At the heart of a disaster.
There's always the miracles where people live two, three, four days.
The rescuer.
So you just can't give up.
On a desperate search.
Find them buddy.
The survivor.
I'm alone.
I have nobody.
Facing a life in ruins.
I expect the worst and hope for the best.
The disaster chief.
California is probably one of the better prepared states for earthquakes and even fires than any state would have in the United States.
Okay, let's make the search.
It's alright, don't cry, we'll keep.
Two days.
We have heard reports of looting.
And two nights.
After the earthquake.
You pick up the pieces and you move on.
Monday the earth here rolled and Southern California rolled to a halt.
We've spent the last 48 hours at the heart of this crisis.
This scene back here is part of the quakes legacy.
It's where highway 14 dropped on the interstate five.
It's now a heavily damaged freeway that's going to disrupt traffic for months.
It is a very dangerous place.
It's a very dangerous place.
It's now a heavily damaged freeway that's going to disrupt traffic for months.
It is one aftershock that may even be felt well in the next year.
Others may be less visible but no less devastating.
Join us now as we meet the men and women who are in the fight of their lives.
Fighting to rebuild, fighting to recover.
As you will see in here.
The true scope of this earthquake cannot be measured on the Richter scale.
We began at the quakes very core.
The apartment where 16 people went to bed Sunday night and never lived to see the dawn.
There is no single place in Los Angeles where more lives were changed or more lives were lost than here.
See that right there?
That's the first floor.
That's the second floor.
And there's no more first floor.
Dazed survivors, many of them the walking wounded, stumble out of the Northridge Meadows apartment building.
I was on the second floor.
Among them, Sheila Chulik.
The guy next to me is still missing.
He's in number 259.
Everything we own, our car, everything's crushed.
We're lucky to be alive.
Thank you God.
Others are not so lucky.
Nobody knows how many are buried in the rubble.
It's the beginning of a new day.
It's the beginning of a long day.
It will be hours before their families learn who lived and who died.
Oh boy.
What can I tell you?
It happened.
It was very bad.
My whole window caved.
Oh mama.
And my son and my children.
Most of the people who live here are either elderly or college students like Sheila Chulik.
Your clothes are in there?
Everything.
Your books?
This is it.
Everything.
This is all I own.
Purse, thongs and pajamas.
I'm not trying to embarrass you, but it doesn't look like you even have a belt.
No, I do not.
I have a bungee cord holding up my pants because there are some man's pants that are too big for me.
I mean that's how nice people were.
They were pulling over on the side of the room and they were pulling over on the side of the room.
That's how nice people were. They were pulling over on the side of the road getting blankets and offering coffee.
I mean they were just really good.
What is that?
Garage?
No, it's apartment.
Others are helping in the dangerous ruins of Northridge Meadows.
Okay, come on this way.
Tony, around here.
Come on.
Greg Gonzalez and Errol Cobb are volunteers with the California Swiss Search Dog Association.
Good boy. Find them.
The command sums up the searcher's goal and the dog's role.
Come on, find them.
Find anyone trapped in the building. Find them, dead or alive.
Just trying to get her into openings in the building and see if there's any human scent in there that would draw her in.
They search room by room.
Heck, here.
When they find somebody inside, the dog will begin scratching and barking.
As the day goes on, the only people found are dead, many killed in their own beds.
Come on, go to the left.
But Cobb, Gonzalez and the dogs keep looking for survivors.
Where is he?
This is what they're up against.
Since this building collapsed on itself, there are all sorts of tiny crawl spaces.
Like this one in here that are just too narrow to be searched by a human being.
A man can't get down in there, but a dog can.
How do you feel about the way it went today?
I mean they kept finding body after body after body.
Is that a failure?
Even finding people that have died in a disaster, it's part of the job.
You want to find the survivors, but finding the people that have died is something you do for the families.
Absolutely.
They need to know. It's better to know than not know.
Do you think that there's anybody alive in here now?
There's no way to know. There's no way of knowing.
There's just no way of knowing.
Believe in miracles?
Absolutely.
There's a lot of voids in these buildings.
That's all it takes is a little crack.
A little bit of air.
A little bit of space for a person that survived.
So there's always hope.
I just don't see how anybody else could be still alive in there, but they've been known to find them even up to five days after.
Sheila Chulik has spent the night at the home of friends.
The night was frightening. She's a little shaky.
There were two or three pretty big aftershocks last night. Did you feel them?
Every single one of them. See, it feels like it's shaking right now, but I don't think you can feel it.
It's not?
It's not shaking.
I know, but it just feels like it.
And it's taking its toll.
When I contacted some friends and family last night, every time I talked to them, I'd start crying again.
What makes you cry now?
Knowing my neighbors are dead.
Never thought all my belongings would wind up in a little bag.
I know I'll never come back to that building to live.
I mean, that's pretty obvious.
But little more than 24 hours after the quake, Sheila Chulik is going back.
It looks worse than it did yesterday.
To look for her belongings and to look for her friends.
