Living in the Red Zone : The Northridge Quake Tested the Limits of Our Engineering, Revealing That Our City Is Built Beyond the Limits of Our Knowledge. In Post-Illusion L.A., Even the Familiar Won’t Feel the Same.

A few days after the Northridge quake, on the morning when five aftershocks hit within 18 minutes, a geologist or seismologist or some kind of “ologist” assured a local new camera: “This earthquake is continuing in a normal pattern.”

Excuse me, but was that supposed to make us feel any better--that Northridge was a “normal” earthquake?

The TV people evidently thought so. As a good journalist, I should be able to report exactly which stations and which broadcasters I’m referring to, but days after channel-zapping from one quake-cast to another, I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Whoever they were, the man and woman on camera assumed their most reassuring expressions and most soothing voices, then lectured for several minutes about how we’re not supposed to panic because this was, after all, the normal behavior of a normal quake.

While they spoke, I looked around my cozy West Hollywood apartment at the cracks in my ceilings and walls--cracks I had been officially assured are cosmetic, not structural.

“Cosmetic” means your plaster’s cracking. “Structural” means your building is falling apart. The inspectors were understandable very busy and burdened with an enormous responsibility; imagine the guilt of an inspector who declared a building safe, only to see it fall down. So most inspectors didn’t have time or inclination to stick around and explain that cosmetic cracks occured where there was some structural strain, but in these spots the structure held.

Sitting in my apartment, trying to accept the reassurance of both the inspectors and the broadcasters, I reflected that my building was inspected before the flurry of aftershocks that had just scared the crap out of me. In fact, there have been many aftershocks after the inspection. Therefore, I have a question:

Are all the cracks cosmetic, or have those umpteen aftershocks caused more damage? We’re told that there will be hundreds more. Just because I can’t feel most of them, does that mean my building can’t? The inspectors cannot check every structure after every shock. That’s just not humanly possible. So am I still not to be concerned because this was only the normal behavior of a normal quake?

As often happens when I’m watching television, I couldn’t figure out who was crazy, me or the television. This time I didn’t think it was me.

Don’t be an alarmist, my friends said. I said, What’s more alarming, accepting an unreal version of a dangerous situation or attempting to assess the reality?

ONE ASPECT OF THIS REALITY IS THAT, ALL REASSURANCES aside, Northridge was not a “normal” quake. By that I mean: It was not the quake our politicians and scientists had planned for--insofar as they’d planned at all. State Sen. Tom Hayden of Santa Monica announced two weeks after the quake his discovery that, from fiscal 1990 through fiscal 1993, California spent more money on freeway landscape than on freeway retrofitting. (I emphasize this in italics because it’s the only way I can scream in print.) Since were not allowed to picnic by the sides of freeways, our elected and appointed officials couldn’t have been planning for a picnic, and they certainly weren’t planning for earthquakes. Somehow the people in charge decided it was more important for our freeways to be well-groomed than sturdy.

Well that, at least, is normal. We’ve learned not to expect much from people in charge. But what if the money had been spent for retrofitting instead of landscaping? This seemingly innocent question received a frightening answer when Caltrans’ chief bridge engineer, James Roberts, admitted that retrofitting would not have held up most of the freeways that collapsed in the Northridge quake.

For instance, where the Interstate 5/Antelope Valley Freeway interchange went down, Roberts said, the road swayed 10 feet. Retrofitting planned for that road was calculated for a only a two- to three-foot sway--only 20% or 30% of what was needed. It wouldn’t have saved that interchange.

Not that retrofitting was useless. Far from it. Many damaged brick buildings might have collapsed entirely without retrofitting, and nobody knows how many other freeways might have gone down if they hadn’t been retrofitted. But we’re learning that the variables are such that retrofitting is more a hope than a plan.

Why was Caltrans’ planning about the collapsed interchange so inaccurate? Because nobody knew about the fault that caused the Northridge quake until it shook.

It’s a “buried thrust fault”; it constitutes what Caltech’s James Dolan called “a whole seismic hazard that we didn’t even appreciate until six years ago.” And no one understood the connection between faults. Seismologists used to say, as a matter of course, that quakes near one another weren’t connected. Now they’re saying, as Tom Henyey of the Southern California Earthquake Center told Newsweek, that it’s theoretically possible that one quake could “jump from fault to fault (across) the full 100-mile fault zone,” causing “an earthquake that registers close to an 8.” That 125 time more powerful than Northridge, albeit spread over a larger area. In other words, the Big One could come at us from several directions now, not just from the San Andreas. Or we could have several Big Ones, a possibility beyond my shaken comprehension.

