FOUR THIRTY-ONE in the morning and I’m shot from sleep by a terrifying rumble. In the same moment, the floor beneath me begins to move. At first it’s a tremble, within seconds a violent vibration. The ceiling creaks and cracks like it’s going to collapse and I’m paralysed with fear, the brain unable to respond to a crisis beyond its comprehension.

Because, just 48 hours after landing in Los Angeles, I am in the middle of the biggest earthquake in the city’s recorded history.

Nine miles beneath the surface of the earth, directly under the San Fernando Valley, an unknown and unnamed fault line has chosen this time to yawn, stretch itself and acquire an identity just like its infamous predecessors: San Andreas, Whittier, Santa Monica, Frew and others. Like some rough beast, its hour come at last, it has slouched towards the surface to be born and a baptism of fire is inevitable – it will eventually pay the ultimate price.

Mark and Kathy are in the other room, screaming at me to join them. They are panicking too but they know that the drill is to stand directly under a doorway for whatever shelter it might offer.

I stumble through the dark to join them and we huddle up, arms tightly round each other, grateful for the comfort this warm body-contact brings. The apartment, meanwhile, is in convulsions, rocking and swaying and trembling. The most terrifying sound comes from the ceiling as it creaks and strains under the pressure. Out in the kitchen, Kathy’s wine glasses and dishes come crashing to the floor.

And still we huddle there, Kathy’s tiny frame squeezed between us as we struggle to hold our balance on the vibrating floor.

The tremors last for about 20 seconds and if there’s any such thing as pure, pristine fear, then we’ve come to know it in those moments. Afterwards, I’m on the verge of puking, my stomach heaving from the fright . . .

The reverberations recede and the quake is over. But even in those first stunned and silent seconds it’s impossible to avoid the philosophical realities: if ever we needed a lesson about our insignificance, about our essential “smallness” in the grander scheme, then this was it.

Our brains were too scrambled to articulate it but we knew it all the same. We knew it in that pathetic huddle: we had had a glimpse of earth’s awful, awesome, power in that 20-second blast and we just knew how small and vulnerable we really were. If we were going to be spared, it would be the luck of the draw, simple as that. This force was utterly random, utterly wanton in its violence and we didn’t figure in its plans.

And in the light of this experience, the concept of some divine hand controlling our destinies from above seems just as dodgy as those timber houses that cracked like matchsticks during the quake.

The electricity is gone but Kathy, a sassy camera operator from Liverpool, lights some candles. We’re in her pad on Venice Beach some 15 miles south of the epicentre. Her next-door neighbour Yvonne, an Englishwoman in her fifties, joins us in her pyjamas. She is in a state of shock, shaking like a leaf, and pulling hard on a cigarette. “This is terrible,” she sighs between sobs. “You come over here to start a new life and this is what happens. I’m going back to England . . . at least you’re safe in your bed at night.”

Kathy spends the next half hour looking for her pet cat but he’s gone to ground. “Fuck the cat,” Mark says eventually, “he’s got eight more lives, we’ve just got one.” He’s from Galway, an engineer, and has been living in L.A. for the last seven years.

Her pitch-black cat reappears, his eyes shellshocked. He’d managed to squeeze himself under the fridge. A relieved Kathy almost hugs him to death.

She has lived all over America and was in Kansas in ’87 when it was racked by a ferocious tornado. “The tornado wiped out a little town called New Haven just 22 miles away from us. You could hear it coming. These huge black clouds came racing across the sky and the nearer it came the louder it got, like a giant express train. That was scary, but not as scary as last night,” she remarked.

Minutes later, the first aftershock occurs and it’s like another kick in the guts: that dreadful rumbling noise, the trembling house and the terrible uncertainty – is it going to be worse than the first one? That uncertainty is another component in this unique mix of dread – not knowing whether the next one is going to be the big one.

The tremors fade again but the aftershocks come back to haunt us right through the night. We are on the brink of sleep several times when another one arrives right on cue. “Fuck off and leave us alone,” you feel like shouting, if only to relieve the tension inside. This repeated fraying of nerves already on edge makes sleep impossible and anyway, dawn has arrived to a fanfare of screeching sirens.

Power returns to the apartment at about 9am and the local TV stations are already on the ball. Reports come filtering in of collapsed bridges, buckled freeways, raging fires and deaths at Northridge, a suburb in the heart of the San Fernando Valley that takes the biggest hit. The scale of the destruction is shocking and it’s clear that the death toll is going to rise throughout the day.

