At 7:02, they heard distant thunder that sounded like the roar of ten thousand jet engines. The sky screamed overhead, and the wind whipped over the top of their mountain like a hurricane. To Manuel, it felt as if some great vacuum had been created in the heavens that was sucking up everything in the atmosphere. From one second to the next Manuel did not know if he wanted to live or die. Surely nothing alive could possibly survive what was taking place at that hour.

Every member of the Quintana family was fully submerged under two feet of water like creatures in suspended animation. The life-saving fluid around them was growing hotter by the second. But at the moment of impact, they were still alive.

In the distance there was a tremendous explosion, and the earth shook like nothing they had ever felt before. Seconds after the meteor struck the water, they heard a deafening roar and an explosion thousands of times louder than anything they had ever heard in their lives. Outside the water, Manuel thought, surely our ears would have been shattered. Surely we would have been roasted alive! The scalding wave of heat shot over their mountain at that instant. But the Quintanas stayed low in the water, praying silently, shaking, and waiting. Waiting to see what would come next.

There was no logical explanation why the water in their shallow hiding places did not boil them alive or simply evaporate—or why the resulting shock waves did not collapse the fragile walls of their tiny makeshift trenches. Later, when they were asked about their harrowing experience, Manuel and Cathy Quintana would simply say, “God must have wanted witnesses to what happened out there that night. He put His hand down on top of Mount Wilson to protect us. That’s all we know. We have no other explanation.”

WHAT THEY DISCOVERED after it was all over, was that at 7:03 P.M., Pacific Coast time, three hundred billion pounds of blazing rock plunged into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, then immediately pounded the ocean floor with an explosive force equivalent to five thousand of the most powerful nuclear warheads on earth. Geysers of scalding hot steam shot up miles into the evening sky, followed immediately by a circular wall of water that rose over one mile above the earth’s surface, then spread out in every direction at lightning speed.

Within minutes of impact, petroleum products stored in California depots from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo burst into flame. Fuel lines leading from offshore oil wells had ruptured at impact. The crude oil and natural gas from deep offshore had been ignited, setting the sea itself ablaze.

Towering waves were crowned with blazing crude oil, and the massive tidal wave from hell raced across the Los Angeles Basin, burning, drowning, and destroying everything in its path. Nothing could stand against it. Nothing could have lived in its wake.

Minutes later, the boiling, surging seawater overflowed everything from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Every inch of Greater Los Angeles and Orange County was suddenly under five thousand feet of water.