It’s been 30 years since the Northridge earthquake shook Los Angeles to its core, killing at least 57 people and injuring thousands more.
KNX News’s Pete Demetriou spoke to L.A. firefighters who were shaken out of bed by the 6.7 magnitude quake and responded to the crisis. It was a rough start: the doors of the fire station broke and trucks couldn’t get out.
“It took four or five guys to get the, after we had broken the manual chain, to open the front doors,” firefighter Mike Henry said. “We had no power, everything was off, so it was pitch black. That's one of the things that hit me the most was how pitch black it was.”
Another firefighter, Vinnie Jenkins, recalled rescuing Salvador Peña, a street sweeper driver, in the parking structure at the Northridge Fashion Center.
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“Now, we had to lift up the concrete, which is, I believe, was three parking structures of concrete. Once we got that lifted up, then we had the task of extricating him out of it,” he said. “And that was probably the most vivid moment that I can remember, getting him out and bringing him up onto the gurney.”
From there, they had to dig through rubble at the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex to find people – both alive and dead – while they worried about their own families.
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