Oh man, Ellen, baby.
They're okay today.
They're okay. They're in a thousand else, okay?
Thanks.
You're welcome.
Who was that?
That was my neighbor's friends.
My neighbors got out with me.
And that was what he's been looking for ever since yesterday.
So we just told them that they're okay.
So you got to give somebody some good news.
Yes, I just gave them good news.
As things stand now, how dangerous is that building?
In varying degrees. This building right here is extremely dangerous.
You go in this building and a sneeze can bring this building down.
I have a car under there that might be okay.
A $15,000 car.
Sheila and her neighbors are not yet being allowed in their apartments.
They may never be allowed back in.
So we just stand here and wait?
Yep, you just wait.
They're running your life right now.
And if they are, it will be only once to take what they can in just a few minutes.
I can't grab any furniture or anything like that.
You'll have to reduce your life to a 10 minute grab.
To a gunny sack.
How do you do that?
I don't know. I'm going to freak out when I go in there.
I'm going to be like, what do I do? What do I do?
I've never had to do this before.
When this is over, months from now, maybe a year from now,
what do you think you're going to remember the most?
What's the most powerful image in your mind?
The furniture smashing my face.
And hearing those voices of the men that were stuck between the floors.
What were they?
Yelling for help, telling us not to forget them.
And we kept saying we weren't going to forget them.
We were waiting to get the fire people there.
I think that's going to be etched forever.
Just hearing those voices.
These men, you couldn't see them, but you could hear them.
Parts of them were sticking up between the floors and between the concrete.
You can't hear that kind of stuff and not be changed by it.
The voices and how they sounded.
It was just a terrible experience.
Aaron Neville and look, it's Bruno Kirk.
Tonight.
Only on Eye to Eye, behind the scenes with Nancy Kerrigan as she battles back for the gold.
An exclusive interview with Nancy and her family about the scandal.
Would you say that Tonya Harding and you are different kinds of people?
Also, what really happened to Amelia Earhart?
I think Amelia Earhart was a spy.
Eye to Eye Thursday.
We're over another area here above Sylmar where at least 20 mobile homes are fully engulfed in flames.
All the walls in our apartment building fell down.
In the city of Sylmar, what the quakes started.
I just kept laying there and thinking, you know, it's going to stop in a minute.
It's going to stop and it just kept going.
Fire finished.
Smoke and fire.
Fire.
They burned real good.
Mobile homes.
Those things went up like matchboxes and they were too close together.
15.70, 15.70, 15.70, next five.
I live in a mobile home, but I don't have one left.
Our places are gone.
It looks like somebody dropped napalm on the whole area.
Yeah.
It was pitch black and then I got up in my wheelchair.
By four o'clock in the afternoon, Richard Barker had packed up his family.
Because there wasn't a wall in the apartment that wasn't broken, just caved in.
And was on his way to a shelter.
We don't have any place to go back to.
There is no place to go back to.
I got nothing, honey.
I ain't got nothing, baby.
Not a thing.
74-year-old Poppy Weisberg had nothing to pack.
But I found a penny here, so I do have something.
She is among the 350 people who moved into Sylmar High School.
Many of them refugees from mobile home parks.
Everybody has to register over there so we know who you are.
I'm here. I'm alone.
I have nobody.
Everything else is down the line.
30 years ago, Poppy Weisberg was a professional dancer.
I was Poppy Lamar. Lamar.
And toured with the USO all over the world.
But to the Red Cross, she is just another lady in a bathrobe in need of food and a bed.
It's many years. It's gone bye-bye.
And it's hard for me to take.
Now, almost 24 hours after the quake...
Just take it slow, okay? We have plenty of time.
She is beginning to realize all that was lost.
Well, you always want to grab a few things that you think you need.
To me, a handbag is very important.
It makes you think.
I don't have any pictures of nothing.
Her greatest loss...
They were great cats.
Her two closest companions...
They lived on my porch.
Never bothered anybody. They had special okay to live on my porch.
But they're going to come back and there's no porch. There's no steps.
This is my boudoir. That's right.
What do you think of it?
Well, I got news for you. It's better than nothing.
Really. It could be worse.
Orpus Christi High School and Pacific Palisades is closed tomorrow.
The numbers of homeless continue to rise.
Two miles away, a gas leak sets off another fire.
And yet another mobile homeowner, Bob DeHart...
That's everything we own.
...watches his house go up in flames.
I can't believe it.
Early morning at the shelter.
What would you normally be doing at this time?
And if you weren't sitting here...
Oh, normally I'd start to read the paper.
First thing, my horoscope.
Go see what's for the day.
Instead, it's a day for picking up the pieces.
Where are we going from here?
How much rebuilding?
How much insurance covers?
See, I'm still trying to be independent.
But I'm thinking, where do I start?
Poppy starts with a trip back.
Okay, let's go back home.
Margaret and Bud, I'll see you later.
If you want to go through the park, we can.
But here's my porch, the planters.
Do you want to get out?
Look at the big planters up there.
It was a big home.
