After Landers: Emotional, Physical Aftershocks Felt : Earthquake: One year later, scientific inquiry has boomed, but preparedness for the Big One has waned.

LANDERS, Calif. —  A year after the most powerful earthquake in California in 40 years ruptured the Mojave desert surface for 55 miles, scientists are avidly studying the event and residents still suffer traumatic memories. But already the public’s interest in quake preparedness appears to be fading.

It was a year ago today that the Landers quake, measured at magnitudes ranging from 7.3 to 7.6, jolted the West at 4:57 a.m., killing a small child and injuring 400 people. The quake--followed by the Big Bear Lake aftershock three hours later--damaged more than 4,000 homes and 175 businesses.

The Landers earthquake sequence, which continues today with a diminishing number of aftershocks, has been one of the most carefully studied in history, and more than 100 papers have been presented at scholarly meetings.

Landers was scientifically noteworthy in several respects:

* It tended to confirm the validity of new theories that see earthquakes as rippling from a starting point to an ending point, as if a piece of paper was being torn from one end to the other, instead of instantaneously.

* It demonstrated more clearly than ever before, in the words of four Caltech and U.S. Geological Survey scientists, the process by which “a shallow, moderate earthquake” within a few seconds can trigger “a larger, deeper event.”

* It established that the biggest earthquakes can generate “sympathetic” tremors hundreds of miles away. Apparently triggered by earthquake waves, temblors began over a six-state area within as little as 30 seconds of the Landers jolt and occurred as far away as Yellowstone National Park.

* It generated debate over the possibility that the San Andreas Fault boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates in Southern California is gradually being transferred inland. A few scientists, such as Amos Nur of Stanford University, believe that this boundary over millions of years could run through the so-called Eastern California Sheer Zone, which is in the Mojave Desert, and along the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This could push the biggest earthquakes in the region away from the San Andreas.

In Landers, Yucca Valley, Big Bear and other communities, deep emotional fissures remain among the thousands of residents who rode out last June’s earthquakes.

“With every aftershock, I still get goose pimples and hold my breath,” said Landers lodge owner Jack Barr.

“We try to tell ourselves that we’re now living in the safest place in California, because we’ve had our Big One. But every time there’s an aftershock, we still question ourselves. And I don’t think we’re going to be over this for years.”

It was especially traumatic for those who lost their homes.

Stephanie Villareal and her husband, Michael, are among them. Their 70-year-old, locally famous “Rock House” was condemned by county building inspectors and the property repossessed by the former owners after the earthquake caused its rock veneer to separate from the walls and an exterior wall to crumble.

“There are not too many things I thought I could live without,” Villareal said tearfully. “But this place was one. I wondered, am I so shallow to attach so much to a structure?”

Even in other areas of Southern California, where it was not felt so violently, the Landers earthquake sparked fears in the weeks after that a Big One, perhaps the proverbial 8-point earthquake, might be imminent along the southern San Andreas Fault.

A year later, the anxiety has faded, as sponsors of earthquake preparedness sessions have been finding--to their chagrin.

At the Stoner Avenue Elementary School in West Los Angeles, UCLA Extension and State Farm insurance representatives this month invited 75 public schoolteachers to a two-day demonstration of first aid and other techniques to be used if the Big One should strike. Only 16 showed up for a program that has cost insurers about $10,000 a session.

A panel of earthquake experts convened under the auspices of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC reported in November that the probability that a quake of magnitude 7 or greater would soon hit somewhere in Southern California was 5% to 12% each year and as high as 47% in the next five years.

But recently, one scientist who worked with this panel, Lucile M. Jones of the Geological Survey’s Pasadena field office, noted that the Los Angeles Basin at least has entered a seismically quiet period, with scarcely any local earthquakes as strong as a magnitude 3 in the last two years.

Although scientists cannot be sure, it is possible that the moderately strong 5-magnitude quakes that hit in the San Gabriel Valley area in recent years has ended for the time being, Jones said.

Nonetheless, for Southern California, the panel assigned to estimate probabilities of a big quake continues its work. One of the panel’s goals is to update a 1988 estimate by an earlier group that there was a 60% probability of a major earthquake along the southern San Andreas or San Jacinto faults by 2018.

Scientists working with the panel reported last week that the new estimate would take into account all 300 Southern California faults believed capable of generating damaging earthquakes.

