In Tarzana, 73-year-old Norman Lee, a retired biochemist, had been having trouble sleeping and was reading at the kitchen table when he felt something akin to “a giant hand reaching down and shaking me.” He dropped to the floor and crawled to the bedroom where his wife, Marjory, was clinging to the sheets. She was untouched, but an eight-foot-high wooden bookcase had toppled onto his side of the bed. Sometimes, he reflected later, “insomnia is good for your health.”
Nine miles down in the indescribably complex geography of subsurface Los Angeles, the balance between compression and friction suddenly tipped, and a belt of rocks shifted cataclysmically. In an instant, the San Gabriel Mountains grew a foot or more. At a speed of two to three miles per second, shock waves radiated out and up, striking first and hardest in the San Fernando Valley. The epicenter, directly above the fault, was a nondescript neighborhood of garden apartments and shopping centers known as Northridge. Crossing under the Santa Monica Mountains, the shock waves brought down a section of Interstate 10, fifteen miles away. A few hours later, the road–often described as the busiest in the nation would have been filled with cars, but at 4:31 it was deserted. Away to the north, Clarence W. Dean, a Los Angeles police officer, must have been one of the first to die, as an overpass on the Antelope Valley Freeway collapsed just ahead of him. He rode his motorcycle right off the 40-foot drop and was dead or dying by the time the shock wave reached Las Vegas, sending gamblers diving under the tables.
THE NORTHRIDGE temblor was over in just 40 seconds; seismologists measured it at 6.6, not quite strong enough to be considered a “major” quake but more than strong enough for those who had to live through it. Some buildings kept swaying for some time afterward, and some people, obviously, are still shaking. “It was like a rumble from hell,” said John Winans, 35, who with his wife, Josephine, was one of more than 100 who survived the collapse of the Northridge Meadows apartment complex in which 16 people died. “It felt like somebody body-slammed me onto my bed and then threw glass on me,” said another resident, Joanna Killian. Other forces of nature can be as destructive–the cold weather in the Midwest and East caused 142 deaths last week, more than twice as many as died in Los Angeles–but few events are as unsettling as a great earthquake, in which the very ground one stands on seems to come alive with malevolence. “I just stood in my bedroom and screamed,” Killian recalls. in a nearby apartment complex a family of five took shelter in a 6-foot-by-2-foot closet and were still there an hour later when the building manager came to coax them out. A neighbor, Tonie Parker, 9, said: “I thought it would be the last time I ever lived.”
Like a great plague, the quake was an opportunist, singling out its favorite victims–unreinforced masonry buildings more than one story high. In that way, it fell hardest on lower-middle-class and immigrant neighborhoods, notably the blocks of lowrise apartments that have begun to replace the postwar tract houses with which the Valley was settled. To even things out a bit, the quake also toppled the chimneys above the fireplaces of tony communities like Brentwood and Santa Monica. And, irrespective of construction, anything standing on loose, sandy soil or fill was vulnerable. The Santa Monica Freeway collapsed where it crossed La Cienega–a boulevard named for the Spanish word for swamp.
Here are some of the things that were damaged in 40 seconds last Monday morning:
Wayne Gretzky’s mansion in Sherman Oaks and actor Jerry Van Dyke’s house in Toluca Lake, originally built by Bing Crosby in 1936–both almost destroyed–and portions of Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Hollyhock House, dating from 1919.
More than 100 mobile homes, destroyed by propane-tank explosions and fires in three Valley trailer parks.
The studios of virtually every major American producer and distributor of pornographic videos, an industry that happened to locate itself almost directly atop the fault zone.
Hundreds of priceless 78s belonging to saxophonist Arnold Brilhart, who played with Artie Shaw’s band. Brilhart, 89, and his 81-year-old wife, Virginia, survived the collapse of Northridge Meadows by taking shelter under a doorway and were rescued by firefighters an hour later.
About 20,000 bottles of wine, including some 1969 Romanee-Conti worth several thousand dollars a bottle, from the cellar of Piero Selvaggio’s Santa Monica restaurant, Valentino’s. (He still has 80,000 bottles left of what was considered one of the best collections in the country.) When he opened the door to the cellar Monday morning, he was pushed back by a waist-deep tide of wine. “Let’s say that life has its ups and downs,” said Selvaggio, whose home burned to the ground in the Malibu fire last fall.
