![]() ![]() ![]() Today, he said it’s standard practice to design a building with an eye to how all of its elements will perform together during an earthquake. Until then, Wallace said engineers commonly designed elements of structures individually without considering how the columns would connect to the flooring systems. One major lesson came from analyzing what happened to the Northridge Fashion Mall, where nearly the entire floor collapsed, and to the parking structure that fell at Cal State Northridge. Wallace said it quickly became clear following the Northridge quake that, while California had made progress since ’71, it still had a long way to go to make buildings and roads more quake resilient. The 1994 quake was the first major test of how far California had come in making its buildings and infrastructure safer since the 6.6 jolt in Sylmar in 1971, which left 64 people dead and spurred the first detailed seismic safety standards for freeways, hospitals, dams and more. When it comes to building safety, the Northridge earthquake was a “watershed event,” for how structures are designed and built in California, according to Wallace. That international collaboration has helped keep earthquake preparedness moving forward in Southern California even though it’s been a quarter century since the last major temblor here. They can hold online conferences and instantly exchange data sets, which Wallace said happened in the wake of major quakes this decade in Chile, New Zealand and Japan. Those advances in technology have also made it easier for researchers to learn not only from local earthquakes, but from disasters around the world. “It was the main footage shown in China and made it seem like all over L.A. “The most difficult thing for me in learning about the quake was seeing the apartment building in Northridge collapse on TV over and over again,” Farrell said. That would have made a huge difference for the peace of mind of people like Kimberly Farrell, who lived in Westlake Village but was in China on a business trip when the 1994 quake struck. “The earthquake early warning is where we have a lot of opportunity in the next 10 years to make our state more resilient for the next earthquake,” said Ryan Arba, seismic hazards branch chief for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.īut even without a widespread early warning system, today’s technology means people can quickly get information on the size, location and scope of earthquakes. That will give residents enough time to duck, cover and hold, plus give surgeons enough time to stop delicate procedures or conductors enough time to slow passenger trains. But surrounding neighborhoods should get a few seconds or even a full minute heads-up, since shaking travels along faults more slowly than modern communication systems. People living near the epicenter likely won’t get advance warning through such systems, Jones said. 31 across Los Angeles via the ShakeAlertLA smartphone app. That’s the basis for a new early warning system, which went live for the first time in the United States on Dec. ![]() “Now instead of it taking weeks to get stuff, we’re getting it in seconds,” Jones said. They went from experimenting with seven broadband digital monitoring systems - plus one Jones placed in her stepmom’s Calabasas garage after the Northridge quake - to more than 400 systems, each connected to its own computer. For the San Fernando Valley’s economic centers, post-Northridge quake recovery has been 25 years in the making.Northridge Earthquake’s 25th anniversary brings vivid memories to this local woman.‘I thought I would die’: She survived the Northridge earthquake, and it changed her life.L.A.’s earthquake early warning system can save lives, but what about the rest of California?.25 years after the Northridge earthquake, what will it take to prepare for the next big one? A smaller one, experts say.25 years after the Northridge earthquake, another one could hit ‘any time.’ Are we safer?.“The fact that the system failed got us a chunk of money to upgrade it.” More on Northridge Earthquake And it took two hours for information on the first big aftershocks.īut “nothing succeeds like failure,” Jones quips. It took them roughly an hour to share basic information on the estimated size and location of the quake, Jones said. When the San Fernando Valley started shaking at 4:31 a.m., experts scrambled to gather analog data on outdated computers and to communicate with pagers, recalls seismologist Lucy Jones, known to many Californians simply as “the earthquake lady.” “But we still have a lot more we can do.” Technology has advanced “We’re way better off than we were 25 years ago,” said John Wallace, a civil engineering professor at UCLA who focuses on earthquake readiness. ![]()
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