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Earthquake Strikes Los Angeles

THE bed lurched forward, jolting us awake. The noise was as if thousands of tiny hammers were beating on the backs of all the walls and the ceiling. I bounded out of bed and headed for the children’s room. My wife said: “Earthquake!”

The beds had moved out from the wall. A few things had fallen. But we had no damage. Others had not fared so well!

The first early-morning radio reports said the damage was minor. The reporters did not yet know that two hospitals had collapsed, that scores of persons had been killed and that thousands of homes were damaged. Telephones in the disaster area no longer worked, and there was no immediate way of getting the word out.

Then, reports began to come in from the communities of Sylmar and San Fernando, in the northern part of the great city of Los Angeles. They were terrifying.

Three buildings at the San Fernando Veterans Hospital (some twenty-five miles northwest of central Los Angeles) had crashed into rubble, claiming forty-six lives. A mile to the west, the new Olive View Hospital had broken apart under the wrenching force of the quake. Astoundingly, only three persons died in its collapse.

More than half the inside wall was shaken from the huge Van Norman Dam, in the foothills north of the heavily populated San Fernando Valley. Another shock could have sent 3,600,000,000 gallons of water cascading onto homes below. Police cars with loudspeakers ordered the evacuation of a twelve-square-mile area, and a thousand policemen patrolled the area to prevent looting of the 22,000 empty houses. It took three and a half days to get the water down to a safe level so that the 80,000 evacuees could return.

Emptying the water, repairing the 1,100-foot-dam and refilling the lakes could take three years.

Meanwhile, a life-and-death struggle was under way at the Veterans Hospital. Since telephone communications had been destroyed, it was about an hour and twenty minutes before authorities were aware of the catastrophe here. Deputy fire chief Kenneth Long flew over in a helicopter, saw the wreckage and the injured lying on blankets on the hospital grounds and radioed for rescue squads.

Using bare hands, jackhammers, torches and cranes, crews delicately carved the wreckage into small chunks and lifted them away, to find survivors underneath. By nightfall twenty-six persons had been saved, and sixteen dead counted.

Arc lights were set up so the search could go on. The next day, Wednesday, the grim task continued. Then, Thursday afternoon, two and a half days after the quake, a hand waved from underneath a pile of rubble. Frank Carbonara, sixty-eight, had spent fifty-eight hours under a concrete slab, listening helplessly as rescuers worked above him.

His injuries? Merely a broken hand!

Extent of the Damage

The quake’s first shock had occurred about 6 a.m., Tuesday, February 9. It was followed by another at 6:01, then by four more so close together that most people probably thought they were one long quake. The series lasted five minutes and eleven seconds. In the next thirteen days two hundred aftershocks rolled through the Los Angeles area. These could continue for months.

The quake occurred in the maze of faults, or earth cracks, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Geologists say the mountains rose four feet and pushed out three or four feet over the valley floor. Several thousand landslides occurred in these mountains, which rise like a wall behind the heavily populated San Fernando Valley.

Days after the quake, many city dwellers, accustomed to having water, telephones, sewage and piped-in gas for heating and cooking, had little or none of these. They waited for new gas lines to be installed and carried bottles of water from trucks stationed throughout the area at crossroads and shopping centers. And people talked to their friends about how good it was to be invited for a hot shower at someone’s home outside the area.

Thirty-five schools reported “major structural damage,” and parts of eleven would have to be torn down for “safety and security reasons.”

Broken gas lines touched off hundreds of fires. The city’s oldest residence, the Avila Adobe, which had survived quakes for a century and a half, was severely damaged. A hundred thousand volumes were thrown from the shelves of the central library.

Twelve bridges crashed onto multilane superhighways (the famed Los Angeles “freeways”). A concrete overpass smashed down onto a pickup truck, crushing its two occupants.

One of the epicenters of a “supplemental” quake is believed to have been a mile below ground, under the highway interchange between the Golden State and the Foothill freeways. This destroyed five of the interchange’s ten bridges and severely damaged the other five.

The earthquake shattered the Sylmar end of the “intertie,” the world’s longest direct-current electrical line. This line shunts up to 800,000 volts of electrical power 846 miles between California and Oregon, sending electricity north for winter heating, and south for summer air conditioning. Estimates were that it might take up to eighteen months to restore this service, and that the destruction could mean “historic energy problems at both ends of the intertie.”

The Concern Grows

Southern California is a relatively new built-up area. People have moved here from all parts of the United States, leaving family and friends “back East,” as southern Californians call the areas from which they came.

Relatives from “back East,” and Californians trying to contact them, flooded the telephones with such a monumental communications jam that these services were swamped for days. On the day of the quake more than 5.2 million long-distance phone calls were made out of the city’s central area alone. Uncounted other persons tried to call but could not do so. For many residents, it was two or three days before they could get a phone line to tell their families that Los Angeles had not really slipped into the sea, and that they were fine.

