Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D.
17 January 2024
Anyone who has lived in California ten or fifteen years have their own earthquake stories. Mine begins in Athens, Greece. That’s not where it happened, but where my story starts. I had seen my student group off the day before, and was savoring a cup of espresso and baklava in a plaza in front of the Acropolis on January 17, 1994. It had been a good tour, in which we had visited Israel and Jordan, and then Greece. I had been the lecturer as well as director in the latter country. Ushering eighteen people through unfamiliar regions of the world was difficult in that some of the group had never been outside of Southern California—Tijuana and Las Vegas do not count. It was a bit of a challenge, and I needed a while to “decompress.” The day was clear and warm, with the sun playing hide and seek through the columns of the Parthenon high above me. I had spent the morning at the National Archaeological Museum viewing exhibits that were too specialized for the students, and was packed and ready to return home. After a leisurely walk back to the hotel for my luggage and a bus ride out to the airport, I checked through and settled down with a book in the waiting room.
My plane was called and I joined the line of people passing through the check stand. Two women stood in front of me in the queue, and, being friendly, I asked them where they were going. They said Boston and New York. They asked to where I was flying and I responded Los Angeles. Their faces immediately expressed shock and they said: “You can’t go there! Haven’t you heard? They’ve had a terrible earthquake there! The whole city is destroyed! All of the freeways are down! Cars are disappearing into cracks in the earth, and everything is on fire!” I was stunned, and turned to the man behind me and asked what he had heard. He said that he had heard the same thing on “CNN” on the television.
I didn’t know what to do but to board the plane and continue my journey. Los Angeles is a large city. Some streets, like Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards, alone, are ninety miles long. The pass through dozens of communities joined by suburbs that have grown, seamlessly, together. The region contains some ten million people in valleys that extend north and east. Usually, the most severe damage in earthquakes is quite localized, and, while they shake up the area around them, it is the epicenter that gets the worst. I decided that I could not worry until I got some specific information where it happened. When we transferred planes in Paris, I asked some other passengers what they knew. I suggested the usually active regions, such as Long Beach, Orange, San Bernardino, or the Owens Valley. One woman said that she thought it was at “north-something.” When I responded “Northridge,” she said, “Yes, that’s it.” Located in the north-central part of the San Fernando Valley, this town was not very far from my home at Thousand Oaks. Now, I worried!
When we arrived in New York, I ran up to the desk to inquire about the next leg of the flight. “Can I get to LAX (the Los Angeles Airport)?” The clerk said, “Yes. The airport was closed for several hours, but now it’s open.” I boarded the plane and, again, decided not to worry until I arrived in Los Angeles. When I arrived and walked out to get my luggage, a familiar couple was standing there. I was stunned. “What are you doing here?” I asked. They said, “But, you told us to pick you up!” “How did you get here?” I asked. “We drove,” they said with a puzzled voice. “But I thought that all of the freeways were destroyed?” “Yes, the Simi Valley Freeway on the north side of the valley, but the others are all right.”
As we drove up the pass on the San Diego Freeway and merged onto the Ventura Freeway, I could see that large portions on the north side of the valley were dark. Obviously, the electricity was off, but the freeway was fine all the way to my house. The couple had checked the rooms after the quake to see if there was any damage. Besides some books off of a shelf and a lamp fallen over—one that tips if one merely looks at it—everything was all right. Jet lag and exhaustion caught up with me, and I took a quick shower and collapsed into the bed.
I was not to sleep very long. An hour or so later, the whole house began to rock back and forth, making a tremendous noise. It continued ten seconds or so, and stopped as suddenly as it began. Then, it did it again, and again, and again. Tired as I was, there was little rest that night, and, as my internal clock was now ten hours off, I finally got up and turned on the television. The newscasts were filled with horrible pictures of damaged buildings, of miraculous rescues from crushed apartments, and of predictions of further quakes.
The next morning I went into the office at the university where I teach. While there was little visible damage at my home, my office was a shambles. A filing cabinet had fallen over. Bookshelves had “pancaked” down, spilling several thousand volumes onto the floor and on my desk, smashing the lampshade, the computer, and my favorite coffee cup.
Most of the after-quakes were small, but occasionally, there were some that really shook up things a bit. The inexplicable thing is that they began to become almost routine. It would start to shake, and I would pause to see if it was going to intensify or not. When it was over after five, ten or fifteen seconds, I would continue doing what I was doing before it started. The frequency decreased over the next few days, and then they were too rare to notice. Repairs to the bridge over Los Angeles Boulevard in Moorpark and the Simi Valley Freeway were made with surprising speed, and, over the course of the next months, the supports for other bridges were “retro-fitted” with metal straps. Californians went back to their obsessions with weather, beaches and traffic, and the earthquake was forgotten. Why worry until the next one?