It was a good home.
She's looking for her cats.
Where the heck have you been?
Did you find your kitties yet?
And any belongings.
I'll find a couple of my kitties that was in my collection.
And all my scrapbooks and other pictures were in there.
Poppy Weisberg may be able to start over.
There's some film cans right there.
The days of Poppy Lamar are completely gone.
No, Poppy, I wasn't.
You don't want to lean on anybody, do you?
No.
It's kind of dumb to feel that way.
It's not my cup of tea.
You see, you can't help but want to go through the rubble.
You think you might find something.
It's time to go back to the shelter.
How long do you think you'll be here then?
Do you have any idea?
It's beginning to get a feeling of hopelessness.
We survived it, but now we're going to wonder how we're going to survive this.
I've never been in a disaster like this.
I never have.
So, like I say, you don't know what it is until it hits you, you know?
Well, right now I'm in Van Nuys, which is the city just south of Sylmar.
And I feel like I'm in the middle of a refugee camp.
I don't know what else to call it.
This is not an official shelter.
This is just a city park.
If you can look behind me, you'll see that there are people camping out.
They're living in their cars.
And what I think is interesting is that most of these people are not homeless.
They actually have homes.
But as long as these aftershocks continue, and they've been continuing
during this entire 48 hours, they plan on staying here.
And also there's another interesting point.
They're too afraid to go home because many of them are from Central America.
They are used to earthquakes.
They know how devastating it can be.
They're used to substandard housing codes and they don't trust the codes here.
Dan?
Erin, how many people are out there tonight?
Well, last night there were about 300 people.
But the officials here are concerned there may be even more tonight
because, as you know, Dan, there was what they call an aftershock.
I would call it much more like a quake.
5.1 on the Richter scale this afternoon.
So they're expecting more people to come out here.
They're just too afraid to go home.
Incredible.
What do officials think that the people will stay out there?
Well, right now these aftershocks have been continuing for 48 hours.
They may continue for two weeks.
So it's very possible people can be out here for two weeks.
And this is no picnic.
Even though tonight they have fires and they're living in tents,
there's no running water.
Sometimes the church donates water to drink, but they can't brush their teeth.
They can't take showers.
So it will be a very long two weeks if they stay out that long.
Okay, Dan.
I've got more already. Thanks.
Well, as we've seen and you've seen and heard here,
this construction that's underway recovering from this kind of destruction
will take a long time.
In a moment, you'll see why the road to recovery may be bumper to bumper.
This week on Highway 14 carried 130,000 cars a day.
Monday morning, all that changed.
Not just here, but all around Los Angeles.
Because this week for millions of Californians,
life in the fast lane suddenly stopped.
The legendary L.A. freeways.
What's wrong with this picture?
Check out traffic on KX.
It's just devastating. It's still a complete mess.
The freeway system that usually carries some 5 million cars daily is a mess.
Your best estimate, your best guess as to when traffic in and around Los Angeles
gets back to anything approaching normal.
The man who has to worry about all the damage
is freeway system director Jerry Baxter.
Well, we're estimating about 12 months to get those bridges back in.
I'm Tom Sermon.
I'm Tom Huell.
KNX radio announcer Tom Huell is in the Los Angeles commuter.
Eight hour continuing post-earthquake coverage continues now
with another look at the freeways.
And now he faces hitting the road home.
Hang in there.
Not knowing what's open and what's shut.
In order to identify Tom's car, we ask him to mark it.
Well, that's not too even, but I think it gets the message said.
Okay, we're gone.
This time of day would take me about 35 minutes.
We'll see how he does today.
This is our mass transit.
This is what carries the bulk of the commuting population in Los Angeles.
So far, so good.
This is about normal for this time of day.
So far.
On a normal day, he's 15 minutes from home.
Just wait until he has to get off the freeway.
Five is closed.
The alternate, State Route 14, which is another freeway, is also closed.
A critical intersection.
The collapse has shut down two major highways here.
You can see where the road just isn't there anymore.
There's a crane working right where the chunk fell down.
What's interesting about the collapse, it is not the first time that an earthquake of this size toppled this same section.
In 1971, you had an earthquake while that was under construction.
Then it was rebuilt.
After the 1971 earthquake.
Now it's down again with an earthquake.
And looking back on it, did you make a mistake by not rebuilding it strong enough the first time?
No, it was rebuilt, redesigned in 1971 to the 1971 standards.
But it did not have the column strength thing that we're putting in the retrofit program.
We didn't have the information that we do now.
So part of it is preventable, is excusable, you might say.
Structural engineer and critic John Karyotis.
But then what happened is we've known for a long time that these things are disasters.
And they're going to be disasters.
So what we could have done, or what should have been done, is something more like what we've done.
More like what we've been doing in buildings.
Having active earthquake hazard reduction programs.
And in my opinion, that's where the effort should have gone.
It should have gone after 1971.
Is it a case, or is it not, that they've been more interested in building new roads,
putting down new concrete, than shoring up for earthquake protection what they already had?