The Day That Shook Long Beach

By Kristopher Hanson

Photos: Long Beach Earth Quake

LONG BEACH – Six minutes before 6 p.m. 75 years ago Monday, all hell broke loose in Long Beach.

It was a sleepy late-winter Friday, March 10, 1933, and the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression.

Downtown on Pine Avenue, banks were closed and business was light. Unemployment nationally stood at 25 percent, and people in Long Beach, like the rest of the country, didn’t have much motivation to shop.

Across town at Woodrow Wilson High School, a few staffers were collecting their things in preparation for the weekend.

On the then-rural north side of town and in surrounding communities like Compton, Paramount and Bellflower, citrus and dairy farmers were sitting down to dinner after a long work week.

Then, at 5:54 p.m., the ground began shaking in the first throes of a seismic event that forever changed the way Californians understand, react and prepare for earthquakes.

When the 6.4-magnitude temblor ended less than 20 seconds later, more than 120 people were dead and every public school in the city had been reduced to rubble.

From Huntington Beach to Inglewood, masonry structures lay in ruins. In Signal Hill, ruptured oil derricks burned out of control.

The public, including those charged with studying seismic activity, were stunned.

“The Long Beach quake was a pivotal event and really ended a debate going on at that time about whether there were active faults in the L.A. area,” said author and seismologist Susan Hough of the United States Geological Survey.

“The earthquake … forever changed how buildings were designed to withstand shaking and prompted scientists to begin serious review of the Southland’s fault lines, which hadn’t been seriously studied until that event.”

Within weeks, building codes across the state had been strengthened, earthquake study was taking on new national significance and the career of a talented young physicist named Charles Francis Richter was shifting in an important new direction.

Active or not?

As seismologists learned hours after the quake struck, the temblor resulted from a rare rupture along the long-dormant Newport- Inglewood fault line.

The 46-mile long fault line, stretching from offshore Newport Beach north to Culver City, cuts directly beneath Central Long Beach and Signal Hill and is visible primarily as a line of small rolling hills.

Considered by some scientists to be inactive prior to the ’33 quake, seismologists estimate ruptures occur only once every few hundred years along Newport-Inglewood.

“If we were estimating, I’d say it’s about 50 times less active than San Andreas,” Hough said in reference to the massive inland north-south fault line extending from Mexico to Northern California.

“The 1933 incident was not a quake we expect to see every 50 or 100 years, but then again, there’s no predicting when something might hit.”

In fact, during the 1920s, a great debate raged among California seismologists about whether the Los Angeles Basin had any significant fault lines.

On one side stood Stanford Geologist Bailey Willis, who extensively studied the 1906 San Francisco quake and undertook decades of research mapping fault lines across California.

Using data recorded by oil geologists, Willis created an extensive map of Southern California fault lines, then embarked on a campaign urging cities throughout the state to adopt tougher building codes, Hough said.

On the other end was geologist Robert T. Hill, who wrote a book claiming, in effect, that faults in the Los Angeles Basin were “inactive relics of the ancient past,” Hough said.

Supported by Southland business and tourism interests, Hill and his allies successfully convinced much of the public that earthquakes were primarily a problem for Northern California.

When Willis used some partially inaccurate data in the late 1920s to predict a quake, Hill was able to discredit Willis professionally and end, at least temporarily, the notion that Los Angeles and Long Beach faced potential danger.

“Willis kind of disappeared from the scene after that, although he still believed what he was preaching,” Hough said.Quick reaction

Then the Long Beach quake struck, ending the debate and forcing regional planners to quickly adopt stringent new building codes.

Long Beach also set new standards for disaster response and allowed rescuers to adopt new techniques that served later generations of Southlanders.

Shortly after the shaking stopped and perhaps recalling the terrific fire toll taken in San Francisco, Long Beach Gas Department Superintendent William Partridge immediately ordered a total shutdown of natural gas. As a result, the city suffered relatively minor fire damage.

More than 120 people had died, but the fact that school was out saved thousands of potential casualties as every school in the city suffered significant damage.

“Rescue efforts were pretty coordinated and successful, even though 10 of the 12 fire stations in the city lost communication abilities and several were severely damaged,” said Long Beach Fire Battalion Chief Frank Hayes.

In fact, two firefighters lost their lives at fire headquarters downtown when debris crushed them as they raced outside to help.

The temblor prompted revisions of building codes for public structures throughout the nation.

Those laws were among the first in the nation requiring homes, businesses, bridges and public buildings to meet minimum seismic standards, which have grown stronger in the ensuing decades as engineers learn more about the effect of earthquakes on man-made structures.

Richter, a Stanford graduate who was studying plate tectonics, was involved in the post-disaster review.

“The Long Beach quake was a turning point for Richter in that it interested him for the first time of the societal menace that earthquakes were, whereas before he mostly regarded them as a physical phenomenon,” said Hough, who wrote a 2007 biography of Richter titled “Richter’s Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man.”Staying prepared

Today, Long Beach stands more prepared than ever to ride out a major quake, said City Building Planner Larry Brugger.

In 2007, the city oversaw the last retrofit of an unreinforced masonry building – the kind that crumbled en masse in ’33, raining bricks on streets across the region.

And in January, the city’s building code was updated to include new standards for the reinforcement of wood-frame single-family homes and vulnerable soft-story structures.

Soft-story structures are characterized by groundlevel carports topped by apartments and supported by thin steel beams. Many of these apartments were constructed in the ’60s and ’70s, before a string of major earthquakes revealed their tendency to collapse.

The danger of soft-story structures was later illustrated during the 1994 Northridge quake, when most fatalities were attributed to building collapses.

Also of concern to city enforcers are so-called “tilt-up” structures. This design, popular among warehouses on the Westside of Long Beach, typically includes a large, flat rooftop loosely attached to four tall walls.

When shaking starts, the ceiling tends to cave.

The solution for both tilt-up and soft-style buildings is reinforcement, which can include anchoring, cross-beam retrofit and other measures, Brugger said.

“There’s a number of measures that can be taken to make these buildings stronger, and at some point, we may consider a detailed survey of these buildings in our city to take inventory and see what can be done,” Brugger said.

As for rescuers, Long Beach fire and police departments receive regular disaster-response training, and in 2003, the city completed a state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center capable of withstanding a 7.1-magnitude quake.

“We know a lot more about earthquakes, the best ways to respond and rescue and how, for example, to search most effectively for victims,” Hayes said. “We’ve also learned more effective ways to deal with (hazardous materials) situations and minimize that impact on the public.”

REMEMBERING 1933

What: The city is hosting a special ceremony and panel discussion to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1933 earthquake, which killed more than 120 and caused $50 million in damage throughout Greater Long Beach. Seismologist Lucy Jones is the keynote speaker.

Where: Long Beach City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd.

When: 5:54 p.m. Monday. The event is expected to last two hours.

kristopher.hanson@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1466

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