A terrifying decade of California earthquakes began with these forgotten quakes

In the dead of night, the ground beneath Southern California shook, shaking millions of people, damaging or destroying hundreds of buildings, rupturing the California Aqueduct and sending more than a billion gallons of water to the bottom of an ancient desert lake.

This quake, a magnitude 6 quake with an epicenter near North Palm Springs, is not part of the tectonic pantheon that raises California’s worst seismic concerns — like the Northridges, Loma Prietas or Sylmars. But although the July 8, 1986, earthquake was not as well known as some of its fault-breaking brethren, it set off a series of earthquakes that shook Southern California for the better part of a decade.

It was a harbinger of the kind of seismic activity that younger millennials and Generation Z had never seen before. California’s largest cities have been spared major devastating earthquakes over the past quarter century.

The lucky streak won’t last forever

“It’s a reminder that what a large portion of the population grew up with is not the long-term norm” for earthquake activity in California, seismologist Lucy Jones, a research associate at Caltech, said in an interview.

Although California has made great strides in earthquake safety — with some cities ordering retrofits for vulnerable buildings — progress has been uneven.

Los Angeles ordered the rehabilitation of fragile brick buildings, wooden apartments and concrete buildings, but did not require inspections of vulnerable steel skyscrapers. Inland Empire cities in the path of the notorious San Andreas Fault have not been ordered to retrofit or demolish older brick buildings, which can rain down debris capable of crushing pedestrians, cars and buses with lethal force onto sidewalks and streets as they shake.

A partially collapsed brick building in San Francisco crushed cars during the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake. Five people died after the brick building’s fourth-story wall fell onto the parking lot below.

(C. Meyer/USGS)

Given the uneven progress, scientists are preparing to update the ShakeOut scenario, a prediction of the devastation that could result from a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in San Andreas. When it was first released in 2008, researchers said an earthquake of that magnitude could kill more than 1,800 people, injure 50,000 more and cause $200 billion in damage.

“We did a bunch of things, and they made a difference,” said Jones, the lead author of ShakeOut. “And there are things we didn’t do. What opportunities did we miss?”

Jones said she recently secured some seed funding from her center — the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society — to work on updating the ShakeOut scenario. It’s important, she said, because it’s been more than three decades since the last devastating earthquake in the Los Angeles metro area, and such a major natural disaster is not a question of if it will happen, but when.

But whether a disaster becomes a disaster depends on the work that has been done beforehand.

Highways collapsed during the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

(Steve Dykes / Los Angeles Times)

After all, as the ShakeOut report says, a disaster is “a disaster when a community is not prepared to withstand the scale of the disruption that occurs,” with impacts lasting for decades.

The Shakeout 2.0 system, for example, could consider the possibility of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake triggering an urban wildfire 10 times the size of what burned in the Eaton and Palisades fires combined, Jones said.

The report in 2008 said that among the reasons that made Southern California at risk was the loss of water due to damage caused by the earthquake and the resulting inability of firefighters to extinguish fires.

One plausible scenario envisions several simultaneous fires in San Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Ana and South Los Angeles. The scenario says the fires alone could kill nearly 900 people and cause $90 billion in property damage.

Such a huge fire footprint has huge public health implications: “Imagine we produce 10 times the amount of volatile lead and arsenic,” Jones said.

California has a terrifying decade of earthquakes

Although California is known as earthquake country, it experiences fewer earthquakes on average than places like Japan and New Zealand.

As a result, the dynamism and inevitability surrounding earthquake preparedness is “just a whole different social equation” in the Golden State.

However, California can experience huge earthquakes. Earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.9 last struck Southern California in 1857 and Northern California in 1906.

Following the 1986 North Palm Springs earthquake, 1987 brought Los Angeles County its first major urban earthquake in 16 years: the 5.9 magnitude Whittier Narrows earthquake. The quake struck at 7:42 a.m. on October 1, 1987, and left eight people dead, including a Cal State student in Los Angeles crushed to death by a concrete slab from a parking garage, a construction worker buried alive in a well in the San Gabriel Mountains, and a man who was believed to have been so frightened by the shaking that he jumped from his second-story apartment in Maywood.

The upper deck of Interstate 880 in Oakland collapsed onto the lower deck, killing 42 people and injuring 108 others.

(Paul Skouma/AP)

Larger and more destructive earthquakes followed. In 1989, the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck northern California, killing 63 people and causing $6 billion in damage.

The pace continued in Southern California, leading to a devastating end. 1990 brought a 5.5 magnitude earthquake in Upland, followed by a 5.8 magnitude Sierra Madre earthquake that killed a woman at Santa Anita Raceway on June 28, 1991.

Exactly a year later, the 7.3-magnitude Landers earthquake, with its epicenter near Joshua Tree, killed a 3-year-old boy at a sleepover when bricks collapsed from a nearby fireplace. This quake triggered a 6.5-magnitude earthquake just three hours later, raising fears that the San Andreas earthquake could be next.

Then came the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake in 1994, which killed 60 people and caused an estimated $40 billion in damage.

Three earthquakes larger than magnitude 7 have rocked Southern California in the past three decades: the 7.1 magnitude Hector Mine earthquake in 1999, the 7.2 magnitude Baja California Sierra El Mayor earthquake in 2010, and the 2019 magnitude 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake.

The 2010 earthquake killed two people and damaged several buildings in the Mexicali area, and the Ridgecrest earthquake damaged dozens of homes and caused billions of dollars in damage to the nearby Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake.

“They were all in the desert, and they had no real social impact” in places like the Los Angeles metro, Jones said.

Read LA Times guides to earthquake preparedness

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