The most tragic result of the violent shaking was the collapse of some double-decked sections of Interstate 880. The ground motions caused the upper deck to sway, shattering the concrete support columns along a one-mile section of the freeway. The upper deck then collapsed onto the lower roadway, flattening cars as if they were aluminum beverage cans. This earthquake, named the Loma Prieta quake for its point of origin, claimed 67 lives.
In mid-January 1994, less than five years after the Loma Prieta earthquake devastated portions of the San Francisco Bay Area, a major earthquake struck the Northridge area of Los Angeles. Although not the fabled “Big One,” this moderate 6.7 magnitude earthquake left 57 dead, more than 5,000 injured, and tens of thousands of households without water and electricity. The damage exceeded $40 billion and was attributed to a previously unknown fault that ruptured 18 kilometers (11 miles) beneath Northridge.
The Northridge earthquake began at 4:31 a.m. and lasted roughly 40 seconds. During this brief period, the quake terrorized the entire Los Angeles area (Figure 2). In the three-story Northridge Meadows apartment complex, 16 people died when sections of the upper floors collapsed onto the first-floor units. An investigation revealed that improperly attached floor joists contributed to the collapse. Nearly 300 schools were seriously damaged, and a dozen major roadways buckled. Among these were two of California’s major arteries—the Golden State Freeway (Interstate 5), where an overpass collapsed completely and blocked the roadway, and the Santa Monica Freeway. Fortunately, these roadways had practically no traffic at this early morning hour.
In nearby Granada Hills, broken gas lines were set ablaze while the streets flooded from broken water mains. Seventy homes burned in the Sylmar area. A 64-car freight train derailed, including some cars carrying hazardous cargo. It is remarkable that the destruction was not greater. Unquestionably, the reinforcement of structures to meet building codes developed for this earthquake-prone area helped minimize what could have been a much greater human tragedy.
