FRACTURED DREAMS

We were at a depth where the fossil remains of ancient redwood and pine forests predated the 46,000-year limit of a carbon-14 dating technique. It was here that the bones and teeth of sloths, camels, bison and elephants--the remnants of a past ice age--had been recovered by tunnelers. This was a prehistoric graveyard of Los Angeles.

The subway tunnel was warm; there was almost a jungle-type humidity, more than 100 feet below Hollywood. This surprised me. Other tunnels and caves that I have visited were cool, which was why I wore a sweater under the coveralls.

I began to sweat. I asked Stuart Warren, my guide, about the temperature. He said something about it being Southern California, ha-ha.

A slight mist dimmed outlines in the tunnel and gave the soft-focus scene a feeling of unreality. The evenly spaced lights on the walls cast a dull glow. The noise of the huge fan that sucked out the foul air was deafening. Altogether, a complex assault on the senses.

With the recent spate of natural disaster films in mind, I remarked that the tunnel would make a perfect setting for a movie. I could imagine the presence of monsters, alien beings and chase scenes. It oozed catastrophe.

Warren looked at me but did not respond. I imagined him thinking: “That’s all I need.”

*

I have always wanted to walk through an earthquake fault.

We are surrounded by seismic activity. I live beside the San Andreas fault in Northern California. Every day I gaze at the spot on the fault line that shifted 20 feet in 1906--the largest displacement in the great San Francisco quake. I have experienced two major and an uncounted number of minor temblors. Tectonic action has done more to shape the California landscape than any other factor, and our earthquakes provide the world with a metaphor for incipient disaster.

Such a stroll through a fault seemed like a natural should the opportunity arise. So when someone on an Internet newsgroup devoted to earthquakes mentioned that the people who were digging a subway under the Santa Monica Mountains had encountered the Hollywood fault, I immediately got on the phone with a representative of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and arranged a walk-through. I explained that I was writing a book about earthquakes. A tour was arranged.

That was how I came to be standing in the parking lot of the Fifth Church of Christ Scientist at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue one recent morning. A banner with a Mary Baker Eddy aphorism was prominently displayed in front of the church. It read: “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.” As I prepared for my descent into the belly of the seismic beast, I fervently hoped that was the case.

Waiting for me in the parking lot rented from the church was Warren, geotechnical manager on the project that consisted of pushing twin subway tubes through the Hollywood Hills, and Mary Ann Maskery from MTA’s media relations office. Warren was a veteran of many such undertakings, beginning with coal mines and

*

Proceeding through the tunnel under the English Channel. Maskery was my constant shadow at interviews. This would be her first trip underground.

I had been outfitted at the Universal City construction site office with rubber boots, white coveralls, an orange vest, a hard hat, safety goggles, flashlight, a breathing device in case we came across dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, and two brass disks. One would be left at the top of the elevator and would indicate that I was missing, should there be an accident in the tunnel. The other would be inserted in my body bag when I was brought to the surface. I signed the obligatory release form.

Looking like a comedic astronaut, I clumped across the parking lot with the others and climbed the wooden steps to the Hollywood construction site office. We entered the antechamber to a world far removed from the tourists just beginning their daily promenade along the nearby Walk of Fame.

During interviews with engineers and geologists, the safety of all phases of the subway project, including its eventual operation, had been stressed. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking that these were the same folks who were responsible for sinkholes, large cost overruns and dreadful management. Some of the problems were endemic to digging a 2.4-mile-long tunnel under thousands of people and their artifacts. Better to dig a hole under the English Channel, or the desert.

The region’s biggest and most maligned public works project did seem ill-fated, however. “Litany of woes” and “trouble-plagued” were some of the standard phrases applied to the extension of the Red Line from Hollywood to Universal City. Not encouraging, I thought.

Optimism, in the form of Bob Edwards, a tunnel inspector, flooded the small office. Tunnels were safer than anything built upon the surface of the earth, I was told. “Ten thousand feet up in the Sierra Nevada there was a 5.5, and I came out of the tunnel and didn’t even know it.” Edwards added, “In San Francisco two years ago, I was in a little one at the end of the Muni turnaround on Market Street. I didn’t feel a thing.” Others in the room recalled their benign seismic experiences. It was a virtual Greek chorus of assurances.

I wasn’t as big a rube as I may have seemed to these veteran tunnelers. I had traveled the San Andreas fault and collected some stories. One was of Department of Water and Power employees inspecting a tunnel section of the Los Angeles Aqueduct after the Northridge quake in 1994. An aftershock had caromed through the steel tunnel and scared the bejesus out of them, but the aqueduct remained intact. Most books in the underground portion of the main Los Angeles library had stayed on shelves, while those aboveground tumbled to the floor during that same quake.

There is, however, a wide gulf between the reality of safety and the perception of a particular situation, witness the statistics of flight safety versus those with an irrational fear of flying. We all have our phobias. Mine happens to be heights, not depths, which was fortunate for me on this day.

