January 17, 1994. The fire alarm in my hotel in Santa Monica, California, began screaming at 4 a.m. Sleepily, I shuffled over to the door and looked out the peephole into the hallway. No smoke. I called the front desk; false alarm, but they had to evacuate. I was in no hurry. I brushed my teeth,
splashed water on my face, put on my clothes, snapped on my watch, noticing it was 4:30 a.m. As I reached for my black leather jacket, the world changed.
Light ceased in all forms, both artificial and natural, as if the ability to see was sucked away to a deep place. The floor tilted at a 45-degree angle; the television leaped from the cabinet and into my chest, throwing me back onto the bed. A wicked sound moaned through the building. Rumbling,
screaming shimmers quivered the concrete substructure and then heaved grinding concrete against metal, breaking glass all around me. In the vortex of sound it was difficult to tell where the evil symphony came from. It came from everywhere. My mind tried to grasp my situation rationally, but emotions urged me to do one thing: Open the glass door and jump out the hotel window.
I did.
Outside, I could see. The gray morning haze seemed peaceful as calm air met turbulent earth. I fell one story and landed perfectly on a narrow wall below. Glass fell around me as the world rocked. The building lurched back and forth and a wave of water from the pool two stories above me
broke over the roof and crashed into the street below. I ran down the thin wall and leaped or was thrown into the upturned barbs of a palm tree and slid painfully to the wet grass another story below. Directly behind the hotel, a beach cottage chimney fell into a jumbled pile of bricks. To my
right, a parking lot filled with cars rolled like a waterbed, knocking the mirrors off in the bumping as light poles swayed like pines in a hurricane. To my left, an elevator shaft fell into the street in a tangle of concrete, I-beams and steel cables. Sparks exploded atop transformers and everywhere
broken glass bounced as the ground shook. The sound of billions of glass objects breaking all at once across hundreds of square miles is not easily forgotten.
Before I could get to my feet, a large, muscled man with long hair, wearing nothing but his underwear, landed on top of me, having leaped from the third floor. Pain shot through my back as we hit the ground. He was screaming in a language I could not make out – and, oddly, his breath smelled like, of all things, Old Spice aftershave. Very strange even for 4:30 a.m.
In the chaos, all I could think about was one of my friends seeing this half-naked guy and me, rolling in the grass. If I died there, what would this look like to my family? I pushed the shaken man away and tried to run on the rolling ground. I landed on my knees not three steps away. More
broken glass.
The Northridge Earthquake had sliced through the Los Angeles basin in destructive, dry waves, collapsing freeways and buildings, injuring more than two thousand people and killing several dozen more – a fortunate miracle due to the early morning hour when most people were asleep. Had it
come at rush hour, the death toll would have been horrendous.
I found Robin and Tom and Roni, my traveling companions, walking in the dark looking stunned. The hotel did a name count and gave us white bathrobes to keep warm. This was pre-cell phone and I needed to find a way to call home, back in Gaithersburg, Maryland, so I walked in the cold, dark morning toward the Santa Monica Pier. The predawn sky was stunning. Sirens wailed all over the city and dogs howled in harmony. People roamed about in a catastrophic daze.
I checked each phone. No service. As I was about to turn around, I checked the last phone and got a dial tone. I called my wife and she described on TV what I could not see – L.A. in flames, bridges and buildings crumbled. She said it looked like the entire city was destroyed, and yet, as I
looked around me, I saw little damage to match the images on CNN back home. I saw that later as we drove around the humbled city.
Over the next few days we stayed in several hotels, finished our shoot amid large aftershocks and finally left LAX on a 747 headed back to the East Coast five days later. About an hour into the flight, the plane rumbled and shook and the right side dipped as the pilot calmly told us we would be
making an emergency landing. We lost an engine, then another, then another. Apparently, by the time we touched down in Denver between dozens of emergency vehicles, we were flying on one engine. Me – 2. Grim Reaper – 0.
I looked out the airplane window into the cold Colorado sunshine as the sirens wailed around us. I felt no emotions. After surfing the carpet of my inclined hotel room and being hit in the chest by a TV and jumping out of my hotel window and tight-roping a wall into a palm tree and jumping a few
stories down and landing on a vibrating street and being bronco’d by a semi-naked Fabio lookalike who’d swilled some Old Spice on his escape from under the sloshing pool water raining down in tune with elevators falling and parking lots dancing – a simple near-plane crash seemed almost
normal.
