(NVR) - Jean Crawford was dozing in her living room recliner in the pre-dawn last August when she snapped awake for reasons she still can’t explain.

The clock read 3:15 a.m. Crawford gathered herself and prepared for bed.

She was still in the hallway five minutes later when the floor of her house in the Napa Valley Mobile Home Park began to shake and rumble.

“It felt like I was in a paint can shaker at a hardware store,” Crawford said last week.

The 70-year-old fell to her knees and asked herself: Should she scream? Crawford decided she should.

“I kept saying, ‘Please stop, please stop, please stop,’ until it was over,” she said.

As Crawford crawled through the darkened home a few minutes later, navigating fallen furniture and broken glass, she noticed a heavy bookcase crashed against her chair – the very spot where she had been resting her head moments earlier.

Crawford, who calls herself a Christian woman, said the message was clear.

"It was a wake-up call from God,” she said.

The 6.0-magnitude earthquake was the strongest in the Bay Area since 1989 and the strongest jolt to Napa County in a century. It occurred on the West Napa Fault, seven miles below the ground in a marshy area off Milton Road south of the city of Napa. The rupture sent shock waves north and south, creating rarely seen fissures that buckled roads and sidewalks.

Six months after the violent shaking spilled wine barrels, toppled chimneys, moved homes off foundations and crumpled the historic facades of Napa’s oldest, most iconic downtown buildings, evidence of the quake is fast disappearing.

With each passing day, more scaffolding is removed from repaired downtown buildings. More residents are finishing repairs to foundations and chimneys. Cracked roads and sidewalks have been made right.

Napans weren’t devastated; they were determined, officials said.

Despite the official estimate of $442 million in damages – a risk management firm puts losses closer to $1 billion – the Napa Valley is open for business. In fact, it’s booming, said Clay Gregory, president and CEO of Visit Napa Valley.

“We don’t even acknowledge that there was an earthquake,” Gregory said. “We haven’t talked about it since three weeks after it happened.”

Crawford and her house made it through the disaster mostly unscathed, but her neighbors weren’t so lucky. A gas line ruptured across the street, destroying four homes and damaging others in the park, which houses primarily older tenants.

More than 200 people were injured across the valley, and Laurie Anne Thompson, a 65-year-old Napa grandmother, died several weeks after the quake after a falling television struck her head, causing a brain hemorrhage.

Crawford, seated in that recliner months later, was still unnerved as she recalled the violence of that August morning, acknowledging that she could have been killed, too.

“It was the scariest thing I’ve been through,” she said.

But the residents of Napa Valley Mobile Home Park in north Napa are resilient. Last week construction crews were putting the final touches on several brand new homes on the lots that were filled with ash and debris just months ago.

Crawford’s friend and neighbor, Nola Rawlins, said she’s hoping to move back into the mobile home park by March in a new unit. She’s been staying with her daughter in Lake County since her home burned.

She will be relieved to be independent again.

“I’m looking forward to getting back in and having a house of my own,” Rawlins, 84, said. “I’m excited about getting back to my friends.”

THE COST OF REPAIRS

Christina Jamieson doesn’t have many friends, aside from her two poodles. The 66-year-old housekeeper, a widow from Germany, is working such long hours that she doesn’t have much time to socialize.

But until the earthquake, Jamieson had something she truly loved – her two-story Victorian on Oak Street in Old Town.

The quake hit Jamieson’s neighborhood – along with Browns Valley in west Napa – particularly hard. Many of the historic homes were built in the 1800s and early 1900s and had older foundations with original cripple walls less resistant against seismic movements.

Her house, which was built in the 1880s and purchased by Jamieson and her late husband in the 1990s, initially seemed to survive the tremors. But its foundation collapsed four days after the quake and the home started leaning.

It was such a hazardous situation that the house next door was red-tagged, prohibiting entry and briefly forcing Jamieson’s neighbors from their home.

Jamieson felt bad, but says she didn’t have the several hundred thousand dollars needed to stabilize the structure.

“They were my friends, but suddenly not so friendly,” Jamieson said. “People think because I own this home I am very wealthy, but I’m not. I work day and night.”

She was able to find money to stabilize the house after refinancing her mortgage with Wells Fargo and receiving assistance from the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she said.

Jamieson’s home was one of about 170 buildings in the city that were initially red-tagged, making them uninhabitable, with about 1,700 more cautionary yellow-tagged. About 150 buildings remain red-tagged and 1,500 remain yellow-tagged, according to the city.

About 1,135 building permits for earthquake repairs have been issued, mostly for residents to deal with chimneys and foundations, with 443 jobs completed. At least 11 structures were slated for demolition.

The city is still issuing about five or six permits every day as more people receive grants and loans to repair damage, said Keith Marks, a city building inspector.

Connie Ramey had two chimneys collapse on her Second Street home. She received a small grant from FEMA, she said, but is waiting to apply for a building permit.

“I was told to wait until the rush is over,” Ramey said. “Everybody is fixing their chimneys right now.”

Dan Kavarian, the city’s senior building official, said the city is working with the California Earthquake Committee on a brace and bolt program to retrofit about 75 homes in Napa with cripple walls less than four feet tall.

The retrofitting of homes is voluntary, and some owners can’t afford the $3,000 to $10,000 to fortify their cripple walls without assistance, he said.

“If people can’t afford it, they can’t afford it,” Kavarian said. “We want everybody to be safe and stuff, but money is part of the problem. We’re hoping for the best with funding and outreach from other agencies that have the kind of money to make a difference.”