As if divining my thoughts, Warren pointed to the plans for the 300-foot Special Seismic Section of the tunnel. It was built wider through the 120-foot active fault zone to facilitate repairs after a damaging quake. Flexible steel girders will line the walls, which will also be covered with layers of shotcrete--sprayed concrete with steel fibers. Fifteen-foot bolts--soil nails, in effect--will be embedded in the crushed rock, called fault gouge, behind the shotcrete.

I walked outside and looked down on the cramped construction site that surrounded the gaping hole in the earth. A rectangular sound baffle of blue, green and gray panels separated the construction activity from the nearby apartment buildings. Inside the enclosure, dump trucks backed up to receive their allotment of primordial ooze. They were “mucking out.” Fifty-two truckloads of muck had been hauled away that week.

As we approached, a crippling burst of fear imploded inside my stomach. The steel grating we had to cross passed over the 116-foot-deep black hole. I breathed deeply and frequently, a partial solution that I have employed over the years to deal with heights. I willed myself forward and muttered: “Don’t look down!”

We crossed to the elevator. I gingerly waited on the exposed grating for its arrival while Warren explained the brass check procedure. “It’s in case you get squashed, or something like that,” he said.

We descended into the pit. At the bottom was a sign: “Danger: Laser Light.” There was, in fact, danger all around. Poisonous carbon monoxide spewed from the exhausts of heavy machinery. Deadly hydrogen sulfide gas and fire-prone methane could seep from oil deposits; there was also the ever-present danger of cave-ins.

A panel of consultants had noted: “Problems experienced on previous tunnels [in Los Angeles] included boulders, caving, sinkholes, methane, as well as an explosion and deaths which occurred in 1971.” The panel thought the planning and design for the Hollywood Hills’ tunnels had taken these dangers into account.

The tunnel curved gently northward. Warren set off at a fast pace, as if to distance himself from us. I followed behind. We stopped a couple of times to let Maskery catch up. She was a quiet presence; I had no idea what she thought.

The Stygian setting was the kingdom of the tunnelers. Men were lone, silent figures who toiled as outlines, not precise shapes. They appeared, then vanished mysteriously, working at a rhythm and in a place that was quite different from the habitats of ordinary mortals. Warren fit in easily; we didn’t.

Besides being hot, my boots were uncomfortable. I could feel a blister or two developing. Walking was quite tricky. The bottom of the near-circular tunnel was covered with a thick coating of mud and water. Two steel rails barely protruded through the muck, forming additional obstacles.

Like the heaving deck of a ship, the canted surfaces offered no sure footing. I felt as though I might fall at any moment, land in the thick goo, bang my head on a steel rail and be carried out in a body bag. A sense of security was lacking, on many levels. Warren’s figure kept retreating; I hastened to catch up.

We plodded through the alluvial deposits that were bookmarks at either end of the tunnel’s geology. Warren picked up a handful of mud and described its properties: “Sandy silt, pale to medium brown, pretty nondescript.”

Precast concrete sections lined the tunnel through the alluvium. Spray-painted on the concrete was the graffiti of the tunnelers. “Graveyard [meaning shift, not cemetery] was here” and “We’ll miss you hard-headed hippie” were two examples that would eventually be covered by another lining. The esprit de corps of tunnelers seemed akin to that of submariners.

I could see amber-colored lights in the distance. A widening indicated the Special Seismic Zone. The concrete siding ended and was replaced by a coating of gray shotcrete, a stucco-like substance that formed a thin covering over the rough, bare walls of the newly dug tunnel. The walls leaked water; pus-like excretions seeped through the shotcrete.

It was an ideal time to walk underground through the fault. One tunnel had just pierced it completely, and the other was halfway through. I had hoped that the raw earth of the fault might be exposed, but Warren demonstrated why it had to be covered immediately. He broke off a small section of the shotcrete and dug out a piece of the fault gouge from behind the thin covering. “See,” he said, “this is quite gritty. It is a very, very shattered material. Quite weak.”

Before digging, they had sunk a horizontal bore through the fault line to determine what lay ahead. I had seen the corings laid out in stacked boxes at the Universal City office. The fault, Warren explained, as we stood within the actual fracture zone, was not a single band but rather “a multitude of individual planes and shears.”

I needed a few moments to myself and walked a short distance away. I wanted to gather my thoughts and fix the scene in my mind. We were alone. There were no workers at the twin ends of the tunnels today. Three yellow digging machines were parked at the end of the right tunnel, right and left being determined from where one stood at Union Station, the epicenter of the underground transportation system.

First the top half and then the bottom half of the tunnel was excavated. A steel brace supported the cyclopean eye of a laser navigation system at the end of the tubes. The same procedure was used by the tunnelers coming from Universal City. If all went according to plan, they would meet at an undetermined date in the near future. (This was subsequently accomplished.)

Water was seeping from the end of the tunnel, the rawest wound in the newly shattered earth. The minerals limonite and calcium carbonate were mixed in the water; the former left an ochre stain, the latter white marks. What looked like white fluffy popcorn was a leachate material from the shotcrete. It all seemed to me like the bitter residue of Hollywood.

Warren walked over and explained that the doughy appearance of the mounds of dirt, covered with shotcrete and left in place to give added support to the temporary vertical wall at the end of the tunnel, was called “the dumpling.” He seemed pleased that the American crews had picked up on this Anglo tunneling expression.

