Destructive temblor seared in local history

NORTHRIDGE QUAKE: 25 YEARS LATER



MILLIONS IN DAMAGE—The inside of the Thousand Oaks Library on Jan. 17, 1994, the day a 6.7-magnitude earthquake centered in the San Fernando Valley rattled the Greater L.A. area. The damage was recorded by current Acorn staff photographer Joseph A. Garcia, then a 30-year-old photographer at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle.

MILLIONS IN DAMAGE—The inside of the Thousand Oaks Library on Jan. 17, 1994, the day a 6.7-magnitude earthquake centered in the San Fernando Valley rattled the Greater L.A. area. The damage was recorded by current Acorn staff photographer Joseph A. Garcia, then a 30-year-old photographer at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle.

Twenty-five years ago today, the ground gave way.

The Northridge earthquake struck around 4:30 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 17, 1994. For those who lived through it, it’s a moment they’ll never forget.

The 6.7-magnitude quake destroyed freeways and pancaked multilevel apartment complexes in the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles basin. It left at least 57 dead and thousands more injured.

In Ventura County, the quake triggered landslides in Fillmore and destroyed public buildings in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks.

Steve Brogden was deputy director of the Thousand Oaks Library at the time. The temblor knocked over large pieces of furniture in the T.O. home of the Des Moines, Iowa, native. The Midwesterner said he hopes he never has to experience another massive quake because “once was enough.”

“I’d never had anything like that experience,” he said. “I knew it was a bad one.”

The shaking was so violent, it literally remade local geography. The community of Fillmore moved west by 2 inches, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which studies earth science in addition to planetary exploration and space technologies. Santa Paula and Moorpark also were moved westward by 1 to 2 inches and the Point Dume area moved 1.5 inches north. It also made the Santa Susana Mountains 2 feet taller.

WHAT A MESS—Books are strewn about the Thousand Oaks Library following the Jan. 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake. Making matters worse: sheared-off sprinkler heads doused the books with water. Courtesy of Online Archive of California

WHAT A MESS—Books are strewn about the Thousand Oaks Library following the Jan. 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake. Making matters worse: sheared-off sprinkler heads doused the books with water. Courtesy of Online Archive of California

In Thousand Oaks, the quake early in the morning of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday cracked residential foundations and sent chimneys crashing to the ground.

Thousand Oaks Library suffered the largest single hit, racking up $2.5 million in damage.

The earthquake shook down the 7-inch metal strips that make up the library ceiling, which in turn damaged the building’s sprinkler system.

Water from sheared-off sprinkler heads ruined many of the books that had been flung to the ground, including 70 percent of the children’s collection, Brogden said.

The library had to relocate to 2400 Willow Lane for 18 months until repairs were completed on the Janss Road building.

TOP NEWS—The front page of The Acorn the week of the Northridge earthquake in January 1994. “The terrifying temblor struck in the predawn pitch black darkness at about 4:30 a.m. Monday, and seemed to wrench, grind and twist interminably,” the story reads. A photo shows Lorenzo Flowers cleaning up the Ralphs supermarket in Agoura Hills.

TOP NEWS—The front page of The Acorn the week of the Northridge earthquake in January 1994. “The terrifying temblor struck in the predawn pitch black darkness at about 4:30 a.m. Monday, and seemed to wrench, grind and twist interminably,” the story reads. A photo shows Lorenzo Flowers cleaning up the Ralphs supermarket in Agoura Hills.

Thousand Oaks as a whole suffered $35 million in damage, according to reports from the time. But that’s one-tenth of the cost of the damage in neighboring Simi Valley, according to a Los Angeles Times article from 1994.

Ventura County’s easternmost city sits just eight miles from the quake’s epicenter in Reseda.

The seismic event basically destroyed the Simi Valley Police Station on Cochran Street (it was later rebuilt on Alamo Street). Ventura County Fire Station 41 on Church Street was also badly damaged.

Around 400 homes in Simi Valley were seriously impacted, as were dozens of businesses, including a Pic ’N’ Save store whose entire roof had caved in. Rebuilding would take nearly a decade.

More than 1,200 injuries were reported across Ventura County, and 200 people sought emergency medical care in Simi Valley alone.

All hands on deck

 

 

Once the initial shaking stopped—intense aftershocks would follow—first responders reported for duty whether or not they were scheduled to work.

