The Times recalls how the quake that rumbled through L.A.
Houses destroyed from california earth quake full#
They proved helpless when the fault rupture reached the surface, a phenomenon that had not previously occurred in an urban earthquake.Ĭalifornia Full Coverage: 50 years after the Sylmar earthquake “The code would essentially produce nonductile concrete buildings.”Īnother revelation was the damage to single-family homes, at the time thought to be resilient enough to ride out moderate quakes. “You had to have ductility” - the ability to stretch. “We as an engineering community learned from that, that just having strength was not enough,” said Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA. The hospital buildings and the freeways, all made of concrete, proved unable to roll with the earthquake’s punches. “There were some structures that people thought were safe that turned out not to be,” Hough said. No less shocking was the collapse of the soaring, nearly completed overpass from the new Antelope Valley Freeway (Highway 14) to the Golden State Freeway (Interstate 5) in Newhall Pass and portions of the Foothill Freeway (I-210) interchange, where two men in a pickup were killed. Elevator towers tumbled, and the second floor of the 50-bed psychiatric unit collapsed onto the first.
Less costly in lives, yet more startling to engineers and scientists, was the partial collapse of the 4-month-old Olive View Medical Center. The Sylmar quake was one of the worst in modern Los Angeles history, killing 64 people, injuring 2,543 and causing $553 million in damage. California ‘Abject terror gripped me’: Terrifying memories of the Sylmar earthquake of 1971
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