Town grapples with aftermath of quake
RIO DELL, Calif. — Outside the Dollar General, the store manager ticked off the items she had to share with families trying to jump-start their lives after an earthquake jolted them from their beds and cut off the town’s water and power.
“Batteries or candles?” a worker asked a woman toting a toddler on her hip, and handed the child a plastic candy cane filled with sweets.
Just days before Christmas in Rio Dell, the former lumber town is grappling with the aftermath of Tuesday’s 6.4 magnitude earthquake that injured at least 17 people, shook homes off foundations, damaged water systems and left thousands without electricity — some for more than a day.
By Wednesday afternoon, power was restored to the homes of tens of thousands of residents, and Christmas lights wrapped around trees on the community’s main street came back on. However, most of the town’s 3,500 residents lacked safe drinking water, according to local officials. By Wednesday night, Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it had restored electric power to essentially all of the approximately 70,000 customers who had quake-related outages.
The quake was centered in nearby Ferndale, about 210 miles northwest of San Francisco and near the Pacific coast. The area is known for its redwood forests, scenic mountains and the three-county Emerald Triangle’s legendary marijuana crop — as well as the Mendocino Triple Junction, a geologic region where three tectonic plates meet.
Scenes of panic played out before dawn Tuesday inside homes in Rio Dell, and hours later, many were still on edge. When the shaking settled, many ran outside to check on neighbors. Well after daybreak, some refused to return home, opting to wait out the aftershocks in their cars for fear of flying objects, to power up cellphones and keep warm because there was no electricity.
On Wednesday, the community fire station was turned into a drive-thru hub. Residents pulled up their cars and had water loaded into their trunks, while a local food truck handed out tacos and burritos courtesy of World Central Kitchen. Other volunteers propped up folding tables and gave out apples, peaches, bagels and canned food. One driver ran out of gas on his way through and had to have his truck pushed off to the side.
Rio Dell is the community hardest hit by the quake, though most residents didn’t see major structural damage to their homes.
Ferndale, which draws tourists to its picturesque Victorian Village, also remained without power, and a key bridge to the community was shut down. But shopkeepers hoped to bounce back once the lights come back on, hopefully soon, said Marc Daniels, owner of Mind’s Eye Manufactory and Coffee Lounge.
“We know how bad it could have been,” said Daniels, whose shop occupies a two-story Victorian. “We feel like we sort of dodged a bullet this time.”
About 17 people were reported as suffering injuries, including a broken hip and head wound, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office said at a news conference Tuesday. Two people died — an 83-year-old and a 72-year-old — because they couldn’t get timely care for medical emergencies during or just after the quake.
While more than half of the 72,000 Humboldt County customers who lost electricity when the quake struck had power restored by Tuesday evening, some went without it -- and water -- throughout the night.
City Manager Kyle Knopp said 15 homes were severely damaged and deemed uninhabitable because of the quake. It wasn’t immediately known how many residents were displaced, he said, because in a place like Rio Dell most have friends or family who have taken them in — limiting the fallout from an unusually strong quake in this quake-prone town.
“It surpassed the fun part of an earthquake and became scary,” Knopp said.