Auto alarms and human screams pierced the darkness the morning of January 17, 1994. Some of the dead never knew what hit them and others clearly showed evidence on their faces of dying a horiffic death , crushed with the weight of two stories on top of them.
It would be almost an hour before help was on the way. Sirens had been heard driving by the complex in the first 10 minutes but the fire department never knew there was anything wrong at Northridge Meadows. It wasn't until daybreak that confirmed that the three story building had pancaked. Surviors had been reported as saying "the fire department probably thought it was a two story building."
In the first few minutes after the quake, firehoses where used by some of the tenants to climb over balconys to escape. Tenants helped one another to free each other from their trapped apartments. Using anything they could find to break open doors and walls to free yet more survivors.
13 of the 16 people found dead were still in their beds. An elderly couple was found crushed to death holding hands. One can only imagine the terror that filled their minds as they were being buried alive.
I was lucky. I'm alive. Each minute that passed seemed an eternity waiting for rescuers to find me. But firefighters had their hands full. A mall had collasped nearby trapping a worker in the parking structure, major fires erupted all over the city and a mutlitude of gas leaks.
As the Northridge Meadows Apartments have shown, this design formula can offer little resistance to the lateral seismic forces. The performance of the parking structure in past earthquakes has not been good. A new structure has been built where the old Northridge Meadows apartment crumbled to the ground.
It's hard to say whether seismic retrofitting would have helped the building to not collaspe.
Scientist work hard on methods to help predict earthquakes. Get all the up to date earthquake information. They also have a site for being better prepared and important phone numbers you should know.
Search the world wide web earthquake locator to see what might be happening now. Novemeber 8th, the largest instrumentally recorded event of an area of Tibet, an unbelievable 7.9 was recorded with no casulties and damages reported. The damage and loss of life could have been far worse if the earthquake had been slightly stronger, centered in other nearby locations, or later in the day.