MILLIONS AWAKENED BY A NIGHTMARE.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

NORTHRIDGE - No one who lived through those terrible few seconds 10 years ago this week will ever forget the ferocious shaking and the difficult days, weeks and months that followed.

It was the middle of the night and millions of people woke as if wakened by a nightmare.

Buildings and freeways collapsed, fires erupted. People were crushed to death or so frightened they suffered heart attacks. Others were trapped in rubble. The power went off, the water system failed.

And all over the San Fernando Valley, people streamed out of their homes and onto the dark streets, where neighbors suddenly became friends and family looking after one another, making sure they were safe, the gas was shut off and they had enough food to get by.

``I think about it all the time,'' said Amalie Orme, a professor at California State University, Northridge, whose Woodland Hills house was lifted entirely off the ground by the quake. ``I still keep earthquake preparedness material around and urge my neighbors to do the same.''

It was 4:31 a.m., two hours before dawn, on Jan. 17, 1994, when a hidden fault ruptured more than 10 miles below the surface of the San Fernando Valley.

The rupture lasted only eight seconds, but the shaking at the surface went on for 20 to 30 seconds as the seismic waves amplified and reverberated through underground soil and rock.

The 6.7-magnitude Northridge Earthquake killed 57 people, injured nearly 12,000, left many thousands homeless and caused damage estimated at more than $40 billion.

It was the costliest earthquake disaster in U.S. history.

Yet it could have been far worse. Just how bad was illustrated a year later, when a 6.9-magnitude quake hit Kobe, Japan, killing 5,100 people. And just last month, as many as 35,000 people died when their homes were leveled by a 6.7-magnitude quake in Bam, Iran.

The Northridge Earthquake's death toll was undoubtedly lessened because it hit before dawn when office buildings and shopping centers - where damage was great - were empty and freeways had little traffic.

Also playing a role, experts say, was the San Fernando Valley's defining characteristic: its rows of wood-and-stucco tract homes.

``Our wooden houses are probably our best structures in an earthquake, by a large margin,'' said Thomas Heaton, a professor of engineering and seismology at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Still, the devastation was terrible.

At California State University, Northridge, near the epicenter, buildings suffered massive damage that took most of the last decade to fix.

A parking structure at the Northridge Fashion Center collapsed, but the only person in it was the driver of a street-sweeper, who was pulled from his crushed machine amid the rubble and survived.

Not far from CSUN, the Northridge Meadows apartment complex collapsed, killing 16 people, by far the worst single tragedy of the disaster.

Five-year-old Amy Vigil-Tyere died when her parents' Sherman Oaks stilt house home crashed down a hillside. It was one of nine hillside houses built on stilts that collapsed, killing four people.

Ted Peter Fitchner, 28, died in his Chatsworth mobile home after a microwave oven hit him on the head.

LAPD Officer Clarence Wayne Dean, 46, was killed when he plunged 40 feet to his death off a collapsed section of the Antelope Valley Freeway. Evelynn B. Henson, 92, burned to death in her Northridge mobile home, one of dozens that caught fire after the quake knocked them off their foundations.

``The whole house shook, and then in about five minutes, the house in front of me had a little fire in it. After that, it just went up like matchsticks,'' Los Olivos trailer park resident Ken Saft recalled.

And there were acts of heroism everywhere.

Firefighters, police officers and ordinary citizens crawled into damaged buildings to rescue trapped victims.

Los Angeles police Lt. Andre Dawson was among officers who rushed to Studio City where a house had slipped down a hillside, killing one woman and trapping another.

``We could hear faint cries for help,'' he recalled. ``We literally dug with our hands - we couldn't find any power tools in the neighborhood.''

All over the Valley, people set up outdoor kitchens on cinder blocks in their yards. Neighbors came together, sometimes for the first time, sharing Cheerios and Rice-a-Roni cooked on the barbecue grills.

``Neighbors I barely recognized were coming by and checking on me and my kids,'' Ingrid Goulding said. ``They wanted to see if we needed anything and if we were all right.''

It was a phenomenon that continued for days, as power and water were gradually restored.

``Natural disasters do build a sense of community,'' said Harvey Rich, a sociology professor at CSUN. ``They promote a sense of coming together, of having to dealt with the common threat.''

In the aftermath of the quake, laws were changed and building codes strengthened. Seismic scientists found a wealth of new data that has helped them better understand earthquakes.

They eventually determined the epicenter - the place over which the fault rupture started - wasn't actually in Northridge at all, but in neighboring Reseda.

The fault rupture moved north, northwest and northeast, across a 10-by- 12-mile face of a tilted, buried fault.

``You had a half-million people living on top of the fault,'' said Lucy Jones, the scientist-in charge at the U.S. Geological Survey, based at Caltech.

The quake was felt from San Diego to Las Vegas. Damage was spread over 2,100 square miles, from tiny Fillmore and the Santa Clarita Valley, where 2,200 homes were destroyed, to Anaheim Stadium, where the Jumbotron collapsed and crushed hundreds of seats.

Entire neighborhoods were badly damaged near the epicenter, and also miles away in Sherman Oaks, which was built on sand and gravel left long ago by the meandering of the Los Angeles River.

Amplification of the quake in soft soil collapsed the Santa Monica Freeway at La Cienega Boulevard - la cienega is Spanish for ``the swamp,'' the bed of the Los Angeles River before 1825, the Geological Survey says.

Even Santa Monica, on the other side of the hills to the south, and Fillmore on the other side of the mountains to the north suffered massive damage.

Fillmore's turn-of-the-century downtown lost half of its buildings - old unreinforced structures often used as movie sets. In Santa Monica, masonry buildings partially collapsed along Santa Monica Boulevard and the Third Street Promenade.

Scientists say they have no doubt more damaging earthquakes will hit Southern California. On average, Southern California has three or four 7.0-magnitude - stronger than Northridge - quakes every 50 years.

Even bigger quakes could occur on ``blind'' - or hidden - faults that may only break in intervals of thousands of years.

But researchers can't predict when a great earthquake is coming.

Still, they say new instruments and data networks give them more information far faster for assessing a quake's size, location and impact.

Newer technology - including radar and GPS-based measurements from orbiting satellites that let experts map ground movement before and after earthquakes around the world - offers hope of finding a key to making valid predictions.

``We're not in any kind of position to give predictions - we have great hopes,'' said Caltech geology professor emeritus Leon Silver.

Staff Writer Dana Bartholomew contributed to this story.

Charles F. Bostwick, [phone]

chuck.bostwick(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

4 photos, 2 boxes

Photo:

(1 -- color) The Antelope Valley Freeway overpass collapsed onto the Golden State Freeway during the earthquake. For more quake coverage, see Page 3.

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News

(2) Cars lie crushed beneath an apartment building on Saticoy Street in Reseda on the morning of Jan. 17, 1994, following the 6.7-magnitude Northridge Earthquake that left 57 people dead.

(3) People were not the only victims of the quake. Los Angeles County firefighters cradle two rescued cats at the Northridge Meadows apartments the morning of the temblor.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer

(4) A portion of where the Antelope Valley Freeway and the Golden State Freeway intersect lies in ruins after the 6.7-magnitude Northridge Earthquake struck.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer

Box:

(1) 6.7

(2) HOW EARTHQUAKES OCCUR

SOURCE: Daily News research