Quake’s Silver Lining: It Missed Rush Hour

The refrain was heard for weeks afterward.

“Thank God it happened at 4:31 a.m.,” Angelenos said over and over, awe in their voices. “What if the earthquake had struck during the day?”

It was a terrifying thought, as Southern Californians grimly picked up the pieces of their lives after the magnitude-6.7 Northridge quake. And nowhere did the question resonate more loudly than on the region’s freeway system, host to hundreds of thousands of cars that together travel 85 million miles each day.

Although we mourned the loss of LAPD motorcycle Officer Clarence Wayne Dean, who rode off a crumbled overpass, it was nothing short of miraculous that the collapsed roadways contributed only one death to the overall toll of 57.

Which invites grim speculation: Just how many people might have perished on our freeways if disaster had struck during rush hour?

That kind of a guesswork is problematic, said Russell Snyder, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation . Too many variables muddy the issue, such as time of day (morning or evening rush hour?), the speed of traffic, even the weather.

No one doubts, however, that the death toll on the freeways would have been major during a busy period, with conservative estimates in the dozens, if not in three digits. After all, during the peak hour, 16,600 cars pass over the La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue bridges that buckled on the Santa Monica Freeway; 11,500 cars travel during peak hour on the Golden State Freeway spans that shattered over Gavin Canyon in the Newhall Pass.

Both segments of freeway were on the list for seismic strengthening. In the case of the Santa Monica Freeway overpasses, work was to begin the month after the quake.

“Had (they) been retrofitted, I think those sections at La Cienega and Fairfax would have come through fine,” said Caltech engineering professor John F. Hall.

But the damage was done, and it would take months to repair by crews working round the clock to earn their companies hefty bonuses for early reconstruction.

All told, restoration of the county’s 528-mile freeway network cost $250 million, most of it paid for with federal funds. Fully 10% of the total--or $25 million--was awarded to contractors as bonuses for finishing ahead of schedule.

That’s enough to run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s entire bus fleet for at least two weeks. Enough to buy 80 new buses. Almost enough to pay for 16 miles of car-pool lanes that Caltrans is building on the Ventura and San Gabriel River freeways.

But officials say it was good business sense to offer financial incentives to get the freeways fixed in double-quick time. For every day the freeways were down, the local economy lost money in delays, unearned wages and additional fuel consumed.

In fact, calculations based on figures from the governor’s office show that the ultimate cost of the fallen freeways amounted to at least $325 million.

Hence the rush to repair, as officials cut red tape and dangled bonuses to hurry construction along.

“Give people at the local level the authority, the resources, and they’ll do it,” said Federico Pena, the U.S. secretary of transportation.

The Santa Monica Freeway was back in action in less than three months. Commuters on the Golden State waited just four months.

Psychological scars didn’t heal so swiftly.

For Debbie Tomasi, a Woodland Hills homemaker, it took at least half a year before she could zip along the freeways without the specter of the earthquake hovering over her. For months, she took canyon roads to reach the Westside, even though the Ventura and San Diego freeways survived the quake intact.

Partly to allay fears like Tomasi’s, the Wilson Administration has stepped up its bridge retrofitting program. By the end of 1997, nearly 2,400 spans should be strengthened to withstand a major temblor.