There were still hours to go until sunrise. Tens of thousands of people huddle in parking lots and driveways, wearing whatever they were sleeping in or could grab (in Brilhart’s case: plaid pajamas, two sports coats, mismatched shoes and his eyeglasses, with one lens missing). The ground was still alive with aftershocks, and the precariously balanced wreckage of their homes creaked and groaned and threatened further collapse with each tremor. The night was illuminated only by occasional fires, fed by broken gas mains, and the searchlights of circling helicopters; power was out over the entire city and beyond, in a cascade of outages that reached Alberta. Yet even as these instant refugees awaited the dawn, they feared it, preferring the cozy dark to the devastation they knew the light would reveal. With the light came the game of outwitting National Guardsmen trying to secure the wreckage. People became, in effect, looters of their own homes. Virginia Brilhart slipped back into her building and emerged with a pair of trousers for her husband and a jeweled pin in the shape of a saxophone. Joanna Killian sneaked back to her mother’s apartment in Northridge Meadows, across the hall from her own, and rescued her purse. “She’s my real hero,” Bea Killian said. “A woman is not a woman without her purse.”
Thrown back on their own resources, people coped as best they could, some better than others. Faith Litton, a 21-year-old waitress, bravely took her three young children to safety when the quake struck, but seemed at a loss for what to do next; the family subsisted for the rest of the day on a salvaged bag of Doritos. Thousands camped out in public parks or parking lots, proving Gov. Pete Wilson’s astute observation that “the people who are suffering the most are the victims.” Hayda Ramirez, a native of Nicaragua, planted herself along with her son, daughter-in-law and infant granddaughter in front of Birmingham High School, where she had been told the Red Cross would open a shelter. “I’m kind of used to trouble,” she said softly. “I’ve been through war in my country. But now I have no idea what to do.” Some took to their cars, heading for terra firma in Nevada or points beyond. “They just grabbed their things and told us they would get in touch with us later,” said Mona Parker, comanager of a Northridge apartment complex. “I don’t know whether this was their first earthquake, but it sure seemed like it to me.”
On Monday, Los Angeles was in a state of suspended animation, enforced in part by a dusk-to-dawn curfew; when the sun rose Tuesday it began to stir, but just barely. Fifty armed National Guardsmen patrolled around Northridge Meadows, ready to repel any resident making a suicidal dash for his wedding pictures. Searchers found one more body in the wreckage, making a total of 16. Martha Quispe, a 35-year-old native of Peru, was not among them, but neither was she among the crowd of survivors with nothing better to do than gaze mournfully at the heap of rubble concealing their belongings. Quispe and her fiance, John Christiano, had narrowly escaped being crushed in the collapse and wriggled through the wreckage to a window, but her mother in Peru didn’t know this yet. Thanks to CNN, a civic disaster in a place like Los Angeles can now cause virtually instantaneous worldwide consternation. Quispe’s cousin Ana Rojas Radin was looking for her. “Martha’s mom is calling me,” she cried. “Where is everybody? We grew up with her in Peru and now we can’t find her. How can they not know where she is?” She made her way to the Red Cross shelter at Birmingham High School, but officials there told her the policy was not to release the names of survivors for the first 48 hours after a disaster. “If she’s alive, I’m going to kill her,” Radin cried. “How could she not call me?”
POWER WAS STILL OUT IN MOST OF the Valley and many traffic lights were off, drivers edged up cautiously to intersections and waved one another across, behavior that signified to many residents that the city was still deep in shock. Felipe Gutierrez, 31, took grim satisfaction in the discovery that not even an earthquake could jolt his neighbors into honesty. Camped out at the Victory Recreation Center with a dozen or so relatives, he found milk for $8 a gallon at a nearby grocery. This reinforced his intention to return to Jalisco, Mexico, when he finishes his degree in hotel management, an idea he first had when he found himself downwind of Mount St. Helens during its 1980 eruption.
Of course, at times like this anyone with a cash register comes under suspicion–although there also were reports of stores that actually cut their prices last week, either out of benevolence or a desire to clear the shelves before the roof fell on them. But the great thing about America is that it’s still possible to start in business with literally nothing. At nightfall, a Salvation Army van appeared in the park, and volunteers began handing out blankets and bottled water. The rule was one of each per family member, but then a skinny man in ragged jeans appeared with a tale of woe so rambling and long that the volunteer gave up trying to understand him and handed over a box full of water bottles and a stack of blankets. Within minutes the man was in business, offering blankets at $5 and water for $3. But the volunteers repossessed most of his stock before he could do too much damage to the good name of capitalism.
