Northdrige Earthquake 1994 | Teen Ink

Northdrige Earthquake 1994

September 14, 2014
By Babey_Abbey BRONZE, Pacoima, California
Babey_Abbey BRONZE, Pacoima, California
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

In 1994 as you may already know a tragedy occurred. Lots of families were injured, and there were much destruction. I myself was not yet alive to live this tragedy thankfully. You might have no idea what I’m talking about, but let me tell you this Northridge earthquake wasn’t a joke. I myself have never asked anyone about this earthquake because I didn’t think it was a big deal to or impacted my family because, well more than 90% of my family was not in the United States when the earthquake occurred.


I interview my aunt about her experience at the 1994 Northridge earthquake since she was one of the few people I know that lived threw this earthquake . She said “ I remember it like if it was just yesterday, it was 4:30 in the morning and well your uncle was awake because he had to work, when all of a sudden I feel a shaking and it wakes me up “ At that moment I didn’t know what to do , I was half asleep and still didn’t know what was going on “.Being half asleep in something like this isn’t the best thing that can happen to you. She said that there was something that did scare her “then like 5 minutes later I heard a loud screaming, and as you know my mom intuition just told me “my daughter”. I ran into their room and Anabel at that time was just 4 I believe” my cousins were very young at that age. If I was that small I would have probably been crying while all this happened.  When she ran into the room, she said “when I saw her, she had glass from her mirror was on her body”. This must have been very scary because she was a little girl. “Not only did that scare me, but I didn’t see Jazmine in the room”, “I then started to scream her name and say a little hand under the bed”. She was so scared she took cover under her bed”. I myself would have gone crazy if my daughter wasn’t in the room, but my aunt knew that panicking wasn’t the right thing to do at this time. When she went back to her oldest daughter, she didn’t know what to do because of the glass so she just carried her to her room and started taking the glass out. “I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but taking her to the doctor never came to mind, but thinking about it now its good I did it because there were other people that were more injured and needed that hospital spot”. Even though her daughters are of course her first priority she knew that being greedy about her daughter getting hurt wasn’t going to help the community.  After all this about her daughter, my aunt went to go check the rest of her house.  “I remember walking through the halls of my house and all my family portraits were broken on the floor, and then came the worst part the kitchen.” In the kitchen there was barely any space to walk, all my plates and my entire princess house collection was destroyed on the floor”. This was one of those things that looking into my aunt eyes could tell really hurt her. She had a princess house collection and she almost died when even tries to touch her stuff and lost a lot of it. She also lost a lot of family portraits because some of them were damaged because of the glass.


After all this tragedy, I asked my aunt if she thinks she would be more prepared for a next big earthquake and she said, “ After this day, hopefully I don’t have to experience another big earthquake because that one was already enough for me”. She might have not had the worst experience in this earthquake, but her experience matters to me because she is family and I myself would never want to experience a big earthquake. Try to image living threw the earthquake yourself at a young age.



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