We were under Runyon Canyon Park, he said.

*

On the surface, the Hollywood fault is a distinct entity (if you know what to look for) that traverses one of the best-known landscapes in the world. Mention Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, or Beverly Hills and very few people would guess that an earthquake fault united them.

If an X-ray could be taken of the crust of the earth underneath the Los Angeles Basin, it would resemble a car window smashed by a baseball bat. One of the more distinct cracks would be the Hollywood fault, extending from the Los Angeles River near Griffith Park to a point close by the Beverly Hills Hotel. Truly, no other seismic rift in the world is more star studded. It is also a study in social contrasts and monetary extremes.

The Hollywood fault is a known fracture, of which there may be about 100 scattered about the Los Angeles Basin. There is an unknown number of what are called blind thrust faults, of which only a few--like the Northridge fault--have announced their presence. There are few places where you can live in California without being near one or the other type of fault.

Kerry Sieh of Caltech was the principal geological consultant for the tunnel project, and his opinions are constantly cited by the engineers. Sieh determined that earthquakes might occur on the Hollywood fault, on average, every 1,000 to 2,500 years. Besides the fact that quakes do not occur at regular intervals, Sieh did not know the date of the last quake. Thus, there was no telling when the next one would strike.

Given a spread of 1,000 or more years, it was no wonder that a tour of the fault line from Hollywood to Beverly Hills revealed almost total ignorance of the presence of such a potentially disruptive feature. My guide was a draft of a technical paper written by James F. Dolan, a geologist at USC, who has also conducted field trips along the fault line.

I picked up the fault at Beachwood Drive and Franklin Avenue, directly south of the HOLLYWOOD sign. This was “Now Renting Weekly” country. West of the Hollywood Freeway the fault split into three parallel strands along and just south of Franklin Avenue, north of Franklin, and the Yucca Street strand. Behind the landmark Capitol Records tower, the fault scarps (incised hills) on Franklin and Yucca were quite pronounced.

The windows were boarded up and there was a fence around an unreinforced masonry apartment building, a victim of the 1994 quake. These were the mean back streets of Hollywood. Echoes of apocalypse hung in the air, this being the locale of Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.” West also wrote the novel in this neighborhood.

Three years before Northridge, Lionel Rolfe described this area in his book “In Search of Literary L.A.”: “Many of the apartment buildings are unreinforced masonry, doomed to extinction when the inevitable big earthquake strikes. The orgy/riot climax of West’s novel seems metaphorically to pinpoint this madness.”

I walked down to Hollywood Boulevard and had a cappuccino in a mini-mall off the main thoroughfare. There was a tourist information center run by the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. I asked the man behind the counter where I could find the Hollywood fault. He said he didn’t know. “It’s not an attraction,” he added.

Farther west was an attraction. On Franklin Avenue, just behind Mann’s Chinese Theatre, a sharp dip in the terrain at Hollywood Franklin Park announced the continuing presence of the fault line.

At nearby Runyon Canyon Park, the trails were dominated by morning dog traffic. Metal bowls were affixed to chains attached to water fountains. A sign for a dog-care service on the fault line advertised “canine coiffures and pawdicures,” “dog day afternoon spa program” and “muttramony and barkmitzvahs.”

The bizarre and mundane were joined here. On this day, more than 100 feet underneath the park, they were digging in the damp darkness.

Just beyond the park at the northwest corner of Franklin and Camino Palmero was Al Jolson’s mansion. Across the street and two doors up the hill was Ozzie and Harriet Nelson’s house, which was used for the exterior shots in the television show. The fault passes beneath the living room.

Sandwich boards advertising “Star Maps” marked the beginning of Sunset Strip, where some very fancy establishments, such as the Chateau Marmont, are located in the fault zone. Sightseeing buses with tourists glued to smoked-glass windows glided along the Strip, oblivious to the deeper realities of life on the edge.

At Havenhurst Drive and Sunset Boulevard, I entered the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, a shop specializing in the TV cartoon characters created by Jay Ward: Bullwinkle, Sherman and Mr. Peabody, Dudley, Boris and Natasha, etc.

I explained the seismic situation to the carefully dressed woman behind the counter, who seemed quite composed, on the surface. Her expression barely changed as she poured out a litany of continuing inner terror after the Northridge quake. But there was no place else to go that was warm, she said, certainly not San Francisco, where she had relatives.

Farther west at Sunset and La Cienega boulevards, just south of the intersection, the Hollywood fault lies adjacent to the Strip. Dolan’s paper (the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America recently published the final version) also noted that west of La Cienega there were two main strands: “A northern strand that lies approximately at the mountain front, generally north of Sunset Boulevard, and a southern strand in the alluvial apron 150 to 450 feet south of Sunset Boulevard.”

Lined up like expensive toy soldiers that might collapse in a row, should there be an earthquake along the fault line in Beverly Hills, were structures of Mediterranean, French chateau, English baronial, New England colonial and Southern plantation derivations. Near the Beverly Hills Hotel, I could find only a slight swale across the wide street and carefully tended lawns that mark the western end of the fault.