DISASTERS: Hand in the Night

From San Francisco to San Diego, thousands of Californians, shaken as though by a giant hand, jumped from their beds, felt the floor move eerily under their bare feet, heard an unearthly jangle of church bells, burglar alarms and shattering window glass at 4:52 a.m. They learned that they had felt the waves of a major earthquake, centering near the little mountain town of Tehachapi, Calif, (pop. 1,685), 75 miles north of Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, for a few minutes, there was near panic. “It was the first time,” said a Hollywood actor, “that I ever saw whitecaps on a swimming pool.”

By daylight, the first word from Tehachapi reached the outside world. Telephone lines had broken, and people had had to go miles to put in their calls for help.

With roads closed by landslides, doctors, nurses and medical equipment were flown in by the Air Force, the Navy and the Red Cross. Stunned people huddled in small groups in the streets, fearing another quake. Beds dangled out of two hotels whose walls were shorn away. Families had been torn apart. Sobbed one woman: “God just took the middle right out of my family and left me the two eldest and the two youngest.”

There were at least eleven dead. The quake was the most violent (magnitude 7½) since the disastrous San Francisco quake in 1906 (8½).