The Northridge earthquake is so embedded in me I flinch every time I see it's Jan 17th.
I've crashed cars, had guns put in my face, all kinds of things, but nothing comes close to that.
I was in the SF Valley just off Ventura. When it happened it didn't even occur to me that it was an earthquake, it felt like the building or the world was exploding. It was so loud I think I woke up screaming but my wife right next to me said she didn't hear me.
@billyjoebowers I was working on a band's tour prep in Florida when the Northridge earthquake hit. Most of the crew that I was working with were based in LA. I remember one guy's house was a complete write-off and he had only signed the papers and closed on the sale one week before.
Luckily, I didn't own anything at the time. So glad that I missed that one.
I can think of half a dozen people who experienced that quake, and then immediately moved away from California.
Some people I knew had sublet their apartment to some other people I knew and they had only moved in days before the quake and lost everything. The people that moved out were fine.
Working in a studio back then was a situation where you were always there unless you were dead.
I remember after the quake I didn't even call in to check on work, and no one called me, for like a week, and then when I did call they just said they weren't sure what was happening.
People just up and left.
This guy who owned all the vending machines in the studio came in one day and started pulling them out. So I ask him what's going on.
His wife got in the car and left right after the quake. Just left. Wouldn't come back. He waited a few weeks but then he had to choose so he was shutting down his whole business and moving.
The thing about the Northridge quake was for the last few years there had been quakes all the time and people just rolled with it and laughed. But it was not funny after that. It was traumatic.
I was in the studio a while later, doing something on the ground under the console, when I felt a tremor and jumped up to say something, but everyone in the room was gone by the time I stood up. No one in the building, they were all in the parking and had literally ran there.
@billyjoebowers I was in the Palisades, not nearly as close to the epicenter, and -- could partly have been the disorientation of being woken like that -- but it's the only time in my life I thought I might reallly die.
It's really weird how much it matters what's immediately underneath you. I experienced the end of the world. My friend in Burbank, maybe 5 miles away, said something fell off a shelf and he went back to sleep.
When the shaking stopped, which seemed like forever, I got out of bed because it was impossible to even do that until then.
Immediately stepped in glass, cut my feet up, couldn't open the bedroom door because of all the stuff piled against it.
Got it open and everything in the house was now on the ground. The living room full of bookshelves was a waist high pile, solid across the room. I literally had to crawl across it and dig though stuff to find my cats under the furniture.
@billyjoebowers For me....it was the sound. 1000 freight trains. The end of the world. Rolling wave after wave after wave to the tune of every piece of glass in my house shattering.....
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