The First 15 Minutes After the Big One

The region has undertaken laudable defensive measures. Caltrans insists that all state-owned bridges are safe, for example, and thousands of Southern California buildings have been retrofitted. And thanks to tough statewide seismic building codes, commercial and residential structures will perform better than those in the Great Hanshin quake, which wrecked Kobe, Japan, in 1995. Kobe, whose leaders had wrongly boasted of superior quake construction, suffered 6,400 deaths. Some 80,000 buildings were ruined beyond repair.

But geologists agree that the duration and intensity of the Big One will create a catastrophe the likes of which L.A. has never known. It will be as deadly as Hurricane Katrina and more than twice as costly, killing 1,800 people. And as USGS seismic scientist Ken Hudnut notes, the scientists who created the ShakeOut data have settled upon safe, conservative estimates.

PHOTO BY STEVE APPLEFORD

Jerry Brown's earthquake specialist, Kate Long, left, and USGS seismic expert Lucy Jones

IMAGE COURTESY OF USGS

Two minutes after the Big One, intense seismic waves flow through Greater Los Angeles.

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More About

• Peggy Gooday
• Anthony Perez
• Alexandria (Virginia)
• Accidents and Disasters
• 2011 Japan Disaster

It might be worse.

Downtown Los Angeles will be hit hard by the monstrous quake. City leaders recently granted $640 million in taxpayer subsidies to three new hotels. They've provided billions more in public subsidies to downtown developers over the past 30 years.

Downtown might not have been the best place for the Los Angeles City Council, mayors Antonio Villaraigosa, James Hahn, Richard Riordan and Tom Bradley, and the Community Redevelopment Agency/Los Angeles to concentrate vast sums of public-development money.

Most new skyscrapers will suffer relatively minor damage, but they'll be sitting in the midst of vast destruction.

In the 1994 Northridge quake, several historic buildings such as the Alexandria Hotel and L.A.'s first skyscraper, the Continental Building, escaped damage and received "green" safety ratings rather than yellow or red unsafe ratings. The buildings that got green ratings escaped complying with full seismic retrofits required of buildings seriously damaged in that temblor. The ironic result: These passed-over buildings aren't ready for the Big One.

Moreover, despite Caltrans' upbeat assessment of its bridges, a new report from U.S. policy group Transportation for America says motorists in L.A. drive on structurally deficient bridges more often than residents of any city in the United States, some 400 cars every second.

The L.A. County Department of Public Works is repairing 11 nonretrofitted bridges, but 14 others in L.A. remain a threat, including downtown's decaying and heavily used Sixth Street Bridge to Boyle Heights, which is slated for demolition and replacement.

Now, many of these unfortified buildings and bridges will crumble or break apart.

"Society tends to be reactive," says University of Colorado earthquake engineer Keith Porter. "It takes something to hit us before we actually do something about it."

Individual scientists say that hundreds of buildings within the City of Los Angeles could be badly damaged, while USGS predicts that five large buildings will collapse entirely — another admittedly conservative estimate.

Downtown, Hollywood, the Eastside and the huge Wilshire District have dense concentrations of potential killer buildings, but downtown is the most susceptible. It and the Eastside will take a harder hit from the seismic waves, and downtown has rows of old buildings in higher concentrations than other districts.

Last month, Villaraigosa told L.A. Weekly that the city's nonretrofitted buildings "are some of the things we are going to have to look at."

A few days later, on Oct. 27, the mayor rattled nerves by declaring that the Sixth Street Bridge, used by thousands of Eastside motorists traveling to and from downtown, will need $401 million in repairs to make the bridge safe.

That money may be hard to get. "L.A. doesn't just go to Washington with its hand out,'' Villaraigosa said in a press release. But "you know cities can't build and rebuild their airports, their ports, their freeways, their public transportation systems all at the same time."

6:59 p.m., seconds before the quake:

Inside her one-bedroom, corner apartment in the Alexandria Hotel, the lid on Peggy Gooday's pot of boiling pasta water starts to rattle. Gooday, watching the end of The Simpsons, hears the friendly mealtime sound echoing off her 12-foot ceilings.

But as she rises, her floor jolts back and forth violently and she's thrown into the cushions.

Though unhurt, Gooday freezes. Two bookcases spill to the floor. A short, antique ladder topples, flinging a porcelain lamp against the wall, where it shatters. When her laptop crashes off the dining room table, she snaps out of it and crawls under the coffee table.

"I understand standing in the doorway is obsolete," she remembers — and she's right. Her ring-adorned hands cover her neck, as a heavy mirror above her sofa shatters onto the coffee table.

In total darkness, Gooday closes her eyes and waits out the shaking, but she can't believe how long it lasts. She says ruefully: "People like me, well, we tend to make plans, but then we get complacent. I think, 'Yeah, I should do that,' then I watch The Simpsons instead."

The Northridge quake rupture lasted a while, too, she tells herself. In reality, the earth moved for only seven seconds (although shaking was felt for 10 to 20 seconds).

The seismic waves initiated 100 miles away are amplified by the 30,000-foot-deep pit of silt beneath most residents' feet in L.A. County. Often confused with "liquefaction" — which requires lots of groundwater — this reaction is better defined as "seismic reverberation."