A Stubborn Case of the Shakes

• Share

In L.A. Story, his prophetic film satire, Steve Martin portrays a weatherman who at one point is trying to enjoy Sunday brunch in a garden restaurant with friends. Suddenly the sunlit get-together is interrupted by an earthquake. As a neighboring table rattles past them across the floor, its traveling occupants keep chatting without even looking up from their arugula. "How strong is it?" a guest at Martin's table inquires blithely. "Oh," Martin says with a shrug, "I give it a 4."

If only the rattled citizens of the real Los Angeles could be quite so blase. If only they could take their umpteenth aftershock so much in stride. Instead they are suffering sharp and lingering emotional tremors from the 6.8- magnitude Northridge earthquake on Jan. 17 that killed 57 people and caused $15 billion in damage -- and they don't mind showing it. The original hyperactivity -- and some panic -- has been followed by delayed shock and a period of numbness, and now, more than a month later, by an abiding anxiety. Few doubt that Los Angeles has been taking it harder than San Francisco's Bay Area did after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, which was even greater in intensity -- 7.1 -- and caused 61 deaths.

Sherry McClure, 26, a mortgage-bank clerk in Northridge, sleeps on the kitchen floor, ready to roll under the table when necessary. Phoebe Sharaf, a middle-aged Santa Monica social worker, refuses to go to the movies because she fears dark enclosures. Some Angelenos keep hard hats -- or even heavy-duty salad bowls to be used as helmets -- at the ready on their night tables. Others keep a packed bag in their car, parked outside the garage.

For many residents the new California dream is to flee the place. In a poll taken during the last week of January by the Field Institute in San Francisco, 26% of Southern Californians surveyed said they had considered moving away because of the quake, more than three times the proportion of Northern Californians harboring such thoughts after the 1989 quake."This is usually our slow period," said a Bekins Moving & Storage Co. executive. "But we're seeing a significant increase in business from people wanting to leave the area."

With each of the aftershocks, which have totaled more than 5,000 of varying intensity, the fears have assumed a pervasive, even obsessive dimension. One store reported a sudden boom in $2,000 steel-canopy beds capable of withstanding "an entire collapsing roof." Conversations are dominated by the quake. True tales of the fateful moment at 4:31 a.m. are told and retold: how in one Sherman Oaks home a water bed went wild, flipped its occupant against the ceiling and then heaved him against the wall as though to suffocate him.

Among the symptoms of L.A.'s post-traumatic stress disorder are uncontrollable flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance and anger about the lack of control over one's life, according to Mory Framer, clinical director of the ! Barrington Psychiatric Center, which treated more than 1,000 victims. The Northridge quake left two special psychological scars because it came in the early hours when people were at home and in bed, thus transforming those two refuges into places of lethal danger. "Here we are, supposed to go back to our homes and back to our beds, but now it is frightening there," says Framer. Many people, his team discovered, have been waking up at exactly 4:30.