It took a split second for Principal Laura Gutierrez’s instincts to kick in when an earthquake ripped through Aldama Elementary School in Highland Park as she stood outside supervising recess.
She began to dance, shaking to the rhythm of the jolts. A few students, frozen by momentary fear, saw her and began to dance too.
“They looked at me, a lot of them with big eyes. I looked back at them and said, ‘OK, we’re going to swing on this.’ And a lot of them did it with me.”
She then immediately radioed the plant manager and his supervisory assistants to coordinate a full response on campus.
A moderate earthquake at 12:20 p.m. rocked the first day of school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, causing no reported damage but sparking some jitters and testing the preparedness instilled by earthquake drills.
The 4.4-magnitude quake hit the surrounding area particularly hard, including Wilson High School, which was temporarily evacuated, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. Students took cover on many campuses, and a smaller number followed with short-term evacuations.
The main campus of Academia Anawakalmekak, a private school, is two blocks from the epicenter. The force of the shaking was not great.
“It was like an ocean liner hit the building,” said Marcos Aguilar, co-principal of the K-12 charter school.
The initial shaking was the most intense, followed by tremors lasting only a few seconds, Aguilar said.
That’s pretty much what José Montes de Oca, the assistant principal of the upperclassmen campus, felt, although he used the word “truck” and not “liner.”
Aguilar was upstairs working with some staff members and admits he and his colleagues ignored the standard protocol of ducking and covering up and instead rushed downstairs to check on students.
They were fine and following safety rules, hiding under or near their desks and then evacuating the area once the shaking stopped, under adult supervision. Many, if not most, of the students were already outside because it was lunchtime, Montes de Oca said.
Parents called the hotlines to check on them, something that happened at other schools, including Aldama. Staff at the charter school couldn’t answer the calls at first because they too had to evacuate. But the school quickly texted to say everyone was safe.
Aguilar rushed to the campus to look for the younger students “because that’s where I thought there would be more concern.” About four students were scared, one was crying. “Everyone else was just excited to be out. It shocked a few of our staff members. They may have memories of bigger earthquakes.”
At an afternoon school assembly for students and parents — part of regular first-day events — Montes de Oca reviewed earthquake safety, including what to do at home.
As scary as things may have been for a few seconds, Aguilar noted that no one evacuated the nearby restaurant.
Back at Aldama, Principal Gutierrez said about two-thirds of the students were already outside, either at recess or lunch. The students inside appeared to be following safety rules. It helped that she chose earthquake safety as the topic of her Monday school assembly. Like the charter school, Aldama holds earthquake drills every month.
Lauren Quan-Madrid, a mother, didn’t feel the quake where she worked in Whittier. But her husband, a teacher at Wilson High School, alerted her, somewhat panicked, to go check on their daughter.
The shaking had been strong at Wilson, prompting an evacuation of the entire school and a thorough inspection of the campus that forced students to remain outside for a period of time.
Valeria Madrid-Romo, their second-grader, said the earthquake scared her. She was already worried about moving up a grade, wondering if she would be able to handle more difficult subjects.
By the end of the day, she felt academically confident and had overcome the earthquake. When her mother arrived out of breath and took her out of the classroom for a moment, Valeria asked her, “What are you doing here?”
Juvenal Rodriguez and his wife were also alarmed, but Mateo, also a sophomore, was not impressed. It was much more interesting, he said, when hail fell on their house during the recent rainy season, he said.
Madison Alvarez, a third-grader at Aldama, thought the earthquake sounded like a tree falling. So she wasn’t too worried. What really hit her was that it was the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.
“We did a lot of drawing and coloring,” she said. “And we had the first day of recess, it was short, but it was really fun.”
Jorge Alvarado, a 12th-grader at Academia Avance, another charter school, was sitting in class when he saw a mirror shake, then he felt the floor vibrate, then he saw the walls move.
“I was shocked, because we were in class and I didn’t expect this to happen,” Jorge said. But like in other schools, he and his classmates knew what to do.
Director Gutierrez chose to take a positive approach: “At Aldama, we dance for any reason.”