So let’s define “normal” here. We’ve learned that we don’t know where all the faults are; we don’t know how they’re connected, if in fact they are connected; we don’t know whether they’ll shake horizontally or vertically; we don’t know how hard they’ll shake, and we don’t know when.

Our building codes are based on the more common horizontal quakes. They were formulated long before Northridge-style vertical quakes added an additional threat. Now we find out that the Los Angeles area is honeycombed with possibilities for Northridge-type quakes--which means we don’t know how good our codes are anymore. If we don’t know how good our codes are, then how can we know how good our inspection standards are? Hence how can we know, with any reasonable level of certainty, whether a building that withstood the last aftershock can withstand the next?

Where does all this leave me, as just another Angeleno renter, in my cozy West Hollywood apartment? It leaves me staring at cracks in the ceilings, cracks in the walls and cracks in the bathroom tile, and feeling that they’re connected, crack by crack, to forces deep in the earth, forces about which we have only the thinnest understanding. In other circumstances such a profound connection to nature might delight me, but at the moment it’s scaring me senseless.

Is there anyone who hasn’t awakened in the night terrified (or at least anxious) as a truck passes, or when a neighbor upstairs drops something, or when they have some half-remembered earthquake dream? We’ve watched all the commentators and the Caltech scientists, we’ve read all the magazine articles, and what have we learned? To use the word that’s obsessed me since that television broadcast, we’ve learned that, when it comes to temblors, the actual “normal pattern” for our “normal earthquake” is: We don’t know.

The experts know little, the people we entrusted with our state and city government know less, and we citizens know even less (if that’s possible). Which makes calling for more efficient earthquake management a kind of cry in the wilderness. How can people be more efficient about what they don’t know?

The Northridge quake, more than any other in California history, has introduced us to the limits of our knowledge.

In this sense, maybe it’s good that that section of the Santa Monica Freeway collapsed, especially since no one got hurt there. It makes the Northridge quake harder to forget.

For we’re good at forgetting in Los Angeles. We’d long forgotten that the area beneath the freeway at La Cienega and Venice, where the road fell, was once a marsh ( la cienega is Spanish for the swamp ); marshes aren’t very secure for the building of heavy structures. We’d forgotten that much of Santa Monica, Venice and Marina del Rey are landfill, where quake-waves can turn the earth to quicksand and sink buildings. We’d forgotten that only four aqueducts carry water to Los Angeles; all of them go through dangerous fault territory, and two of them broke during the Northridge quake. Most of all, we’d forgotten (or we’ve never known) that just because our civilization knows more science than any other in history, that doesn’t mean we know enough, or nearly enough.

We’ve built an entire way of life beyond the limits of our knowledge.

We did it innocently enough, and with the best intentions. We did it without knowing we were doing it. We did it without planning to do it. But we certainly did do it, and we are now living in the consequences (some of us are actually living in the rubble) of what we’ve done.

To realize that we live in a city built beyond the limits of our knowledge is, in itself, an earthquake--a kind of mental earthquake that grows larger on one’s personal Richter scale when you realize that, even in a recession, California is responsible for one-eighth of America’s total economic output.

Being only one state in 50, one-eighth of the U.S. economy is an awful lot. (For the newest technologies it’s even more than one-eighth; according to Inc. magazine, 32 of America’s 100 fastest-growing companies are in California.) So if our output is threatened by not one but several Big Ones, as the Northridge quake indicates, then it’s not only California that will bear the consequences of our precarious situation. The Big One, or rather those Big Ones, could deal a staggering blow to our entire nation’s economy.

A dizzying thought. You or I, individually, can leave California, but the United States can’t leave California. We are united as a country, then, in living audaciously, on the edge, whether we like it or not, hoping that our luck will hold as our knowledge grows. We Californians are directly at risk, but economically the risk here has a ripple effect that could hurt all of America, and all of the world. National economies are so interconnected now that a Big One, or series of Big Ones, crippling California would be felt everywhere in one way or another.

