25 years after the Northridge earthquake, another one could hit ‘any time.’ Are we safer?
A quarter century has passed, but David Miller will never forget the sound.
“It was like there was a freight train under my house,” he said, recalling the moment 25 years ago Thursday, Jan. 17, when the Earth’s plates suddenly slipped along a previously unknown fault 11 miles beneath his Prairie Street home in Northridge.
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What Miller heard in those predawn moments was the sound of nearby buildings collapsing. Freeways fell, gas mains burst and neighbors screamed, as a magnitude 6.7 quake jolted millions of Southern Californians awake.
“I honestly thought we weren’t going to make it,” recalls Marnie Nemcoff, who lived in Reseda, the quake’s epicenter.
The shaking was less than 20 seconds. But it was enough to kill at least 57 people, injure 9,000 and cause $40 billion in damage throughout Southland communities.
“It looked and felt like Armageddon,” Nemcoff said.
Twenty-five years later, the Northridge earthquake, the last major quake to hit Southern California, continues to impact lives, pocketbooks and public policies.
But how much has really changed in terms of technology and safety standards since the mystery fault revealed itself on that clear January morning? Are people more prepared? And when a large quake strikes again, will the damage be reduced?
The answer, experts say, is a mixed bag.
“We’re way better off than we were 25 years ago,” said John Wallace, a civil engineering professor at UCLA who focuses on earthquake readiness. “But we still have a lot more we can do.”
Technology has advanced
When the San Fernando Valley started shaking at 4:31 a.m., experts scrambled to gather analog data on outdated computers and to communicate with pagers, recalls seismologist Lucy Jones, known to many Californians simply as “the earthquake lady.”
It took them roughly an hour to share basic information on the estimated size and location of the quake, Jones said. And it took two hours for information on the first big aftershocks.
But “nothing succeeds like failure,” Jones quips. “The fact that the system failed got us a chunk of money to upgrade it.”
They went from experimenting with seven broadband digital monitoring systems — plus one Jones placed in her stepmom’s Calabasas garage after the Northridge quake — to more than 400 systems, each connected to its own computer.
“Now instead of it taking weeks to get stuff, we’re getting it in seconds,” Jones said.
That’s the basis for a new early warning system, which went live for the first time in the United States on Dec. 31 across Los Angeles via the ShakeAlertLA smartphone app.
People living near the epicenter likely won’t get advance warning through such systems, Jones said. But surrounding neighborhoods should get a few seconds or even a full minute heads-up, since shaking travels along faults more slowly than modern communication systems. That will give residents enough time to duck, cover and hold, plus give surgeons enough time to stop delicate procedures or conductors enough time to slow passenger trains.
“The earthquake early warning is where we have a lot of opportunity in the next 10 years to make our state more resilient for the next earthquake,” said Ryan Arba, seismic hazards branch chief for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
But even without a widespread early warning system, today’s technology means people can quickly get information on the size, location and scope of earthquakes.
That would have made a huge difference for the peace of mind of people like Kimberly Farrell, who lived in Westlake Village but was in China on a business trip when the 1994 quake struck.
“The most difficult thing for me in learning about the quake was seeing the apartment building in Northridge collapse on TV over and over again,” Farrell said. “It was the main footage shown in China and made it seem like all over L.A. the homes were leveled.”
Those advances in technology have also made it easier for researchers to learn not only from local earthquakes, but from disasters around the world. They can hold online conferences and instantly exchange data sets, which Wallace said happened in the wake of major quakes this decade in Chile, New Zealand and Japan. That international collaboration has helped keep earthquake preparedness moving forward in Southern California even though it’s been a quarter century since the last major temblor here.
Building safety concerns
When it comes to building safety, the Northridge earthquake was a “watershed event,” for how structures are designed and built in California, according to Wallace.
The 1994 quake was the first major test of how far California had come in making its buildings and infrastructure safer since the 6.6 jolt in Sylmar in 1971, which left 64 people dead and spurred the first detailed seismic safety standards for freeways, hospitals, dams and more. Wallace said it quickly became clear following the Northridge quake that, while California had made progress since ’71, it still had a long way to go to make buildings and roads more quake resilient.
One major lesson came from analyzing what happened to the Northridge Fashion Mall, where nearly the entire floor collapsed, and to the parking structure that fell at Cal State Northridge.
Until then, Wallace said engineers commonly designed elements of structures individually without considering how the columns would connect to the flooring systems. Today, he said it’s standard practice to design a building with an eye to how all of its elements will perform together during an earthquake.
The Northridge disaster also triggered major changes to federal, state and local building codes.
In 1995, the American Concrete Institute’s rule book for reinforced concrete structures was 30 pages long. This year, Wallace noted the guide is 60 pages.
“We’ve really come a long way in getting research implemented into building codes for new buildings,” he said.