THE TRUE MAGNITUDE OF THE disaster that had befallen Los Angeles became apparent only gradually. The death toll grew slowly through he week, from Monday’s 33 to Saturday’s 55, mostly by counting in people who died of quake-induced natural causes, such as heart attacks. But the casualty losses rose on a much steeper curve. Unlike a fire or flood, an earthquake causes damage that may not be apparent from the air, or even a cursory inspection on the ground. Early reports of a round billion dollars in damage quickly grew to $7 billion, then $15 billion, peaking at Wilson’s estimate of $30 billion Wednesday morning, a figure no doubt intended to catch the attention of President Clinton, who arrived that day for a tour and town meeting with local officials.
The upper estimates include a healthy multiplier for the imponderables of lost business, such as the movies that don’t get made because Jeffrey Katzenberg is stuck in a traffic jam. But the hard losses alone were enormous–300 schools seriously damaged, 11 major roads blocked, thousands of small businesses in ruins. A study released Friday by two economists at nearby Chapman University estimated nearly $8 billion in direct physical damage. Half of that was assumed to represent damage to houses and their contents, but what was good news in The Wall Street Journal (“The insurance industry is expected to escape serious financial harm”) was not so reassuring to the people whose property it was. Earthquake insurance is expensive, so most households don’t have any; Kathie Geyer, who owns a cabinetmaking company, turned down a policy costing $5,000 a year on her Northridge home, which was valued at $650,000 before it rose and fell on its foundation Monday. And deductibles can run $10,000 or more, often calculated separately on the house and its contents, so even people with insurance may have to bear a large share of their loss out of their own pockets.
Of course, there’s also federal disaster assistance to fall back on. Clinton reassured Angelenos that the rest of the country would not desert them in this tragedy, and in fact HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros set up office in Los Angeles to work on relief efforts and was still there by the weekend. But the day Clinton came was also the first day many Angelenos tried to get back to work, and confronted in full hideous detail the limits of governmental power. Commutes that once were a manageable hour-and-a-half now started long before dawn and ended too late to call New York before lunchtime. Like a foraging army, drivers by the tens and hundreds of thousands descended on peaceful residential boulevards in search of routes around the blocked freeways. The fledgling public transit system suddenly found itself awash in passengers. The Metrolink Santa Clarita line, which had been carrying about 1,000 commuters a day since it opened in 1992, packed in 8,000 riders on Wednesday. But the Antelope Valley Freeway, which served the same area until part of it collapsed in the quake, normally carries more than 127,000 cars a day. And this is one problem that money can’t really cure. Rebuilding the freeways will take a year or more even if they’re paved with hundred-dollar bills.
MONEY CAN HELP MORE QUICKLY in the region’s other critical need, housing. There are plenty of vacant apartments still standing, but people who’ve lost their furniture, car and bankbooks can’t take advantage of them. But the demand for disaster help overwhelmed federal officials. The 12 relief centers opened by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were swamped with applicants, who were not pleased to discover that after hours in line all they got was a bundle of paperwork and another appointment as much as a month off. On Friday, the day after a woman fainted on line at the FEMA center in Northridge and was personally revived by Wilson, nearly 800 people were lined up in the heat of midday, besieging a relief worker who urged them to try another office due to open in Sherman Oaks. “You sleep in my car, I go in your house!” one man shouted. With weekend rain approaching, National Guard troops began frantically throwing up tents to house most of the estimated 14,000 people in temporary shelters or camped out in parks. One crude encampment was cleared, with more evacuations of the homeless to come. But where would they go?
And all this took place to a steady drumbeat of aftershocks, roiling the mountains, sending dust billowing into the sky and nerve-racked Angelenos rushing out into the streets. The quake revived an old joke about Los Angeles’s four seasons: earthquake, fire, flood and drought. Southern Californians have indeed seen a lot of weather in the last few years, along with what appeared to be an alternating civic calendar of trials and riots. But they have endured, and will endure. As always, anyone who longed for winter was welcome to depart for Chicago. “What are we going to do?” sniffled Bea Killian, left homeless, along with her daughter Joanna, by the wreck of Northridge Meadows. “They won’t tell us where we should go. Maybe we can go live in Hawaii with my other daughter.”
That’s right, Joanna responded. We’ll be just in time for the next hurricane.
You can’t earthquake-proof your house completely, but there are many ways to make it safer:
Fasten water heater to wall
Keep wrench wired to gas valve and know how to use it
Brace chimney
Put latches, like those used for baby-proofing, on all cabinet doors
Secure appliances and other large household items with heavy-duty brackets
Move beds away from windows or from beneath fans
..MR.-
Ventura County: 6,000 residences damaged. 1,000 uninhabitable. 250 businesses closed.
A police motorcycle officer died in a fall off a collapsed roadway.
Granada Hills: Kaiser Permanente Medical Center was destroyed.
