It took a split second for Principal Laura Gutierrez's instincts to kick in when an earthquake struck Aldama Elementary School in Highland Park while she was outside supervising recess.
She began to dance, shaking to the rhythm of the tremors. Some students, paralyzed by momentary fear, saw her and began to dance as well.
“They looked at me, a lot of them with wide eyes. I looked back and thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to swing with this. ’ And a lot of them did with me.”
He then immediately radioed his plant manager and supervisory assistants to coordinate a campus-wide response.
A moderate earthquake at 12:20 p.m. struck the first day of school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, causing no reported damage but creating jitters and testing the preparedness instilled by earthquake drills.
The 4.4 magnitude quake, centered in El Sereno, particularly shook nearby areas, including Wilson High School, which was temporarily evacuated, said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. Students ducked and covered on many campuses, and a smaller number followed a short-term evacuation.
The main campus of Anawakalmekak Academy, a charter school, is two blocks from the epicenter. The force of the quake was no small feat.
“It felt like an ocean liner had crashed into the building,” said Marcos Aguilar, co-principal of the K-12 charter school.
The initial jolt was the strongest, and subsequent jolts lasted only a few seconds, Aguilar said.
This is more or less how José Montes de Oca, deputy director of the higher education campus, felt, although he used the word “truck,” not “ocean liner.”
Aguilar was upstairs working with some staff members and admits he and his colleagues ignored standard duck-and-cover protocol and instead ran downstairs to check on students.
They were fine and following the rules of ducking and covering under or near their desks and then evacuating when 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 flooded phone lines to check on their children, something that also happened at other schools, including Aldama. Staff at the charter school were unable to take calls at first because they, too, had to evacuate. But the school quickly sent out a text message saying everyone was safe.
Aguilar rushed to campus to find the younger students “because I thought there would be more concern there.” About four students became frightened, and one of them cried. “Everyone else was very excited to be outside. Some of our staff were shocked. They may have memories of bigger earthquakes in the past.”
At an afternoon school assembly for students and parents — part of the regular first-day events — Montes de Oca reviewed earthquake safety, including what to do at home.
Although the situation was terrifying for a few seconds, Aguilar noticed that no one was evacuated from the restaurant next to the store.
At Aldama, Principal Gutierrez said about two-thirds of the students were already outside, either at recess or lunch. The students who were inside seemed to have followed safety rules. It helped that she had chosen earthquake safety as the theme of her school assembly Monday. Like the charter school, Aldama has earthquake drills every month.
Lauren Quan-Madrid, a mother, had not felt the quake at her workplace in Whittier, but her husband, a teacher at Wilson High, alerted her in a panic to check on her daughter.
The shaking had been strong in Wilson, prompting an evacuation of the entire school and a thorough sweep of the campus that kept students outside for a time.
Her second-grader, Valeria Madrid-Romo, said the earthquake scared her. She was already anxious about moving on to a new grade in school and wondered if she could handle more difficult material.
By the end of the day, she felt academically calm and had gotten over the shock. When her mother arrived out of breath and momentarily pulled her out of class, Valeria asked, “What are you doing here?”
Juvenal Rodriguez and his wife were also alarmed, but Mateo, who is also in second grade, was not impressed. It was much more interesting, he said, when hail fell on their house during the recent rainy season.
Madison Alvarez, a third grader from Aldama, thought the earthquake sounded like a tree falling, so she wasn't too worried. What really caught her attention was that it was the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.
“We did a lot of art and coloring,” she said. “And we had the first day of recess, which was short, but a lot of fun.”
Jorge Alvarado, a 12th grader at Academia Avance, a different charter school, was sitting in class when he saw a mirror shake, then felt the floors vibrate, then saw the walls move.
“I was in shock because we were in class and I didn’t expect this to happen,” Jorge said. But, just like in other schools, he and his classmates knew what to do.
Director Gutiérrez chose to take a positive approach: “We dance for any reason in Aldama.”