Ventura County Sheriff Cmdr. Tim Hagel was a deputy at the time. The violent shaking ripped him from sleep in the predawn hours.

Having been born and raised in earthquake country, the T.O. native grabbed his 4-year-old son from the bedroom next door and fled outside before the primary shaking subsided. Hagel turned off the gas to his Moorpark home, made sure his family was safe and then reported to the Thousand Oaks Police Department to assist in the emergency response.

“I remember thinking at the time that this was a big one, a really big one,” he said, “I’ll never forget it.”

Officers were assigned to assess every bridge and overpass in the city. Hagel was tasked with surveying the Sunset Hills Boulevard overpass, while other deputies were sent to check out the integrity of the dam at Bard Lake, a reservoir along the eastern border of the city that was created in 1965 with the construction of an earth dam that can hold over 3 billion gallons of water.

Hagel said TOPD diverted many resources to Fillmore, where more than 200 buildings had been red-tagged and a large section of the downtown had been destroyed.

Recently retired T.O. Councilmember Andy Fox, a firefighter by trade, was sleeping at home with his family when he was jolted awake by violent shaking. He assessed the damage to his home—a fallen TV set and rooms in disarray—then drove into L.A. to report for his regularly scheduled shift at Los Angeles Fire Department Station 26 on Western Avenue.

He was assigned to a strike team with his crews forced to take surface streets in order to circumvent a collapsed section of the 10 Freeway. He spent the next three days on a strike team in the San Fernando Valley, putting out fires and setting up water systems for residents with no water service.

“It could have been a lot worse,” he said.

The earthquake hit close to home for Fox. One of his childhood friends lived in the Northridge Meadows apartment building that collapsed in the shaking, killing 16 people and becoming a hallmark image of the disaster alongside photos of the ravaged Newhall Pass interchange, which had fallen onto the 14 Freeway below with lanes of the 5 Freeway ending in midair.

Current Simi Valley Mayor Keith Mashburn is a retired battalion chief with the Ventura County Fire Department. He was a fire captain at Station 45 in 1994 but was not on shift when the earthquake struck.

Despite damage to his own home, he headed out with a crew to assess the aftermath.

After a while, Mashburn started to realize his own home had suffered more damage than many of the homes he saw on duty.

It took a year to make $90,000 worth of repairs, which he had to pay for out-of-pocket because homeowner’s insurance does not cover earthquake damage.

Mashburn had purchased his childhood home from his parents, and he was in the same bedroom during the 1994 Northridge earthquake that he occupied during the 1971 San Fernando quake, also known as the Sylmar earthquake, which registered a 6.6 magnitude on the Richter scale.

“I don’t think there was a comparison,” Mashburn said. “Northridge was radically worse.”

The damage at Simi Valley High School alone was estimated at $3 million.

Newbury Park High School history teacher Steve Johnson was working at SVHS at the time. The quake shook asbestos out of the school’s ceiling and Johnson said the Simi campus was so badly damaged, SVHS students had to share the Royal High School campus with their crosstown rivals for two months while repairs were completed.

“It was really quite a horrific event,” he said. “I remember there was a really beneficial community feeling then similar to what I felt after the fires and the shooting. We were all looking out for one another.”

Lasting legacy

The Northridge earthquake caused $20 billion in property damage and remained the most expensive natural disaster in the United States until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, according to JPL.

The quake collapsed seven freeway bridges and damaged 250 more, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

It also left 7,000 single-family homes, 5,000 mobile homes, and approximately 49,000 apartments uninhabitable.

The disaster also showed that older, concrete-frame buildings were especially prone to earthquake damage, as were the welded connections in steel frame buildings. The most common failure was the collapse of “soft first stories,” where dwelling units are built on top of open ground-floor parking, according to PPIC.

The wides pread loss of housing and commercial units led to changes in building-code requirements across the state, including tieddown foundations, strengthened concrete and stronger welds for steel frame buildings.

Hagel said the quake also ushered in a new era for first responders because it catalyzed local police and fire departments to expand their urban-search-and-rescue training and to develop Disaster Assistance Response Team and Community Emergency Response Team programs to make sure civilians are prepared to respond when crisis strikes.

But when it comes to average citizens, Fox said, very few keep adequate emergency supplies, like extra nonperishable food, water and an emergency radio, on hand.

“As a general rule, I don’t think any of us are as prepared as we were supposed to be,” he said. “When you need it, you need it.”