Sylmar: 70 homes destroyed by fires from gas leaks.
San Fernando: Oil line exploded. 63 buildings destroyed. 835 damaged.
Northridge–Epicenter: 16 people died when the Northridge Meadows apartment complex collapsed.
Calabasas: 12 residences declared unsafe.
Burbank: 37 structures declared unsafe.
Glendale: 31 structures decared unsafe.
Pasadena: Several apartment complexes condemned.
Sherman Oaks: Buildings collapsed. Fires.
Hollywood: At least 50 buildings were destroyed.
Beverly Hills: Stored damaged on Rodeo Drive.
Santa Monica: Out of more than 1,600 buildings inspectedm 560 were badly damaged.
South L.A.: Many homes, churces and schools were badly damaged.
Los Angeles: Across the city, 4,500 apartments and houses were declared uninhabitable by the end of last week. School district officials estimated building damage at $700 million. ..MR0-
..MR.-
1986-1993: A seven-year statewide drought reduces farm acreage, kills fish and wildlife and hinders development. It ends in early 1993 with severe winter storms that destroy more than 50 houses and kill 13. ..MR0-
..MR.-
1993: Southern California brush fires rage over 200,000 acres, destroying more than 800 homes.
1994: Northridge quake in the San Fernando Valley. Damage estimates run to $30 billion. ..MR0-
title: “After The Quake” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Cathy Pietrowski”
For an organization described by critics as “dangerously Islamic,” the Justice and Development Party was showing its true colors in a most unreligious manner–literally cloaking itself in the mantle of Ataturk, the symbol of all that’s progressive (and utterly secular) in Turkey. As a symbol, the message could not have been clearer. “We are not a religious party,” says Gul, emphatically, as Ataturk’s three-yard-wide bow tie twitches into position outside his window. “We want to show that a Muslim society can be transparent, democratic and compatible with the modern world.”
It’s hard to overstate the significance of that remark–or the scale of the party’s win in the Nov. 3 polls. It was nothing less than a political earthquake. The victory swept away all but one of Turkey’s traditional parties–and handed AK, as the party is known for short, a comfortable two-thirds majority in Parliament. For the first time in a political generation, Turkey has a government drawn from a single party. With luck, that’ll mean an end to the fractured and stalemated coalition politics of the past. The new government will have a clear mandate and the power to execute on it.
If one is to take the AK at its word, that could mean massive and rapid social and political reform, especially in the realm of human rights. It means an acceleration of Turkey’s drive to join the European Union–and a push to defuse several brewing crises abroad. Above all, it means a new impetus for economic change, principally a drive to clean up the cronyism and corruption that have hobbled Turkey’s banking and financial system for decades.
All this is good news. But AK’s power to change Turkey also raises fears, especially among the country’s military and security elites. For all the fine words about democracy and modernity, they worry that the party’s leaders have not fundamentally changed since their days as Islamic radicals. AK’s charismatic chairman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was himself imprisoned for four months as recently as 1999 for “inciting religious hatred,” after he famously recited a religious poem at a rally. Never mind that Ataturk was also fond of quoting the poem in question. Erdogan was banned from ever holding public office–a restriction he now plans to fight even at the cost of changing the Constitution (interview). “I hope the party has changed, and doesn’t engage in any provocative acts,” says one retired senior general with ill-concealed distrust. “It will be closely watched.”
Such skepticism will not quickly dissipate. Only deeds will banish the doubts. That said, a strong case can be made that AK’s poll victory may be one of the best things to happen to Turkey in years. For starters, the party isn’t really “Islamist,” however much that word might be bandied about. Both Erdogan and Gul forcefully, even indignantly, affirm their belief in the separation of church and state; when they speak of religion, it’s solely as a matter of personal choice.
The secret of AK’s success has been in persuading Turkey’s political center to give the party the benefit of the doubt on this score–at least for now. Fully 40 percent of the party’s support came from first-time voters; 70 percent of its backers hadn’t voted for religious parties in the past. That clearly suggests that “AK has changed from an Islamist to a conservative center-right party,” says analyst Can Peker–and in the process moved away from the Islamist roots of its leaders. By contrast, Turkey’s truly religious hard core voted for the openly Islamist Saadet party. It drew just 2 percent of the vote, proving that old-style political Islam no longer has much of a following.
