Forget the San Andreas, it’s the Newport-Inglewood Fault that will level Long Beach. Again

1933 QUAKE PHOTO COURTESY KEN LARKEY, CURATOR LONG BEACH HERITAGE MUSEUM

I’m sitting in my car, staring at the red light at the intersection of Orange and East Willow. Sunnyside Cemetery is over my left shoulder and I’m trying to ignore it as I wait for the light to change. Behind me, a few blocks to the northwest, is Long Beach Memorial Hospital. What I don’t realize as I sit in my car is that about six miles directly underneath me—under my car, the cemetery, the hospital—two pieces of earth meet in a right-lateral strike-slip fault called the Newport-Inglewood Fault Zone (NIFZ). The same fault was responsible for the earthquake that shook Long Beach on March 10, 1933, killing 120 people. Seventy-five years later, the fault comes lurching back to life.

Most seismologists believe that Southern California has a seismic debt to settle. Too much tension is building up underground around the shifting Pacific Plate, with too few major quakes to alleviate the pressure. In other words, we are overdue for a Big One in a serious way. But forget the San Andreas fault—it’s miles away from any large cities, making a Big One there small-time compared to a quake on the Newport-Inglewood fault. A 7.0 on the Newport-Inglewood will cause more death and destruction in Long Beach than an 8.0 on the San Andreas. According to a planning scenario published in 1988 by the California Department of Conservation, Division of Mines and Geology, “A major earthquake (about magnitude 7) on the NIFZ within the highly urban Los Angles Metropolitan area poses one of the greatest hazards to lives and property in the nation.”

The team of scientists that created the scenario ran the parameters of the 1933 earthquake through a computer model simulating a 7.0 earthquake on the NIFZ. The result is a worst-case scenario, a doomsday story that reads like fiction but is based on fact.

It starts rolling primary waves that gently push my car forward, then pull it back as the wave passes underneath me, compressing the earth horizontally. As I look around to make sure I didn’t just imagine it, I see no damage. In these first few seconds the only evidence of coming disaster is the swaying tops of trees. The secondary waves closely follow, moving the ground in right angles to the waves. The earth begins to move vertically in violent heaving shakes that rise and fall as the wave passes through. A few more seconds of shaking and the roads around me split apart. Huge sinkholes open up and swallow two cars in front of mine.

Panicking, I grip the steering wheel—as if I can drive out of this mess. I listen to the hiss of steam emanating from the wrecked cars in the sinkhole before I realize I’m not getting anywhere in my car. I open the door and step out into the rising sounds of chaos: loud pops in the buildings nearby as internal supports begin to collapse; distant explosions; screams of people as scared as I am; but mostly the overwhelming rumble of tons of earth and rock moving in great spasms for miles around and below me. I see exposed pipes and wires where liquefaction has caused the sandy ground under the asphalt to turn to quicksand and flow wherever there is space. The gaping holes have exposed utility lines that, when functional, provided the life support for most of Long Beach.

Now the lines fracture under the pressure of their own weight where they cross over the concealed fault. Water is pulsing out of the major transition lines, thousands of gallons that were leaving the Long Beach Water Treatment facility, just north of the fault, and on their way to all of the homes and businesses to the south.

Before the LA River was lined with concrete and rebar, it flowed through the city unfettered, depositing layers of alluvial sediment on its banks—minuscule pieces of the San Gabriel Mountains, delivered mostly  during the glacial melt after the last ice age, and from yearly snow melts—and carried down to the LA River basin. For 15 million years the basin filled with this unconsolidated silt, sand and clay.

Today, a person could dig 36,000 feet under Long Beach City Hall before they hit any bedrock. There’s also the water that’s hidden 20 or 30 feet below the surface—geologists have long described the LA basin as a bowl of jelly for the way seismic waves ripple through the alluvium. This is the foundation that Long Beach is built upon, and an earthquake under it causes the sediment to become suspended in the water—the seismic waves racing through without losing intensity—and like giant ripples in a (now) deadly bowl of jelly, they bounce off the sides of solid mountains and reflect back, amplified.

The shaking doesn’t stop for 20 seconds, and now I’m paralyzed in place, watching the water spill out of the fractured lines like blood from a vein. I notice a peculiar smell, and staring at the cluster of exposed pipes in front of me, I realize it’s the smell of gas. Natural gas is venting in great plumes that are only visible by the distortions they cause in objects seen through them.

Long Beach is an “earthquake cocktail” according to Glenn Borchardt, Ph.D. in soil mineralogy, and co-author of the NIFZ study. This is because when city planners were building and expanding the infrastructure of Long Beach, they decided to dig one trench. Then, all of the utility life lines were buried in this single trench. Water, sewage, electricity, gas, fuel, all of them resting on top of each other, set in sandy, unstable ground.