Tall Buildings

Until just over a decade ago buildings were restricted to a height of thirteen stories in this earthquake-prone area. Now tall buildings, up to forty-three stories high, are scattered throughout this sprawling city. These new high-rise apartment and office buildings rode out the quake very well, generally suffering only minor damage. Occidental Center’s thirty-two-story tower had only two broken windows, while 169 buildings, most of them two- or three-story masonry structures, were damaged in or near the downtown area.

At Pacoima Dam, north of San Fernando, the force of the earthquake’s thrust was recorded at 50 percent of gravity, which is said to have been the strongest horizontal thrust of an earthquake ever recorded anywhere in the world. This would be the equivalent of a 5,000-ton push against a 10,000-ton building.

In the new Century City complex of tall buildings, just west of Beverly Hills, the force was 17 percent of gravity, equivalent to a 1,700-ton push against a 10,000-ton building. The Century City buildings suffered only, minor cracks to partitions inside. Dr. George Housner, chief of seismic research at the California Institute of Technology, said: “The engineering that has gone into recent buildings has really paid off.”

What It Was Like

Hardest hit were the communities of Sylmar and San Fernando, in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley.

“How far do they say you were from the center of the quake?” I asked Russell Burke, whose house in Sylmar looked as if a mighty hand had pushed it over. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “it was right here!”

You see newspaper pictures of earthquake damage and assume it affected a house or two. But it is a sobering thing to drive over cracks in the pavement, for block after block, realizing that these were caused by the earth’s upheaving. Roofs sagged. Walls fell. Chimneys were torn from houses and thrown out across yards, leaving gaping holes where they once had been part of the wall.

People whose homes were dangerously damaged spent the next few nights sleeping in their yards, under tents or simply on mattresses under the stars. They cooked in fireplaces and on camp stoves.

The quake struck before sunrise. “Everything in the house was down on the floor,” was a common expression. People climbed out of their darkened houses over dressers, bookcases, lamp fixtures and broken mirrors. Grant Sad, in Sylmar, thought his house had been hit by an airplane. He said: “There was no rumbling, no rushing, just one big explosion of sound.”

Patricia Helzer said the noise was so great that it drowned out the sound of everything that broke in the house. “I never heard a dish break,” she said, “but I ended up with only two cups and two bowls left.” Outside, she could see the earth still rolling. There are ridges in her lawn six to eight inches high, and they were not there before.

Ray Spendley, who lives in one of the canyons above San Fernando, says he could see the hills swaying. When the rumbling stopped, Roy Fizer said he began to hear explosions. “A man yelled that we were being bombed.” But the explosions were from broken gas mains. “In front of my house there were two holes, approximately ten feet across,” he said. “You could drop an automobile in them easily.”

Frank Nitti said: “There was a shock, and our property buckled. The lot is narrower than it was before.”

Personal Attention

Overseers of congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses made house-to-house checks of every Witness family. Ralph Allen even checked on all the families with whom members of his congregation conducted home Bible studies​—a fact that surprised and elated many of them.

About half the Sepulveda congregation’s members lived in the area that had to evacuate below the Van Norman Dam. By noon its overseer had accounted for 90 percent of the congregation​—all who had not already gone to relatives’ homes. The morning after the quake, a group gathered for their regular door-to-door Bible teaching activity. This congregation of 147 persons had an attendance of 190 at their midweek Service Meeting, and 241 attended the following Sunday.

“You can point out to people,” one of Jehovah’s witnesses said, “that the increase of ‘earthquakes in one place after another’ was part of the great sign that Jesus Christ gave in Matthew 24 to mark the rapidly approaching end of this present system. But earthquakes here and now seem to be an entirely different matter!”

How to Survive

A quake strikes suddenly. Before you can flee, it is usually over. Do not panic. Stay clear of anything that could fall. In a house head for an inside doorway (a doorframe is much less apt to fall than is a room’s ceiling), or get under a table. Stay away from windows and outside walls. If outside, get away from windows, masonry, walls or chimneys. In tall buildings, get under a desk.

When the quake subsides, check for injured persons and for fires. Verify the gas, and close main valves if necessary. Wear shoes​—remember that broken glass is likely to be anywhere.

This was not the “great” quake that experts have been predicting for California. The notorious San Andreas Fault, where a steady buildup of strain has long been under way, was not involved in the February trembler.

As earthquakes go, this was not a particularly severe one​—it just happened in a developed area. It was nothing like the 1970 earthquake that killed 50,000 persons in Peru, nor the one in Iran in 1968 that killed 11,000. But it was serious to those who were caught in it, and it was a catastrophe to those who lost lives and homes.​—Contributed.