Significantly, the AK is determined to accelerate Turkey’s entry into the EU. Though he holds no formal post as yet, one of Erdogan’s first acts after the election was to announce that he would tour the capitals of Western Europe beating the drum for Turkey’s candidacy. He wants a firm start date for accession talks–and already has received a promise of support from an age-old rival, Greece, which he will also visit this autumn. That reception is likely to be mixed. Last week Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who’s shaping the future Constitution of Europe, told Le Monde that Muslim Turkey’s joining the EU would be “the end of Europe,” all the more so with an alleged Islamist like Erdogan at the helm. Admitting Turkey, he want on to say, a country with as large a population as Germany, would invite similar requests from other “non-European” countries, such as those of the Maghreb, implicitly upsetting the balance of power within the EU and destroying its cultural identity. Erdogan shrugged off the remarks as pure “emotion.” “Turkey is a member of the Council of Europe, the OECD and NATO,” he said. Why not also the EU?
As part of that drive, AK aims to quickly implement a raft of EU-inspired legislative reforms passed in August–including the right of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds to broadcast and teach in their native language, the abolition of the death penalty and guarantees of free speech and other minority rights that in the past have all too often been honored in the breach. Though certain to arouse controversy in Turkey, this agenda would be considered moderate by Western standards. The most extreme cause in the party’s program is the right of women, should they choose, to wear head scarves in government offices and schools. For now, even that is on the back burner. Such change must come through “consensus,” Erdogan tells NEWSWEEK. “It mustn’t be allowed to become a point of conflict.”
That sense of moderation could also help the new government defuse some ticklish foreign-policy challenges, which previous governments have only aggravated. Take Cyprus. The new government is likely to mute the nationalist rhetoric of the outgoing regime of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, with its bellicose rants about “annexing” the northern half of the divided island. Instead, just last week Erdogan suggested that it be united under the “Belgian model”–two ethnicities, one international identity. AK’s repudiation of nationalist politics may also help quiet the drumbeats over Iraqi Kurdistan and the desire in some quarters of the country to invade northern Iraq, ostensibly to protect the rights of ethnic Turkomans.
Ultimately, though, the AK will stand or fall on the economy. Last Sunday’s ballot was not merely an election; it represented a revolution. Turks clearly want the old party cronies out. They’re sick of corruption and economic mismanagement. Voters proved immune to the IMF-bashing of some rival parties; they largely blamed their own pols for stealing the country’s money and plunging it into financial chaos. The practical expression of their anger was that Ecevit’s party garnered only 1 percent (!)of the popular vote–a repudiation of almost unimaginable magnitude. AK’s victory, by contrast, sent the stock market soaring by 25 percent. Interest rates fell on government debt and the lira rose. That suggests that Turkey’s major economic problem–investor confidence–may already be solving itself.
With a more settled political landscape, banks should be less wary of lending, foreign money should come in and the state should be able to reduce its budget deficit by borrowing more cheaply. AK will stick to the IMF’s strict spending and macroeconomic plan for Turkey, says Erdogan, even as he tries to renegotiate certain conditions that have worsened unemployment. Meanwhile, he’s suggested breaking up old and inefficient state-owned monopolies in sugar and tobacco–all well received by Turkish free marketers.
There is no guarantee that AK itself won’t succumb to its own brand of cronyism; on the other hand, its leaders pride themselves on their squeaky-clean image–to the point that the party’s name translates to “white” or “pure.” “AK is not anti-establishment. We are against oligarch ties between the state and businessmen, as under Marcos and Suharto,” says Emin Sirin, a newly elected AK Party M.P. for Istanbul.
To be sure, problems lie ahead. For one, AK’s massive majority could backfire. If Erdogan has the latitude to take giant steps for the good, he also has the opportunity to make disastrous mistakes unchecked by a more experienced coalition partner. His is a neophyte government, after all, and could easily blunder. There’s a tightrope to be walked, too, with the Army, which remains deeply wary of AK in general and Erdogan in particular. If the new government crosses the line between the state and religion, the military could move quickly to remove it in the sort of “soft coup” which brought down the mildly Islamist (but deeply incompetent) government of Erdogan’s mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, in 1997.
So far, the two sides have gotten off to a good, if wary, start. Turkey’s chief of the general staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, remarked during a visit to the United States last week that the results “reflect what our people want, and I respect this.” For his part, Erdogan referred to the military as “the apple of our eye” and “all of our Army.” He has also indicated that he’ll listen to their advice on Turkish participation in a U.S. campaign in Iraq–albeit with the same wariness as the outgoing government. This entente, though stiff, is encouraging and may even blossom into trust if Erdogan sticks to governing the country well and abstains from grinding ideological axes. With a bit of luck, and a lot of time, Turkey could take a big step toward becoming that most elusive quantity–a model of a modern, democratic, stable and economically prosperous Islamic nation. For the rest of the Muslim world, what a revolution that would be.