“In Long Beach there are all kinds of things that are co-located. It’s efficient, it’s cheaper, but in the case of an earthquake, it mixes things up,” Borchardt says. “That gets to be a problem. In Long Beach you have the water, the sewage, the electricity, the gas, the fuel, this looks to me like an earthquake cocktail. That will be a mess with the liquefaction. The foundations become quicksand. That’s the kind of thing we would expect to see there. Some of the pipes will break and you’ll have various fluids running around. I don’t think we can avoid that because of the way it is.”

Chris Garner, director of Long Beach Gas and Oil, says he “isn’t concerned” about the state of the utility lines. He acknowledges that the gas and water lines are in the same trench, but buried at different depths, and says that most of Long Beach’s electrical lines are aboveground. If an oil line breaks and starts flowing into a water line, it would be isolated and quickly shut off. Of course, this still leaves broken lines that need to be dug up and repaired before the utilities can be restored.

I start running toward the place I drove by minutes ago, thinking the hospital has to be safe. I haven’t gone far when I see trickles of smoke slipping out of buildings all around me. The smoke turns thick, black and acrid, the kind of death cloud that forms when fire is fueled by an endless supply of combustibles. All around me and across the fault, the split gas lines are igniting. I cross California Avenue and run past a tract of homes on my left. I hesitate for a moment as I watch walls collapse. I can hear the sickening crunch of strained timber splitting. I see the walls crumble and wonder how many people are still inside. Water heaters pull out of the braces, breaking the gas lines, and within minutes the houses ignite.

As I pass Atlantic Avenue, I look north toward the 405 and see clouds of dust rising in the air. The overpass has collapsed on the freeway below, leaving hundreds of passengers in their cars trapped with nowhere to go. It’s instant deadlock for anyone lucky enough not to be on, or under, a section that has fallen. I look south toward the water and see more dense black smoke rising. It turns the sky orange when it passes across the sun, and soon the plume covers Long Beach in its black and burnt orange shadow. I head up Atlantic toward the hospital, and already I can hear the piercing scream of emergency sirens.

The hospital is not safe. It’s in a condensed state of chaos, a scaled-down version of every compounded disaster that has laid siege to Long Beach. The earthquake cocktail has mixed everything up, and the city feels drunk on disaster. The transformers blew at power substations—three miles from the fault in every direction is a dead zone. The hospital has its own power supply: generators that are checked once a week—they run the hospital on generator power once a month.

I’m standing in the waiting room while people just like me flood in, many with injuries. There are too many people that need help, and not enough people to help them. There is no power, no gas, and no water. I start thinking about the patients that were already in the hospital when the quake hit: What about intensive care and the patients hooked up to life-sustaining machines that beep and whirl with the power of electricity? Generators can only get you so far. Suddenly, I feel as if the walls of the hospital are pushing in on me, this place intended to protect life feels like a cemetery, a death trap. I need to get out of here, somewhere without walls that might fall on top of me.

I overhear an EMT’s radio squawk—the Red Cross is setting up an emergency tent in Recreation Park. All of the patients here need to be evacuated—hundreds have shown up at the hospital in various states of ill health but facilities such as this can only accommodate 50 to 200 people. The ones who need the most help also need to be moved to a higher-functioning facility, quickly. I think about the condition of the roads around the fault, and I have no idea how this task is going to be accomplished. Powerless to help, I step back out into the larger chaos.

In the event of a disaster, the City of Long Beach Emergency Operations Center urges the citizens to “stay tuned to TV and radio news stations (such as KNX 1070 AM or KFWB 980 AM) for updates.” In the event of a 7.0 earthquake, there will be no power to turn on your TV, and your radio may be on your nightstand—which is buried under your collapsed house. “If an action is necessary, the media will be informed immediately and repeatedly. Emergency response vehicles and helicopters will go directly to impacted neighborhoods and advise residents via microphones and door-to-door contact.” Emergency response vehicles will find that the areas most in need of advice are the least accessible due to the damaged roads and highways. That leaves a helicopter with a microphone to coordinate all of Long Beach’s dazed survivors.

As for anything else, the Emergency Ops Center web site is clear: “Long Beach does not have bomb shelters or civil defense sirens.”

Take comfort, though: This scenario does not predict a tsunami. The Newport-Inglewood fault doesn’t extend into the ocean. (To generate a giant wave, an epicenter under the water would be required.) So, a system of wailing sirens most likely wouldn’t be useful, anyway.

I walk out of the hospital and into streets that are worse. The sky is darker than before, and I see a massive exhaust mushroom-cloud rising from a fire burning in the distance over the Edgington Petroleum refinery. The fire is nearly impossible to contain. It will burn for days and black out the sun. I start towards the park, four miles away, and on the way I gag at the stench of raw sewage. It’s gushing out of broken pipes where liquefaction has exposed them, and the sewage is flooding streets and homes, pouring into the storm drains that empty into the ocean, and sinking into the exposed ground where asphalt has been sloughed off. I watch it bubble as it absorbs into the sand and wonder how long it takes sewage to percolate down to the ground water.

