PA'AUILO, Hawai'i — Ross Nakashima, covered in dirt, crawled on his belly out from under his house.

He had been shoring up the foundation with bricks when visitors arrived yesterday.

"It's still livable, but I don't trust it. It's dangerous," he said.

The 47-year-old carpenter's home was one of the victims of magnitude 6.7 and 6.0 earthquakes that struck early Sunday, causing no catastrophe, but individual disasters for residents scattered across the Big Island.

Half of a little bridge carrying Highway 19 over a gully collapsed, leaving one lane to enter the community, where tin-roofed homes stand on stilts a few feet off the ground. Many date to the 1940s, when they served as a housing "camp" for a sugar plantation.

Nakashima's home, which once belonged to his grandmother, received substantial foundation damage. The bucking earth also cracked his sidewalk and knocked down a stone wall around the property. State inspectors had been by and posted "restricted use" signs.

Next door, the back half of a long-abandoned home had fallen off and slid down a hillside.

A few hundred yards down the road, Richard Horita surveyed damage to his chimney and a 14-foot-wide sinkhole that opened next to his carport and took part of the foundation with it.

Horita was away when the quake struck.

"I came home and my neighbor came over and said, 'Hey, you've got a big hole in your backyard,'" he said.

The quake left a crack in the ground extending from a community parking lot directly to his home. The sinkhole formed where his cesspool was located.

Leslie Correia, owner of Alfalfa Hay & Cubes in Pa'auilo, said the big quake felt much stronger than a 6.7. He said he looked out a window and saw his Ford pickup bouncing up and down a few inches off the ground.

"This had to be 7.5. Six-point-7 is not cutting it at this point. Just talk to the local people," he said. "The people are scared, especially with all the aftershocks. It started and it just would not stop."

There was more yellow tape around St. Joseph Catholic Church, a little mustard-color cinderblock building showing cracks, and the county-owned Pa'auilo Gym was closed because of structural damage.

"Where most of the population is, they didn't have as much damage — but it's all the rural areas that got hit bad," said Bill Bergin, 40, who was using a backhoe to dig a new cesspool for a friend. "The damage is spread out. You've got to go look for it."

Nearby, 50-year-old Sheila Miyasaki's house was in serious trouble. The back of the house had separated from a cement lanai. Wooden stilts that held the house about 5 feet high had splintered and several had shifted completely off their concrete pads.

A cinderblock wall around a pool collapsed.

Miyasaki said she had been trying to get through to a civil defense hot line but it had been busy. "Red Cross was here a few hours ago and they said it was the worst they've seen all day," she said. "They said other houses not as bad have been condemned. So I don't know if I want to get through. I've got no place to go."

To the northwest in the town of Waimea, a two-story wooden house listed dangerously to one side, completely separated from its carport and porch. A big red sign in the window read "Unsafe. Do not enter or occupy."

At the top of a nearby hill stood a partially burned home. A police officer said it was ignited when an electrical line snapped during the quake.