One LAPD police officer is already dead, a 46-year-old motorbike cop speeding down the Antelope Valley Freeway overpass, unaware that a section has collapsed onto the Golden State Freeway below. In a city deprived of its lights, he has no warning and plummets 30 feet down to his death.

Sixteen bodies are eventually pulled from the wreckage of the Northridge Meadows apartment complex, including a 14-year-old boy found dead in a closet. His distraught Asian-American mother stands by for hours at the mountain of rubble, hoping for a miracle. At 8.30am she is approached by a paramedic: “Ma’am, listen to me. Your son, how old is your son?” he asks. “This son is dead, Ma’am. He is dead.”

But this disaster bestowed death without fear or favour. On a cul-de-sac in Sherman Oaks, in a street known for its breathtaking views, a 31-year-old entertainment industry executive and his 32-year-old fiancée are found dead in their downstairs bedroom – what’s left of it. Their hillside house was uprooted and scattered for hundreds of yards, their cars – a BMW and a Porsche – also destroyed. Only the couple’s whimpering puppy survives.

In room 601 of a skidrow flophouse, meanwhile, a mentally ill former convict dies when he falls from his open window in the Frontier Hotel at Main and 5th Streets . . .

Another heavy tremor occurs as we watch Channel 7’s Eyewitness News and they feel it in the studios. The airbrushed male and female presenters – classic stereotyping here: the guy supplies the “gravitas,” the girl the glamour – are shook momentarily but their composure is welded on and the smooth patter continues.

The television coverage is all-day and all-consuming from stricken sites all over the city. The following day they’re back to report on the “fighting spirit” of the Angelenos as they go about re-building their homes and lives. The approach is syrupy, sentimental, determinedly upbeat – fables of the re-construction, as it were.

TV is so endemic in this culture that talking to reporters seems to come as naturally to people as talking to their families, more so, probably. And pretty soon they’re jamming the switchboards to recount their experiences. One twenty-something husband rings in to explain how he and his wife were locked in a frenzied tryst when the big rumble happened. The tremors were a drag but they got the job done. Best of all, thought, the earth moved for them.

Citizens repeatedly refer to Mother Nature and the need to respect her with the same piety Irish politicians reserve for talking about the democratic process. “It’s frightening. Mother Nature – you just don’t mess with her,” remarked a doctor in Sherman Oaks who’d just watched his neighbouring house slide down a hill. The truth, of course, is that we all mess with her and their new-found respect for her powers is a temporary conversion that will last for as long as she scares the shit out of them.

Which she continues to do right throughout the day with aftershock following aftershock, and stopping everyone in their tracks every time. A record 86 aftershocks occur in the first 17 hours after the quake and are expected to recur with decreasing frequency over the next week or ten days.

Pretty soon too, the shrinks are on air talking about the psychological after-effects on people. “Earthquakes can’t be predicted,” says Robert T. Scott, a consultant psychologist for the American Red Cross. Nobody knows they’re coming and this “sends a scary message through our primordial survival mechanism. We get jolted out of bed and everything goes into high alert. Flashing lights, crashing glass. It really charges us up. That is why earthquakes carry such emotional power.”

He’s right about the primordial nature of our fear: when an entity as fundamental and immovable (we thought) as the earth starts shifting and shuddering like that, the most deeply-held presumptions in the psyche are jarred. Like, just how stable is this set-up anyway? And if gravity isn’t sacred, what is?

And it puts other things in context too. Like politicians and clergymen in Ireland when they talk about the “fabric of our society” breaking down. If they saw the fabric of a society literally breaking down brick by brick, they mightn’t be so hung up about the breakdown, real or imagined, of the moral order. Perspective, man, perspective, as they might say over here.

Twenty-four hours later and the recovery has begun. In a city of cars, the number one item is the restoration of the collapsed freeways. Writing in the Los Angeles Times the day after, columnist Peter H. King said: “Los Angeles without freeways would be like a clock without hands, or a human body without arteries. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t live. That simple.”

No less than 13 freeways, including the Santa Monica, the busiest in the nation, suffered collapses and complete restoration, it is estimated, will take between a year and 18 months. already there has been gridlock on a grand scale and in a city where just about everybody needs a car to get around, the disruptions will endure long after the tremors have receded.

The Irish community, needless to say, will get by – or even better. Popular myth has it that McAlpine, he of the fusiliers, implored on his death bed to “keep Paddy at the mixer.” Well he’s still at it, but it’s his own now and he’s set to make a handsome profit here rebuilding the millions of dollars of damaged property.

I know, I’ve just got “the shtart” and I’m up at six in the morning – barring a disaster.