A Stubborn Case of the Shakes

By Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles

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.

Most Angelenos went back to their jobs soon after the quake, possibly finding some of that refuge there, but employers discovered a phenomenon they call "on-the-job absenteeism." Workers take interminable breaks, have difficulty concentrating and generally show low productivity. "The reality is that many people are going to be operating at only 40% to 70% of normal speed," says Lilli Friedland, a member of the L.A. County Psychological Association disaster-response team.

Families too have suffered. Unstable relationships can be pushed across the line into outright dysfunction. In some cases the Barrington team observed, one spouse became hypersexual and the other hyposexual, with obviously destabilizing consequences. Adults frequently misdirect their anger toward spouses and children. In one pitiful case, a young mother started abusing her four-year-old daughter, swatting the clutching child with shrieks of "Get away from me!" The woman had lost two other children in a quake in her native Guatemala.

Why is the fallout in Los Angeles so severe and prolonged compared with San Francisco's experience in 1989? Experts give several reasons. Despite its higher intensity and death toll, the Loma Prieta quake inflicted only 10 aftershocks of 3.5 or greater magnitude, compared with more than 150 in L.A. But the main cause is probably L.A.'s "layered" collective trauma. "Previous traumatic experiences have not yet worked themselves out," says psychologist Michael Gellert. "This makes three catastrophes in a year and a half: the riots and their atmosphere of tension perpetuated by the trials, then the fire storms just a couple of months ago, and now the quake. It's layer upon layer. And what this does is magnify people's reactions."

Women appear to take it harder than men. The overwhelming majority of the participants in postquake counseling sessions -- sometimes all of the participants -- are women. One hypothesis is that the female nesting instinct is especially offended by a quake's threat to home and hearth. More manifestly, women are more demonstrative and vocal about their anxieties. Men, who may be just as nervous, are culturally conditioned to hide it. "Fearfulness knows no gender," says Gellert. Experts disagree about the probable duration of the stress. Gellert points to a classic formulation in mass psychology known as the "six-week model of crisis resolution," and he predicts that, depending on how long the aftershocks continue -- there were five more of up to 3.4 magnitude last week -- many people are due to return to normal this month. Daniel Weiss, professor of medical psychology at the University of California, San Francisco's School of Medicine, warns, on the other hand, that "it's going to take people between four and six months to feel like themselves again."

Out-of-state real estate agents continue to receive inquiries from Angelenos who want to pull up stakes because of what Clearwater, Florida, agent Richard Cope calls L.A.'s "last-straw" phenomenon. "They all want charts of the fault lines in our area," explains Karen Lind, deputy director of Colorado's business-development office in Denver. "We decided to get out right after the earthquake," says Dubi Friedman, 47, owner of a clothing-design firm in the northern L.A. suburb of Valencia, who is moving to Las Vegas with his wife Irit and two children. "The damage is nothing. It's the scare. You go to bed downstairs with your shoes on. You don't sleep. You just sit there waiting for it every night. It's bad."

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles