The First 15 Minutes After the Big One

When the horrible shrieking from twisted metal and wood quiets, Gooday hears screams from a neighbor a few floors above her, as he is crushed by his caved-in ceiling. Soon, there's no sound from him.

Down below, at street level, two diners at gourmet restaurant The Gorbals in the Alexandria unwisely dash into the dark lobby. Other patrons dive under tables. The Alexandria's huge chandelier, with its eight frosted globes, suddenly shatters, and knifelike shards fall on the two fleeing diners, delivering mortal wounds.

ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK FARICY

PHOTO BY STEVE APPLEFORD

Brett and Renee Asolas, disaster volunteers in Norwalk

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More About

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

Just outside the lobby, a woman and a child on Fifth Street are killed instantly, gruesomely pinned beneath the Alexandria's historic, 400-pound stone griffin, which has cleaved off a lower corner of the hotel.

Downtown and other older neighborhoods of L.A. contain thousands of unreinforced brick masonry buildings that will fling steel, bricks and glass into the streets. Outside the city, Los Angeles County still has 1,500 nonretrofitted brick buildings. But inside the city limits, more than 99 percent of the brick buildings have been retrofitted.

This common type of upgrade, called "life-safety" retrofitting, is solely aimed at preventing total building collapse — not at stopping killer projectiles such as flying bricks. "You can retrofit to the current minimum standard of life safety," says earthquake scientist Hudnut, "but the next level is to get to less disruption, where a building doesn't have to be evacuated, or maybe even rebuilt."

Seismic engineer Keith Porter notes that despite the effort to prevent total building collapses, "Earthquakes can always produce something different or stronger than expected. There is always a chance that life-safety [retrofits] will fail."

Thanks to California's tough seismic building codes, commercial and residential structures will perform better than those in the Great Hanshin quake that devastated Kobe.

The landmark, red-brick Bradbury Building on Third Street, built in 1893, suffers shattered glass skylights but stays intact, thanks to its $2.4 million retrofit. The 1930 turquoise art deco Eastern Columbia building on Broadway — known to millions of commuters on the 10 freeway — also stands strong due to a retrofit. The Title Guarantee building on the east side of Pershing Square, built in 1930, received a green rating after Northridge but went through bulky structural retrofits anyway. It, too, remains standing.

7:02 p.m., two minutes after the quake:

As bricks and glass crash to the streets and maim residents throughout Southern California, an even worse, and widely unexpected, disaster is unfolding in L.A.'s pre-1970s, mid-rise and high-rise concrete buildings that contain insufficient rebar for major quakes and are known to engineers and other experts as "non–ductile concrete" structures.

Inside the city of Los Angeles, 25,000 to 30,000 non–ductile concrete buildings were erected, concentrated in areas such as Hollywood, downtown and the Wilshire District. Some of these office and apartment complexes will tilt, fragment and collapse as the L.A. Basin continues to pulsate long after it's shaken. Floors will fall, façades will plunge, some will badly sway and be left askew.

Heaton says pre-1970s concrete buildings were designed to sustain only 3 feet of "displacement," or swaying, during a quake. The long-lasting seismic waves from the Big One will shift buildings more than three feet.

Moreover, Porter says the beams and columns in buildings constructed with "welded-steel moment-frames" between 1964 and 1994, which before Kobe were assumed to be earthquake-safe, will "tend to suffer brittle failure" at the welded joints. And the horrible part is, engineers and officials can't easily identify which buildings are "WSMF," or welded-steel moment-frame constructed.

"There is a big effort right now by engineers to identify these types of buildings," Porter says. "There are probably thousands and thousands of them."

A state-funded but fairly limited survey found 1,317 within Los Angeles. According to Department of Building and Safety spokesman David Lara, there is no current city, county or statewide ordinance to make retrofits mandatory, and only 1 percent of the small number of non–ductile concrete buildings identified so far have performed voluntary seismic retrofits.

Lara doesn't know if the Alexandria, technically classified as a non–ductile concrete building despite its brick exterior, is on the city's list of 15 to 25 buildings that performed retrofits. But city building records show that no seismic retrofits were made to the former hotel. The building's owner, Amerland Group, did not return calls for comment.

About three minutes after the massive jolt, the trembling slowly comes to a halt downtown. Gooday emerges from beneath her table at the Alexandria and walks to her front door. Fragments of mirror stud the soles of her purple Crocs. She dead-bolts the lock on her door. She knows the chaos is not over in her neighborhood in the city's historic Spring Street Financial District, with its mix of upscale and downtrodden residents.

Below, a group of young hipsters who'd been cheerfully heading to the rooftop bar at the Standard Hotel on Flower Street is sobbing as they pull concrete scraps off three badly hurt friends and two bleeding strangers. It's rush hour, and crashing cars have veered off Fifth Street and onto the sidewalk. Their headlights eerily illuminate the darkened, grisly scene.

Many people participate in acts of heroism and selflessness. But some see the bedlam as an opportunity to get theirs. Shop windows two blocks from the Alexandria Hotel in the Jewelry District on Hill Street are shattered by the Big One, their thick, metal security gates left badly warped with gaping openings. Young toughs scurry into the blacked-out stores like cockroaches using the cover of darkness.