In the Landers area, it is not so much a matter of theoretical probabilities as still-present realities.

There is some humor about the situation. At the Moose Lodge, where the big room is under repair, the bar is open and doing well with its “Landers 7.6,” a rum, vodka and Galliano concoction. “Every time they upgrade the magnitude, we add more booze,” said proprietor Barr.

But reconstruction is often slow, with Landers and Big Bear contractors reporting a six-month backlog. Even more telling, perhaps, is the ongoing psychic repair--children and adults working out their anxieties and struggling to recapture life’s routine.

The area has benefited from a counseling project the Federal Emergency Management Agency developed after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California and reinstituted after the Landers quake.

Known as COPE (Counseling Ordinary People in Emergencies), it sent teams of counselors to meet individually with more than 3,400 people and address more than 7,000 others--ranging from preschool children to senior citizens in classrooms, community meetings or group therapy sessions.

“We’re hoping that people will see themselves as survivors, not as victims,” said Bill Fry, who heads the Yucca Valley counselors. “But for many, their lives were changed drastically. They’ve lost homes, property and things of great sentimental value. Everyone is on their own timetable and some people are still upset.”

Some residents are afraid to shop for groceries, fearful that merchandise stacked high on shelves might again tumble. Some sleep on porches. And just when a kind of quiet settles in, there is another aftershock to uncover the emotional wounds inflicted a year ago.

Those most troubled by the earthquake, Fry said, are the elderly--survivors of the Depression, World War II, other natural disasters and deaths of loved ones. “The people with the greatest life experiences had the hardest time dealing with the earthquake,” he said.

The Morongo Basin Unified School District saw an increase in alcohol and drug abuse cases among students this past school year--in stark contrast to a decline in substance abuse in previous years, said Beverly Willard, a district statistician.

Students have had trouble focusing on classroom work and more children have been “acting out” through misbehavior, Willard said.

Older children--especially those whose bedroom doors were blocked by debris--have reported difficulty sleeping, and some still sleep in their parents’ bedroom, she said.

But some residents seem to have remained stoic through the experience.

The earthquake’s epicenter was 200 feet below the home where Geneva Clark’s mother once lived, a place that was converted to a family guest home after her death years ago. The house shifted eight feet; a seven-foot-deep septic tank was exposed to the sun. Today, all that remains is a concrete slab.

Clark lives next door and can attest to the power of the quake, of how her water bed lurched two feet and of how books falling off bedroom shelves trapped her children--including two older, handicapped daughters.

Still, she says, “this is not the worst thing to happen to me. We all came out OK.”

Others, however, grew cynical of government disaster relief efforts in Yucca Valley and Big Bear, and said they pulled themselves up with their own bootstraps.

Tina and Roger Stockman own the Grubstake, a popular roadside restaurant that escaped structural damage but whose contents--ranging from antique memorabilia to toilets and ovens to electrical wiring--were all but destroyed.

The couple applied for disaster relief but said their application was lost in the paperwork in Sacramento. Finally, three months after the earthquake, they reoutfitted the restaurant privately, thanks mostly to a donation from a friend in Hollywood.

“They told me I was the first to file with FEMA,” Roger Stockman said. “Four months later, they said they finally found my paperwork. I told them, not too nicely, that by then I had taken care of my problems.”

For every gripe encountered about the government, praise is heaped upon the Red Cross for its relief efforts and on the Mennonites who offered volunteer labor.

Even as people await funding decisions, checks or repair work, the emotional reconstruction continues through COPE.

Carole Ehmke lived in Studio City during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and was so frightened by it that she moved back East. She returned to Big Bear, living in a mobile home, and had braced herself after the Landers earthquake for the likely aftershock.

When it struck, she said, the contents of her home were trashed as the mobile home was whiplashed. But that was the least of her problems.

“I was in a catatonic state,” she said. “For six months, I couldn’t even sign my name.” She had to quit her cottage industry of assembling computer boards.

Finally, like hundreds of others who resisted seeking help for months, she visited a COPE counselor to help her deal “with all my fear, not just of the earthquake, but because my whole life seemed shattered.”

“COPE helped me realize that everyone had suffered from it, not just me, and that I could either just feel sorry for myself or grow stronger out of this.”

Ehmke has decided not only to not flee from this earthquake as she did after the 1971 one, but has enrolled in Red Cross first aid courses so she can help others if and when the next disaster strikes.