks and elsewhere in the region. In one of the weirdest effects of the quake, fireballs from ruptured gas mains exploded in the midst of the floods. Nearby in Granada Hills, water from broken water mains raged through the streets.

From the air, at least 30 to 40 homes could be seen burning. Sylmar, the epicenter of a devastating earthquake in 1971 that killed 65, was blanketed by a black haze of smoke. Three other hospitals, Holy Cross, Panorama City and Sepulveda, were forced to evacuate patients because of quake damage. In Los Angeles, Cedars Sinai was receiving 'a tidal wave of walking wounded,' hospital spokesman Ron Wise said. He later said the hospital was operating on emergency power. 'We have no power, no laboratory, no X-rays, no pharmacy and almost no food,' Wallerstein told them. The hospital's disaster coordinator, Mark Wallerstein, told those without serious injury to go elsewhere. That was easy to forget in the chaos at the Sylmar hospital, which was swamped by more than 250 new patients. Richard Andrews, California's emergency services director, said the early hour and the Martin Luther King holiday reduced the number of people exposed to injury in the quake. The quake had turned the multi-story garage into a 20-foot-high pancake of concrete, and transformed the mall's Bullocks department store into a gnarled pile of concrete and steel. In a dramatic and dangerous rescue nearby, searchers spent hours digging through the wreckage of a parking garage at the Northridge Fashion Center before pulling out a 35-year-old street sweeper alive. A third-floor resident, Eric Pearson, told Cable News Network that he felt a huge jolt that lifted the building off its foundation, moved it over and slammed it down. The entire building 'shifted north about six feet,' said fire Battalion Chief Bob De Feo. Hundreds of people watched firefighters search the rubble. An identical building next to it buckled, but didn't collapse. The building, half a block from California State University, Northridge, housed mostly college students. We've got people we're pulling out all the time.' Steve Bascom said: 'We've got a three-story apartment that's now a two-story. Referring to the ruins of the Northridge apartment building, fire Capt. A person who fell from a sixth-floor window at a downtown hotel. A Los Angeles police officer whose motorcycle sailed off a severed freeway overpass, falling nearly 25 feet to the road below. One woman who broke her neck when she slipped and struck a crib at her home in Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County. Two people who died when a hillside home collapsed in Sherman Oaks.

Five people who died of quake-related heart attacks, three at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and two at Holy Cross Medical Center in Sylmar. Fourteen people crushed to death in an apartment building in Northridge. The dead, according to hospital and police reports, were: Although not as strong as some quakes in recent years, it was unusually destructive because of its location in a populous area.Ī swarm of aftershocks, some as strong as 5 on the Richter scale, jostled the region throughout the morning, and seismologists said they could continue for several days. The quake struck at 4:31 a.m., and measured a preliminary 6.6 on the Richter scale, said Kate Hutton, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In addition, fire rescue teams responded from as far away as San Francisco. Pete Wilson declared states of emergency, and President Clinton said he expected to issue a federal disaster declaration later in the day. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and California Gov. Power and telephone service were lost throughout Southern California. The quake derailed a freight train carrying hazardous material and briefly closed several airports, including Los Angeles International. I was looking at the ceiling one moment, then I was looking at the sky. 'This place was moving like a jackhammer was going at it,' said Richard Goodis of Sherman Oaks, an affluent San Fernando Valley suburb.

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