At the park, survivors have already gathered. I walk through the crowds and learn what has happened. No one can leave the city. All of the highways are gridlocked, closed to emergency traffic only, or too damaged for anyone to use. The worst destruction is near the water, where homes were built on artificial land, nothing more than reinforced piles of sand. Liquefaction destabilized the foundations built into the sand, tilting them like rafts disturbed by a wave. The houses slipped off of their foundations then sank into the ground, settling at odd angles.

At the Port of Long Beach, ground failures just behind Terminal Island have ruptured oil storage facilities. There is a fire on the island and a discharge of fuel into the channel, posing the threat of an even greater fire. Towering cranes have collapsed on top of cargo ships. The highways and bridges to Terminal Island have been destroyed under the strain of liquefaction as well.

None of the 40,000 people normally at the port can get away. They are stuck, stranded, surrounded by water rank with sewage runoff and slick with leaking oil that’s threatening to ignite.

Firemen can’t get to the fires caused by broken gas and electrical lines because the roads are destroyed. There is no water pressure to fight them, the lines severed where they traverse the fault. The same is true for all the other utility lifelines; everyone south of the fault is isolated now, cut off from distribution centers north of the fault. Disaster coordinators are saying that the water pressure won’t be restored for days, possibly weeks. We will have to find our own water, and boil it to kill the contamination from the sewage. Those without a generator or camping stove will have to rely on whatever water can be trucked to them from storage tanks, or their own emergency supply, until the gas or electricity is restored. 

Casey Chel, the Emergency Services Coordinator at the Disaster Management Division of the Long Beach Fire Department, reassures me that since the ’70s, Long Beach has practiced strict compliance with the four phases of emergency management: response, recovery, mitigation and planning. Retrofitting buildings is an attempt to mitigate the possible hazards of an earthquake. The city has an effective SEMS, or Standardized Emergency Management System, “a very, very solid system that is able to prioritize and maneuver resources to mitigate problems the best we can.” In an earthquake, they would try to recover the lifelines of Long Beach first. Mostly this means critical facilities like water treatment, electricity, gas, oil, transportation and roads would be assessed and restored as quickly as possible.

There is also CERT, the Civilian Emergency Response Team. Any resident can take this 17 hour training program and become a valuable skilled assistant when a major disaster overwhelms emergency services. Chel is proud to say that 2,000 of Long Beach’s approximately 463,956 residents have been CERT certified. The fire department also offers self-reliance training. So, all of these acronyms, programs, and Band-Aids are poised and ready for application to any quantified disaster. But then Chel says, “The biggest issue is that the public needs to be self-reliant,” and that they should “be self-reliant for five to seven days.” Five to seven days of self-reliance didn’t work in Hurricane Katrina, when people were left to survive without water, power or shelter. And that’s the problem with disasters: They don’t always unfold according to our plans, however complete—or not—they may be. In the absolute worst case, it’s not even a scenario anymore; it’s called a Black Swan.

Epistemology scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb confronts our notions of control and security in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  According to his “anti- theory,” Black Swans are “highly improbable consequential events.” They’re the outlying events so catastrophic and pulled from chaos that it’s beyond the scope of our imagination. The magnitude of the threats they pose overwhelms our ability to plan for them. And so we don’t—we are stunned to inaction.

Glenn Borchardt isn’t sure if the local government does enough to prepare for a major earthquake. “I think, in general, in the state [of California] we are doing quite a bit. The thing is, we have never done enough.”

After a 6.7 earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley in ’71, Long Beach became more seismically aware. Building codes were revised with the new data, and a citywide retrofitting mandate was put in effect. According to Chel, retrofitting was completed in the ’80s, with most buildings, including vulnerable masonry work, deemed seismically secure. Borchardt thinks this isn’t enough.

“Some of the retrofits are big bolts that they put in through the foundation into the wood, and they are rusting,” he said. “They’re not galvanized, and they could just break off, too.”

The scientists that worked on the NIFZ planning scenario are proud of what they produced, but disappointed by the lack of awareness it generated. “Our scenarios are good, but I don’t know how many people know about them or read them,” says Borchardt.

Seventy-five years ago, the ’33 earthquake revealed the danger that lay concealed below us, but our collective memory is short-lived. And as the city’s unprecedented seismic slumber extends into another year, residents too slip deeper into a complacency coma. You, though, are not fooled. You know now that the scenario given here is an eventuality. Plan accordingly, if you can. Good luck.

Tags: 1933 quake, disasters, earthquakes, Long Beach, long beach memorial, preparedness