In quake's aftermath, concern for loved ones

Matthew John, 40, was waiting to board a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Seattle to visit his two sisters.

"I tried calling them but I couldn't get through," John said. "It's ironic because they left here to get away from earthquakes. And now this."

Veronica Gonzalez, a 23-year-old Los Angeles native who has lived in Seattle for two years, also waited anxiously at LAX to find out whether she would be able to fly home Wednesday afternoon or would have to wait until Thursday.

"I'm really worried about my boyfriend's safety. He was supposed to pick me up at the airport," she said.

More than 60 flights between Los Angeles and Seattle were thought to be affected by the quake Wednesday, including 31 from Los Angeles and 34 from Seattle. All had been scheduled for after 11 a.m., when the quake struck.

In San Francisco, 13 flights to Seattle were delayed and two flights were canceled by mid-afternoon. Airport spokesman Mike McCarron said a similar number coming into San Francisco International Airport also were affected. All flights into and out of the Pacific Northwest would be affected for the rest of the day, he said.

Most of the delayed or canceled flights in California were served by United, Southwest and Alaska airlines.

In Sacramento, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services readied itself for calls for help from Washington.

"We're ready to do whatever we can," said Jaime Arteaga, spokesman for the OES. "We just need to see what they need from us."

Gov. Gray Davis was planning to contact Washington to assess their needs Wednesday afternoon, Arteaga said.

The OES could send urban search and rescue crews or global information system resources. Rescue crews in the Northridge earthquake that struck Los Angeles in January 1994 used GIS to create maps with different types of information, such as where the worst damage was, said Arteaga.

Asked to compare this quake to Northridge, a 6.7 magnitude quake that killed 72 people and caused $25 billion in damage, seismologist Kate Hutton with the California Institute of Technology said Wednesday's 6.8 quake was much deeper than the one at Northridge.

"A deeper quake hopefully means less damage so that's a good sign," she said. The Northridge quake was 14 miles to 15 miles deep. Wednesday's quake was 33 miles deep, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network.

As news trickled in of injuries and damage, San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles television stations interrupted much of their afternoon programming to air live coverage of the quake aftermath.

Imelda Bynog, 36, of Baldwin Park was watching television news footage of the earthquake Wednesday afternoon.

"It scares me just to see it. I've been there, so I know what they're going through," she said. With so many large earthquakes happening lately, she said she hopes one isn't headed for California.

Though it's unlikely a devastating earthquake will hit in the immediate future, it's not such a remote possibility. Robert Uhrhammer, a research seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley's Seismological Lab, said studies have shown there is a 70 percent probability that one or more destructive quakes will hit the Bay area in the next 30 years.

Wednesday's quake was on the Juan De Fuca fault, which runs under Puget Sound. That fault is connected to a system that runs from Cape Mendocino in California to just north of Puget Sound in Washington.

Marleen C. Madge, a sales agent from Orange, said the Northwest earthquake worried her just as the Northridge quake had.

"It was such a large magnitude, it's just a matter of time before we have another big one," she said. "You see the earthquake in Seattle and it reminds you it can strike anywhere."<