‘I thought I would die’: She survived the Northridge earthquake, and it changed her life

Andrea Alvarado was in her rented Granada Hills home on Jan. 17, 1994, when her bedroom walls and windows began to rattle.

She jumped out of her bed and headed to the living room to find her door blocked. A piano rolled across the hallway and barricaded the entrance. Alvarado began pounding on the door and screaming.

“I thought I would die,” she said. “I grew up in L.A., and as kids we would laugh when the lamps went back and forth. It was like riding a roller coaster. But that day, it jolted and pushed and jolted again.”

Her son narrowly escaped a falling TV set when it came out of the wall and collapsed on the floor, missing him by inches.

Her younger son was in bed when the quake began. He was thrown against the wall and dislocated his shoulder.

When Alvarado finally walked into the living room, she found the floor covered in glass.

“It was like a glass carpet,” she said. “Broken glass was everywhere.”

As she drove to the hospital with her son, Alvarado could see the scale of the destruction left by the deadly earthquake. A main broke near her house, turning nearby Rinaldi Street into a river. Several houses were consumed in flames.

“It was like a war zone,” she said.

A line near a hospital in Burbank went around the block, as injured residents flocked from across the Valley.

“You could see a lot of blood in the hospital,” she said. “Some people had blood running down their faces.”

When the family returned home, they found their house without gas and water. In the following weeks, Alvarado said she and her two sons used a barbecue on their patio and water from a jacuzzi to wash dishes.

“We were living like on vacation,” she said.

But their vacation was about to be over when one day Alvarado’s landlord showed up. The landlord’s own house was severely damaged in the earthquake and she wanted her second home — the one Alvarado and her family were living in — back.

Alvarado’s family had only a few weeks to find a new place.

That proved to be a challenge. Many homes in the neighborhood were either destroyed or damaged. It didn’t help that Alvarado was the breadwinner in her family.

“I was always struggling, since my sons were young even though I was making decent money,” she said. “I couldn’t never afford to buy a house.”

Alvarado contacted a real estate agent and soon moved into a three-bedroom house, which she purchased in Northridge for $158,000.

“How lucky I was to buy the house,” she said, adding that the earthquake changed the trajectory of her life. “When one door closes, another opens.”