The bigger challenge has been retrofitting existing buildings with these new safety standards in mind.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, now publishes comprehensive standards for seismic retrofitting. And a study from the National Institute of Building Science shows property owners will save $4 for every $1 they spend on earthquake readiness.
“But you have to believe that that earthquake is really going to happen,” Jones said. “And you have to be willing to invest now for something that may not happen for a long time.”
California works with FEMA to offer grants toward retrofitting for local governments, hospitals, transportation agencies and individuals, according to Arba. But it’s largely been left up to cities to actually mandate upgrades.
In 2015, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a measure requiring seismic retrofitting for two of the city’s most vulnerable types of buildings.
That includes non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings, which Wallace called “death traps.” And it includes “soft first-story buildings,” wood-frame structures with large openings on the first floor for display windows or parking. An example was the Northridge Meadows apartments, where the first story collapsed and killed 16 people during the 1994 quake.
Garcetti allowed seven years to upgrade soft-story buildings and 25 years to improve concrete structures.
Three years later, city officials said they’ve sent compliance orders to all 13,821 soft-story buildings identified in Los Angeles. And as of December, 1,370 buildings have been fully retrofitted and 7,470 are in progress.
Cities such as Santa Monica and Long Beach are developing similar retrofitting plans.
Wallace is encouraged at the progress, but he said we’re clearly “racing against time.”
“We’ve been quite fortunate now that we’ve had 25 years to make improvements before this next event, however long it’s going to be,” Wallace said. “We’ll do a lot better, but it’s not to say there won’t be damage.”
The changes are enough to help Miller feel more confident — especially since the 57-year-old now lives in a Calabasas home that’s been built since the new building codes kicked in.
“I think they’re doing a lot to make it safer,” he said.
Other aged infrastructure, such as water and power, seems to still be more precarious.
For several days after the Northridge quake, an estimated 48,500 homes had no water, some 20,000 lost gas and 9,000 homes had no power, according to a report from Arba’s office.
Nemcoff was out of her rented home for a month in 1994, waiting in a long line of stranded residents for repairs to her broken gas line.
“$2 billion in losses were due to water damage and we really haven’t done anything to address that issue,” Jones said.
Individual preparedness unsteady
Thanks largely to the Great ShakeOut program, Arba said the average Californian is more aware of the hazards and the recommended responses to earthquakes compared to 25 years ago.
The annual drill encourages people to spend one minute practicing the “drop, cover and hold on” response. More than 56 million people around the world have registered to participate since the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California started the program here in 2008.
Earthquake insurance has also undergone dramatic changes since 1994.
After California started requiring companies that sold homeowners insurance to also offer earthquake policies in 1985, there were plenty of cheap and comprehensive plans available. So roughly 40 percent of homeowners had earthquake insurance when Northridge hit.
“That all changed in a matter of seconds,” said Glenn Pomeroy, CEO of California Earthquake Authority, a nonprofit organization that offers insurance policies through member companies.
When companies were faced with $15 billion in insured losses, Pomeroy said 95 percent of providers simply stopped offering homeowners insurance altogether. The Legislature quickly authorized “mini” bare-bones earthquake policies, so companies started offering plans again. But they were pricey, with limited coverage and few choices for homeowners.
The California Earthquake Authority has been working to change that for the past 22 years. The organization, which now carries 80 percent of earthquake policies in the state, has been able to reduce prices by 55 percent, Pomeroy said, while also greatly expanding available plans. And they’re now ready to pay out more than $16 billion in claims.
But homeowners such as Pam Baker worry today’s policies still don’t go far enough.
Baker was among the 40 percent of homeowners who had earthquake insurance when Northridge hit because she’d seen the damage from the Sylmar quake. Her policy covered most of the nearly $100,000 needed to replace the chimney, fix cracks in the pool and make other repairs at her Porter Ranch home in 1994. But today, she said the coverage isn’t as comprehensive, and she worries about being left “up a creek” if another big quake strikes.
Just 13 percent of insured homeowners have earthquake policies today, according to the Department of Insurance.
There are also fewer earthquake drills in schools, Jones said, with many now sadly focused on active-shooter preparations.
“On the individual level, we are in worse shape than we were then,” she said.
Baker admits she’s fallen somewhat in line with the stereotype, where people get hyper-prepared in the aftermath of a quake but relax those efforts as the fear fades.
“I think it’s just complacency and the fact that I don’t want to think about it,” said Baker, 73, who still keeps extra water on hand but keeps meaning to put latches on her cupboards.
State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, is working on legislation aimed at improving earthquake readiness in California, with more funding for retrofitting properties, safeguarding the insurance authority and more. Details on that bill are expected this week.
The good news is that Jones said science has somewhat debunked the idea of us being “due” for another big earthquake soon.
“The amount of time since the last earthquake doesn’t seem to matter much,” she said, with historical records for some faults showing three major quakes within one 50-year period and another 300-year stretch with no big activity.
Less comforting?
“Basically,” Jones said, “at any time you could have it go.”