In the early morning on 17 January 1994, the earth beneath the sleepy suburbs of southern California shook violently. For 20 excruciating seconds, millions of lives stood still.
The historic Northridge earthquake destroyed 87,000 homes and businesses, turned highway overpasses into gaping precipices, and killed more than 60 people in the Los Angeles area when it struck before dawn three decades ago.
The earthquake was caused by the sudden rupture of an unknown blind thrust fault, and the memories of that day and the difficult weeks that followed remain fresh in the minds of those who lived them.
Nancy Bloch recalls peering into the impenetrable darkness of her ruptured San Fernando Valley condo after the shaking stopped, feeling for a flashlight in the debris-covered kitchen. Power outages had snuffed street lamps outside, shrouding neighborhoods in darkness.
“It was pitch black – you’ve never seen something this black,” Nancy said.
The disaster launched a new era of earthquake mitigation, preparation and research, with advancements that include the development of early warning systems, better codes for buildings and bridges, and public education about earthquake survival. But as the 30th anniversary approaches, it’s clear that far more work is needed to ready a region where threats loom large. Despite the destruction it left behind, the 6.7 temblor was considered moderate in size. The “big one” is still coming.
“The 1994 Northridge earthquake really was a wake-up call,” said Robert de Groot, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey and coordinator for ShakeAlert, the agency’s earthquake early-warning system. Along with that program, which is now equipped to send alerts to roughly 50 million people across California, Oregon and Washington, he championed the extra focus on education and practice that came after the quake.
De Groot, who rushed to get under a doorway in his Pasadena home when he felt the shaking in 1994 – a move no-longer encouraged by experts – noted that even he had to learn the new, safer strategy “to drop, cover, and hold on”.
“[The Northridge earthquake] got people thinking about the fact that we have to do something on a community-wide scale to better understand how we can impact our resilience and our recovery after.”
Many more memories of that fateful morning and the weeks that followed are etched on to the lives that were upended by Northridge.
When the earthquake began, Nancy Bloch, a nurse, scrambled to get her three children and the new litter of kittens their cat birthed the night before into a safe space under the stairs as the shaking cracked beams in their home and threw objects to the ground. James, her middle child, had nearly been trapped in his room by furniture that toppled as the floor cracked.
As her family huddled together, she knew the light they needed was somewhere on the other side of the glass-strewn floor.
Her daughters, Kelly, then seven, and Michelle, a senior in high school, remember their mother screaming as she hurried through the sharp wreckage in bare feet. The flashlight she returned with revealed another injury that had gone unnoticed in the darkness. Streams of blood cascaded down Nancy’s face as she tried to console her family, the aftermath of a dollhouse corner that clipped her head as it fell from a shelf.
“It looked like a horror movie – she brought the light under her face and it was covered in blood,” Kelly says now, recalling how the sight traumatized her as a child.
In the days that followed, Nancy would return to work, with Kelly in tow, staying at the hospital for days to help others affected by the quake. But at that moment, there was nothing to do but wait. The family would remain crouched together – kittens and all – under the stairs, until morning light.
Lessons from a deadly building
An eerie haze hung on the horizon as the sun rose on 17 January, as stirred up dust caught the first light illuminating the battered cityscape. In the hours before, hundreds of fires, fueled by ruptured gas lines, billowed along flooded neighborhoods, inundated by flows from busted water mains. A relentless wail from car alarms and emergency sirens echoed through the emptied streets.
Seven major freeway bridges collapsed and highway overpasses buckled, choking transportation corridors as first responders rushed into the fray. Hospitals, some damaged and most operating on emergency power, were flooded with “a tidal wave of walking wounded”, a spokesperson for Cedars Sinai, Ron Wise, said at the time, and had to care for them without the use of tools like X-rays and laboratories. Triage units were set up in parking lots as thousands of patients streamed in and roughly two dozen newborn and premature babies had to be cared for and transferred to stable facilities amid the carnage.
Despite the widespread destruction, most fatalities in the immediate aftermath were limited to a single place: the crumpled Northridge Meadows apartment complex. The three-story building wrote itself into history books as a lesson in poor construction, when the top two floors plummeted into the under-supported first, crushing ground-level apartments and those who lived in them.
Residents who escaped bore witness to their neighbors muffled cries for help. Reports at the time detail the horror of those trapped among the wreckage and those who tried to save them, as the screams slowly fell silent while they waited for emergency responders to arrive.
