RIO DELL >> Patti Toroni awoke early Tuesday to her house jolting from side to side — tossing about like a boat at sea as her china cabinet came crashing down and items fell from the walls and smashed to the floor.

“The quake was terrifying,” said Toroni, 68, a retired care worker. “It was really the most frightening thing that’s happened to me in my whole life, and that’s saying quite a bit.”

The two cottages Toroni and her husband lived in near Highway 101 are now filled with piles of fallen furnishings and decorations. They don’t know how, exactly, they’ll get the buildings cleaned up so they can move back in, Toroni said.

“We don’t have any money,” Toroni said. “We’re at the end of our rope.”

Toroni was among the hundreds of residents left bereft after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake rocked Humboldt County early Tuesday, destroying dozens of buildings in the small logging towns of Rio Dell and Fortuna. In a region of California that ranks among the most seismically active in the state, the rupture’s speed — along with the unique way it channeled its energy ashore near the Eel River Valley — combined to cause far more destruction than many other earthquakes of similar size and magnitude, geologists and earthquake experts said Wednesday.

For residents of the hardest-hit towns, that will mean an extensive clean-up process — with rebuilding likely to be costly because few people here have the needed insurance. And for Californians elsewhere, the quake was a reminder of the unpredictable dangers of the state’s fragile geology — and the high risk of failing to prepare.

It took only seconds for the shock waves to hit the Eel River Valley from the epicenter three miles offshore, according to a simulation run Wednesday by the United States Geological Survey. But once they did, they bounced off the nearby Mendocino Range and reverberated — sloshing back and forth for roughly a minute like water in a bathtub, the simulation showed.

The shockwaves from Tuesday’s earthquake appear to have been focused to the north and east of the rupture site — causing its ripples to be felt as far north as Seattle, said Lori Dengler, emeritus professor of geology at Cal Poly Humboldt.

The initial shockwaves also hit with uncanny force, suggesting the fault ruptured with unusual speed, experts said.

“It wasn’t just people feeling freaked because it was an earthquake in the middle of the night,” Dengler said. “We have the instrumental data that makes it very clear that we’re talking about extraordinarily strong ground motion.”

Acceleration rates in Rio Dell hit 1.4 times the force of Earth’s gravity, according to data collected by the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program. Anything higher than .5 is unusual for earthquakes in California, said Susan Minson, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The devastating reality of those measurements was evident Wednesday in Rio Dell, where two dozen homes have been deemed uninhabitable, displacing about 65 people, city manager Kyle Knopp said. Another 37 homes sustained significant damage, he said. Closer to the coast, Fortuna City Manager Merritt Perry said three houses were knocked off their foundations, and dozens more suffered substantial damage, including broken chimneys and ruptured gas lines.

Shannon Lewis was also jolted out of bed early Tuesday in his yellow, single-level home into chaos and cacophony. The earthquake was shaking the top of his brick chimney into a pile of rubble, but rumbling and smashing noises were coming from every direction.

“It was loud,” he said. “It was like being on a wild ride. I could see the wall was moving.”

A sixth-generation logger and now a longshoreman, Lewis, 55, surveyed the damage afterward and wondered if his insurance would cover it. Then, “I looked at my homeowner’s plan and the first page said, ‘You do not have earthquake insurance,'” Lewis said.

Many people with damaged homes or business properties lacked quake insurance, local officials said.

Jacqui McIntosh and her husband, Shane, had earthquake insurance for a couple months last year, but, she said, “It is so astronomically expensive that we couldn’t sustain paying for it.”

Like many others in Rio Dell and other areas hit by the quake, Jacqui McIntosh, who works in human resources, and Shane, an engineer, live paycheck to paycheck. Their house was on the market. Now, after the quake knocked it off its foundation and caused severe structural damage, their real estate agent has told them it’s worthless. “We’re on our own unless emergency funds come in,” said McIntosh, 28.

County supervisor Michelle Bushnell said she was hopeful that state and federal emergency funds would help people cope with damage to homes they can’t afford to fix.

But Rio Dell fire chief Shane Wilson said officials were not yet able to advise residents on getting financial help for rebuilding. “We don’t have those next steps at this time,” Wilson said Wednesday afternoon.

City and county officials described a struggling economy that will make recovering from the earthquake even harder.

The region has seen the industries that once sustained it — illegal marijuana growing, logging, lumber milling and fishing — fade. It’s considered severely economically disadvantaged by state authorities, Knopp noted.

Residents with no earthquake insurance and little or no extra money will have a hard time getting their homes and lives back together, Perry said.

“If you’re trying to repair a gas line or fix a chimney, what else are you going to sacrifice?” Perry said.

For Toroni and her husband, there appeared to be few options available — other than to leave. As she spoke Wednesday, smoke began billowing from one of the cottages on their lot, and Toroni, hysterical, watched her already hard circumstances become even worse. Firefighters doused the blaze — which Wilson said may have resulted from an electrical problem related to the town’s power coming back on — but the cottage and its contents were further damaged by the smoke, flames and water.

“I think I’m just going to have to go somewhere else,” Toroni said. “Earthquakes,” she lamented, “shear things apart.”