Many Napa residents needed the assistance, but it wasn’t immediate.

The federal government wasn’t authorized to provide financial help to individual residents and businesses until after President Barack Obama signed off on the emergency funding in late October.

The deadline to apply for federal aid was in December. As of last week, FEMA provided $10.9 million in individual assistance and the U.S. Small Business Administration had given $35.8 million for homeowners and businesses.

The maximum individual grant from FEMA was for $32,900, while the SBA offered loans up to $200,000 for house repairs and loans up to $40,000 to replace personal property.

Jamieson received the full $32,900 from FEMA, she says, but was denied a SBA loan because officials didn’t think she could pay back the money after she refinanced her bank loan, she said.

She has a chance to appeal the SBA ruling, which could be necessary if she hopes to live in her home again.

The federal and city funds helped her repair her foundation, but she won’t have money left to fix the inside.

Jamieson is thankful and optimistic it will work out, however. She credits the city, FEMA and especially U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein – who toured her home and spoke to her bank managers, she said – for getting her this far.

But there’s a long way to go. Jamieson has been living on the couch of one of her housekeeping clients in exchange for cleaning and laundry services.

There’s a yard for her dogs, she said, but she longs to return home.

“For 29 years of my life, I spent every day saving everything. I never went out for dinner unless somebody offered me, and that didn’t happen too often,” Jamieson said. “All my money went into the house. All the repairs I paid for myself. At this point there’s just not any money to go around.”

RECOVERY

If you didn’t know an earthquake happened in Napa six months ago, could you tell?

The scaffolding and construction that remain downtown is so minimally intrusive it could be mistaken for redevelopment or beautification efforts.

Napa Mayor Jill Techel said that’s because the city has devoted business owners and developers who believe in their investments.

“We are incredibly lucky compared to other cities that have faced disaster like this,” Techel said, referencing the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. “Santa Cruz was boarded up for years, but people here didn’t board up their buildings and walk away.”

Napa was lucky the quake happened early in the morning before most people were out of bed.

Patrons were off the street when brick and stone fell from the facades of historic buildings, such as Alexandria Square, the Goodman Library and Brian Silver’s Law Center.

Restaurants and shops were empty. If the earthquake had happened during a busy dinner rush, more injuries would have been certain, officials said.

But that wasn't the case. The damage was limited to buildings, which can now be fixed and strengthened.

Alexandria Square is already under repair, and Silver’s building has been stabilized. Development continues in the city, such as Todd Zapolski’s plans for a new Town Center and a five-story hotel.

“The Archer hotel was approved a week before the quake and they’re moving ahead with their plans,” Techel said. “Those things could have been catastrophic, people pulling back and saying this isn’t a good time to invest in Napa.”

Government-owned buildings such as the Goodman Library, the Historic Courthouse and the Second Street Post Office have lagged private owners, but repair measures are mostly underway.

The City Council recently approved a contract with a firm to assess repairs on its historic Goodman Library and other buildings. The early estimate was $6.8 million in damage, but that rough number is likely to change after the contractors' evaluations.

A drive up Napa Valley doesn’t reveal many clues of prior destruction, either.

The Trefethen Family Vineyards made international headlines when its tasting room and visitor center began leaning after the earthquake.

Hailey Trefethen, 28, said her family’s first priority was to stabilize the building and focus on the grape harvest. Engineers are only just starting to evaluate the building.

“No one knows exactly how the building will react when we move it back to vertical,” she said.

Trefethen said the wine industry, which lost an estimated $80 million in wine and building damage, was thankful the quake didn’t happen a month later, when tanks would have been full of wine from the 2014 crush.

Their tasting room was closed for a month, but opened in a temporary location on the estate. “The best thing is we have wine to sell,” she said.

And the tourists keep coming.

Gregory, of Visit Napa Valley, said hotel revenues were down 1.8 percent and 2.2 percent in August and September compared to last year. But visitation crept up 4.4 percent in October and 0.6 percent in November, even with the Andaz and Westin Verasa hotels closed much of the time.

Revenue in December was up 14.3 percent, he said, with January up 23.5 percent. That’s as big of a jump as Gregory has seen, he said.

He credits the local and regional travel advertising agencies for getting Napa’s message out.

“Everybody got the message that the Napa Valley was open for business,” he said. “We couldn’t be more pleased about how things have gone.”

Gregory said the Napa community was unique, noting the $10 million in emergency response donations from the Napa Valley Vintners immediately after the earthquake, long before FEMA money started flowing.

“This valley comes together in ways that very few communities can,” he said.

The quick response doesn’t minimize the hard work that went on behind the scenes. City and county staffers have been working in overdrive since August.

Joy Eldredge, the city’s water general manager, said staffers dealt with 120 water pipe breaks in the first week. That’s more than a year’s worth, she said.

In the last six months the city has had 241 breaks. It has started to slow in the last three weeks, but Eldredge said geologists expect movement in tectonic plates to continue for months.

That will take its toll on the city, she said. “We’ve got a lot of tired guys. It hasn’t been easy.”

Kavarian said it’s too early for city inspectors to determine what they learned from the South Napa quake. Structural engineers from Berkeley are still reviewing how buildings reacted to the earthquake.

His next step is preparing for the next disaster, he said. That means the necessary forms, tape and placards are ready to go at a moment’s notice, he said.

“We were better prepared this time than a lot of people were. It could have been quicker if we had everything in place at one time,” he said. “But we’ll be more effective next time."

Techel said the interest in Napa after the earthquake proves its international relevance. But the quick response to the disaster says more about the community, she said.