The bodies of 16 victims were recovered, most still left lying in their beds where the rubble had trapped them. Among them was Ruth Wilhelm, a 77-year-old recent widow, whose leg could be seen among the piles of beams. A husband and wife were found still holding hands, a boyfriend draped over his girlfriend, trying to shield her, and an elderly couple, married for 51 years, locked in an everlasting embrace.
Some people were pulled alive from the building. Alan Hemsath, 37, who had been trapped under a refrigerator, was the last to be saved. After being transported to the hospital, he would come under the care of Nancy Bloch.
“We had to teach him how to walk again,” Nancy remembers. In the moment, she didn’t hesitate to jump into action. Now, looking back, the lessons she and her family had to learn about preparing for and surviving an earthquake come with a heaviness.
Kelly and Michelle, who now have kids of their own, say the lingering trauma helped spur their own endeavors in earthquake safety. “I think about it all the time now, with my kids – it affected how I set up their nurseries,” Michelle said of the earthquake. The sisters are now vigilant about making sure their children don’t sleep beneath unsecured shelves or close to windows that could shatter. Their homes are secured, they have family plans in place, and their disaster kits are easily within reach.
Kelly’s youngest child is now the age she was when Northridge hit, and, though she has gone to every length to ensure her family is prepared, she still worries. “It was a pivotal moment in my life, and it is bringing up a lot of emotions again – especially now that I am a mom,” she said. “If we have an earthquake now, I know my daughter Emma will remember it for the rest of her life.”
A new era of safety, but is it enough?
The Northridge earthquake became one of the most studied disasters, spawning a new era of research and preparation that experts said put this region – and other earthquake-prone areas around the world – in a much better position.
Three decades ago, there were no early warning systems in place. Scientists were unable to quickly measure the earthquake or pinpoint its epicenter, because tools were not equipped for such strong and sudden shaking.
“The instruments at the time were so overwhelmed by the shaking, they were useless,” said Mark Benthien, a director at the Statewide California Earthquake Center.
Those systems have now vastly improved. “Not only are we able to understand and identify [shaking] with earthquake early warning, we can detect that it has started and send out an alert,” he said.
Along with a spate of updated building and bridge codes and better scientific mapping and modeling, new agencies were launched to aid in preparation and recovery. Among them, the non-profit California Earthquake Authority, which provides insurance to more than a million policyholders and funds important retrofitting work that makes buildings better able to withstand large quakes.
The organization opened another round of grants this month for 6,000 California homeowners to fix their foundations, building on more than 23,000 already completed.
“We are making progress – but we have a long way to go,” said CEO Glen Pomeroy. “We feel really good about 23,000 but something like a million homes need retrofit.”
There have also been improvements in education and outreach that will help protect more people without the need for big structural changes. “People worry about structural collapse but it’s really all the shelves, and books, and TVs and the non-structural components that pose a bigger hazard for human health,” said Dr Scott Brandenberg, an earthquake engineer and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But there is still a big vulnerability gap between the new building advancements and older buildings that aren’t retrofitted; so-called “soft story” buildings like the Northridge Meadows apartment complex that collapsed – structures with weaker first-floors usually because of under-supported empty space for parking – can still be found across California.
Even the new codes won’t protect every building from being destroyed. “My takeaway is we have done a lot to improve – it’s not enough,” Brandenberg said.
That’s why seismologist Dr Lucy Jones has been advocating for a shift in approach. Most building codes are designed only for ensuring someone can make it out alive, but recovery is about more than just survival of the initial disaster. The majority of the fatalities linked to Northridge came in the aftermath, when increases in heart attacks and suicides were attributed to the quake. “People lost everything,” she said.
And, as the climate crisis increases the intensity and frequency of disasters, recovery efforts and resources will be further challenged. Jones believes that resilience means reinforcing communities that can respond together.
Those who went through the Northridge earthquake, including the Bloch family, recall how the burden was eased by block parties where neighbors congregated on camp chairs amidst the rubble, sharing coffee and barbecuing the food that otherwise would go bad without refrigeration.
“Preparing for an earthquake isn’t a simple thing,” Jones said. “But getting the places where people come together to focus on these issues and help each other,” Jones added, “that’s what really will make us stronger when it happens.”
