Shaken babies, moms ride out Easter earthquake

Marci Mange is still known to refer to daughter Demi as her “Little Shaker Bunny.”

Genesis Rivas, she likes to call her daughter, Natasha, “Little Terremoto.”

Natasha and Demi turned 5 years old Saturday, born about 12 minutes apart in Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley, where their mothers were recovering from childbirth and the babies themselves were resting peacefully.

Then 3:40 p.m. came, and with it a magnitude-7.2 earthquake that grew more and more powerful as it went, lasting about a minute and a half — what must have seemed an eternity for the moms fretting over the safety of their new babes.

Although the epicenter of what locally is referred to as the 2010 Easter Sunday earthquake was anywhere from 60 to 70 miles south of Brawley, it’s effect was no less traumatic to Mange, of Holtville.

“We thought it was just a little earthquake, and then it started to really shake,” Mange said. “The nurse and I, well, we were a little emotional.”

“Little” might be an understatement, at least for Mange’s attending nurse, who started to panic.

“She really started crying, screaming and sobbing. I wasn’t as emotional as she was,” Mange said. “She was a very young nurse in her 20s, poor thing.”

The nurse had just brought Demi into Mange’s room for a feeding when the quake hit and Mange was about to get out bed for the first time since the birth.

As the shaking intensified, Mange and the nurse collected themselves long enough to hover over the bassinet to protect Demi.

Newborn Natasha Solis was in the nursery when the quake began. Rivas, of Calexico, immediately stood up and started heading for the door and her daughter.

“The nurse came in and told me to stay in the room,” Rivas said. “I said I wanted to see my baby.”

Natasha was safe, of course, but Rivas was shaken up, all alone in the hospital for the rest of the night; her parents were from Mexicali and had went home to shower earlier in the day unable to return to the U.S.

For former El Centro resident Eva Wong and her husband, Charles Wong, formerly of Calexico, things played out a little differently.

Eva said she had gone into what she believed was low-stress, normal labor around noon April 4. She was hooked up to monitors at PMH and still wasn’t all that upset through the main quake.

But it was the aftershocks — four in one hour at some point, ranging between magnitude-5.1 and 5.7 — continuing into the next morning that really took its toll on Wong.

“They tell you to relax, but I was having an emergency C-section through some of those,” she said.

Seven-plus-pound Charles Jr. came along in the early-morning hours of April 5; he is celebrating his fifth birthday today in the family’s new city of residence in a suburb outside Portland, Ore.

Although the original shaken babies just turned 5, each parent has tried to communicate the context of their birth situation in a variety of ways.

Mange, who’s mother coined the term “Little Shaker Bunny” for both the quake and the Easter connection, began to tell Demi about her birth last year.

“We would watch the videos on YouTube; home videos around the Valley,” she said. “She didn’t quite get it, but would say, ‘Look at the swimming pool, the water looks like waves.’

“She’s starting to understand,” Mange added.

The Wongs still have a copy of a special edition of the Imperial Valley Press from April 6 with the headline “Aftershocks” in big red letters that they took with them to Oregon. “We saved that for my son,” Eva said.

“Little Terremoto” doesn’t yet get the significance, Rivas said. Although her family likes to tease Natasha with her nickname, so far the day only resonates with mom.

“I know I won’t ever forget. … It was a special day,” Rivas said. “I’ll always remember the earthquake.”

Top photo by Elizabeth Varin.

Bottom photo courtesy of Charles and Eva Wong.

This story originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, April 5, 2015.