LOS ANGELES – Ten years later, it's hard to imagine that on Jan. 17, 1994, so many parts of Southern California lay in ruins, thousands of its buildings smashed, millions of its people shaken both emotionally and physically, 72 of them killed.

The state university that became known that day as "The Earthquake School" has been reconstructed bigger and better than ever. Thousands of residences in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, home to 1.3 million people, also have been rebuilt, lending a like-new quality to some neighborhoods that originally went up in the Los Angeles building boom of the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

But few – if any – people who lived through the magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake have forgotten those terrifying seconds that damaged an estimated 114,000 buildings, injured some 9,000 people and caused $25 billion in damage, making the event the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history.

"It's still very vivid in my mind every time I notice the time is 4:31," said Erik Pearson, recalling the early morning hour when the ground beneath his third-floor apartment in Los Angeles' Northridge section began to shake.

Now a registered nurse, Pearson, 35, had received his emergency medical technician license just weeks before the quake, and he quickly emerged as one of the disaster's heroes. After getting his wife to safety, Pearson returned to the apartment building again and again to rescue more than 20 people.

Just a few blocks away, Lawrence Schneider was awakened by the violent shaking. In an unexplainable quirk, his house was spared any damage, so he went back to bed. A few hours later, he would discover that just two blocks to the east, California State University Northridge, where he had taught journalism for 23 years, was all but destroyed.

"We had 107 buildings on campus then, and all 107 were damaged, some beyond repair," said Carmen Ramos Chandler, director of news and information for the university. "It was the most expensive natural disaster to hit a public institution of higher learning in the history of the United States, over $400 million just to our campus alone."

Although Northridge, the section of the San Fernando Valley where the quake was centered, got the most attention, it was hardly the only part of Southern California that saw damage and tragedy that day.

Los Angeles police Officer Clarence Wayne Dean was riding his motorcycle to work from his home in Lancaster, north of the quake's epicenter, when he plunged 30 feet to his death, unable to see in the dark that a freeway interchange just ahead had collapsed.

Also killed were several people living along the San Fernando Valley's southern edge, in Studio City, Tarzana and Sherman Oaks.

In Tarzana, homemaker Judy Miller recalled how a friend's piano was tossed through a patio door and into a swimming pool. Some neighbors were so shaken, she said, that they slept in neighborhood parks for days, afraid to go inside because of the aftershocks.

On the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, which separate the valley from the rest of Los Angeles, whole sections of Interstate 10 collapsed, shutting down a key traffic artery linking downtown with the city's west side.

In downtown itself, the historic St. Vibiana's Cathedral, built in 1876 and then home to the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, was so badly damaged that it had to be condemned. The building was in danger of being torn down when the archdiocese sold it to a private developer in 1999. Now being refurbished, it is slated to reopen as a community center.

About a mile away, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home to the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, suffered more than $40 million in damage. Farther south of downtown, the Watts Towers suffered $2 million in damage that took seven years to repair.

In all, eight Southern California freeways were damaged, including the interchange of state Route 14 and Interstate 5, where Dean was killed. The interchange's collapse cut off freeway access to Los Angeles for many residents of northern Los Angeles County.

In neighboring Ventura County, the historic hamlet of Fillmore, a city of 12,000 popular with filmmakers looking for a backdrop reflecting 19th-century Americana, was all but leveled.

Soon, however, shock and awe gave way to a determination to carry on with daily life.

CSU Northridge, for example, was on winter break when the quake hit. The campus began its spring semester four weeks later, and professors held classes in tents, trailers, inflatable buildings and sometimes even on fields.

It took eight years to complete, but the campus was rebuilt from top to bottom, with a new administration building, a new computer center, and every single nook and cranny wired for the Internet.

"There are some silver linings in every cloud, and one of the things for us is we were able to upgrade as much as we could," said CSUN's Chandler.

Fillmore also rebuilt, and Deputy City Clerk Steve McClary said his city looks better than it did before.

The Santa Monica Freeway, meanwhile, reopened just 66 days after the temblor, 74 days ahead of schedule, thanks to the around-the-clock efforts of construction workers whose company earned a $14.8 million bonus for the early completion.

Not everything proceeded smoothly. Only about $15 billion of the quake's damage was insured, and many people had to borrow money to rebuild.

Even some who were insured, such as veteran Los Angeles Unified School District special education teacher Greg Messigian, had to take out low-interest federal loans to pay for damage that wasn't covered.

"Just last year we paid that off," Messigian said of the money he borrowed to repair part of the $140,000 in damage to his Northridge home. "It took us almost 10 years, and I'm sure there are people who still owe."

Some people fled the area in the days after the quake. Among them was Pearson, the hero of Northridge Meadows, who said his wife was too scared to live in Los Angeles any longer. He moved about 100 miles away to Temecula.

His apartment building's manager, Pat Mekinski, moved with her husband to Henderson, Nev.

"I'll never come back to California," she said recently.