When all the glass of a house shatters exactly at the same time,
it sends the blaring rattle straight into your head and echoes
there for years to come.
Ten years, to be exact. Ten years ago Saturday, millions of
people awoke to falling objects and the ground trembling below them
during the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
On the Richter scale, the earthquake measured what some thought
at the time was a small magnitude of 6.7. A common household
experience included plaster hanging off the walls, front doors
peeling off their hinges, refrigerators fallen on top of a mess of
food items on kitchen floors, and water-drenched carpets from
overflowed swimming pools and broken water mains. Compared to the
Richter reading, the destruction was off the scale.
The earthquake killed more than 50 people, injured more than
9,000, and left countless families without homes.
At a time when people from San Simeon, Calif. to Bam, Iran are
familiar with the destruction of earthquakes, many Southern
California residents are also being reminded of what was at the
time the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history.
At UCLA, students who experienced the devastating earthquake
recall a day they cannot forget.
“I live a block away from the epicenter, and I remember
being asleep, and my bedroom window shattered all over me,”
said Noelle Shoji, a third-year political science student.
“Our house was very badly damaged and an entire room had
detached from the rest of the house,” she said, adding that
remodeling her house took close to five years.
Other students were not as affected, though they remember the
earthquake and its aftermath vividly.
“I felt anxious just knowing that the aftershocks could be
bigger than the original earthquake,” said second-year
undeclared student Stacey Harutunian.
The campus itself did not incur serious damages, except for
large cracks in the two Royce Hall towers. Other damage reported
included fallen bookshelves, chemical lab spills, and flooded
buildings. Classes were cancelled for a week following the
disaster.
English professor Ali Behdad recalls dealing with the
earthquake’s aftershocks after classes resumed.
“I was teaching my graduate student seminar, and there was
an aftershock of about 5.4. … I remember (the students) all
jumping under their desks,” Behdad said.
Recalling the Northridge tremor, compared to what recently
devastated parts of his home country of Iran, Behdad said he
appreciated living in the United States.
“Being from Iran … it made me realize how fortunate we
are to live in a country that has the kind of structures we
do,” he said.
If a similar earthquake to the Northridge one were to occur now,
experts believe that the structures in the community would be
substantially more durable.
“(Northridge) had a huge impact in pushing for safer
buildings, highways, bridges, and infrastructure in general,”
said John Wallace, an associate professor in civil and
environmental engineering.
The tremor also caused the field of earthquake engineering to
evolve from predicting collapsing rate to predicting building
performance before collapsing, said Jonathan Stewart, also an
associate professor in civil and environmental engineering.
Several structures on campus are also better equipped in the
event of an earthquake, said Tom Sabol, an adjunct associate
professor from the same department.
Over the last 10 years, several buildings ““ including
Royce Hall, the College (Powell) Library, Sproul Hall and Haines
Hall ““ have undergone seismic upgrades,” Sabol
said.
Some parking structures and Kinsey Hall are in the process of
upgrading while all other buildings are waiting for the upgrades,
Sabol said.
He added that UCLA has been upgrading the campus, the dorms and
the off-campus apartments since the mid-1980s.
Both professors believe the campus construction does not pose a
grave danger.
Incomplete buildings would be more susceptible to damage, but
fewer people may suffer injuries because nobody would be inside the
buildings that are under construction, Wallace said.
Like the broken infrastructure, broken lives have slowly been
rebuilt. And while a decade separates the earthquake from its
memories, the echoes still linger.
With reports from Jennifer Case, Bruin Contributor.