THAT’S A LITTLE HARD TO TAKE HERE IN THIS APARTMENT WHERE THE PLASTER is cracked at virtually every place two walls meet. Here, three stories up in an old four-story brick building (a building that has yet to be retrofitted) . . . looking out over miles of rooftops . . . always a helicopter or jet somewhere in the sky . . . constant traffic and many sirens . . . loud music now and again . . . screams sometimes . . . once in a great while some gunfire (it’s still relatively peaceful in West Hollywood, at least as far as guns are concerned) . . . the usual urban cacophony . . . here, everything is superficially the same, yet it’s as though the Northridge quake has changed the view out my window. It all looks the same, but nothing feels the same.

There are little things, like my new driving habits. Now when I drive under or over a freeway overpass, I gun it, and traffic tickets be damned. If I’m in slow traffic and it looks like I’ll have to stop under an overpass, I stop before the overpass, however much space is in front of me. Honk all you want, I ain’t moving. Think of it this way (if you happen to be honking): I’m doing you a favor, too. If it’s not going to fall on (or under) me, it won’t fall on the cars behind me either.

And I’m choosier about where I park. Some parking garages just don’t feel right anymore. Choosier, too, about malls, or meetings high up in huge office towers, though I know those structures are probably the safest in the city. They just don’t feel that way. But these, as I say, are comparatively little things.

There are bigger things--like the strangeness I feel driving the last few blocks of San Vicente, say, in Santa Monica; apartment buildings that have been there since I moved to Los Angeles 16 years ago are no longer there. Buildings I once walked past every day on Hollywood Boulevard are gone. What with the riots, we should be used to scars in this city, but the scars left by the riots were at least human in proportion--they were caused by human conditions, so presumably humans could fix those conditions.

The scars left by the Northridge quake are not human in origin. And there is no way ultimately to know whether humans can deal with these forces successfully. (We know we can clean up after we’re hit, but that’s hardly dealing with the problem.) Should we stay? Should we move? Should there be an enormous campaign to relocate the basic industry of California so that the world’s economy is not threatened by the Big Ones? The view from my own window hasn’t changed, but its context has.

Face it, most of us are going to stay. It doesn’t make much sense, but Southern Californians have never been famous for their sense. We could leave. Every one of us is descended from people who, recently or generations ago, left the place of their origins with practically nothing but the clothes on their backs and journeyed here. This is even true of Native Americans, though their epic journey occurred thousands of years ago. According to archeologists, there was once a time when there were no humans in the Americas. So it’s in our blood; we could leave.

But for one thing, literally millions of us just got here, from all over the world. This is all of America those Californians know, and it’s tough enough. Where would they go? For the rest of us . . . emigrating has gotten harder and more expensive. You can move yourself and maybe your family, but you can’t move your friends, and in a tight economy you can’t move your job. We’re not exactly prisoners of habit, but we’re creatures of habit. Only the most desperate, the most damaged or the most convinced are actually going to move.

Maybe we’ll make ourselves less vulnerable by changing the way we do L.A. People who ignored our new train system are now taking trains by the thousands. Companies large and small are finding out that many employees can do their work by computer modem at home.

And many are rethinking long commutes that separate families. The Northridge quake struck early in the morning on a holiday; the majority of families were together. How much more terrifying would it have been if families had been scattered, breadwinners at work and children at school, miles apart, with travel problematic, dangerous or (in a Big One) virtually impossible?

So, yes, most will stay, though we know now, some intellectually and some intuitively, that we’re living beyond the limits of our knowledge and everything we depend on can be threatened in an instant.

Me, I keep looking at the cracks in my apartment and at the spaces on my walls and on what’s left of my shelves where possessions dear to me used to be. Much as I miss some of those possessions, I have to admit that gradually I’ve come to enjoy the spaces they left. Things had been the same too long. For me, it was time for a change. I didn’t have the will to do it myself, but the earthquake cleared my rooms of many things (including many of my preconceptions about my life here). What will take their place? I have no idea. But while I wish the change had happened in some less drastic way, there is a part of me that feels lighter, more audacious, more ready to fill those spaces with whatever will be new in my life. I still wake in the night wondering if the trembling is me or the building. Sometime it’s the building; usually it’s me. I’m frightened, but I’m eager to see what happens next.

And that, perhaps, is why some of us will remain in this seismological red zone, la zona rosa . It’s an adventure we don’t have to watch on television. We live it every day. The Northridge quake has raised the stakes of this adventure, forcing us to face our city and ourselves with fewer illusions and with a better grasp of the storm beneath our feet.