Kirsten Anderberg/The Sylmar Earthquake: February 9, 1971

My First Serious Quake Experience

By Kirsten Anderberg

This picture from the U.S.Geological Survey is a southeastern view of the Van Norman Dam and the northern end of the San Fernando Valley in 1971, after the Sylmar Earthquake. In the middle of the photo, a hillside rises up above the dam, and my family lived on that hill. The area in the back of the photo is Sylmar, Pacoima, and San Fernando, the areas right below the dam are Granada and Mission Hills, Porter Ranch, Chatsworth, Northridge...During the quake, the top 20+ feet of the concrete dam sides slid into the dam, leaving only 4 feet between the water and the Valley below. At the time of the quake, the dam was holding 14 feet less water than normal, and thus luck once again came through. There was a 2 foot wave reported in the dam due to the landslide as well. You can see from this picture just how close that dam is to suburban Los Angeles, and you can also see how close that water is to the top in this photo...The dust in the background is from landslides in the hills that continued on for days due to the quake and aftershocks.

The geologic survey photographed pieces of the dam wall falling into the Van Norman Dam...(Photo: US Geologic Survey)

I took this picture of the old Van Norman Dam basin in January 2008 from the west side of the Odyssey Restaurant parking lot. You can see on the left, the original wall for the dam which broke in the picture above. The dam was moved back to prevent a similar threat in the future from the dam after the '71 quake. You can see the new dam wall in about the middle of this photo, it is the white wall between two hills. The old dam floor is seen in this picture, dry, with new roads, buildings, etc. on it. The area is not open to the public and is considered a drain basin for the dam in an emergency so no permanent homes, etc. lie on the old basin floor.

I was 10 years old when the Sylmar quake hit Mission Hills, CA, a suburban community in the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles County). The experience started a lifelong interest in quakes for me. 80,000 residents of the San Fernando Valley floor had to be evacuated for 4 days while the Van Norman Dam (or Lower San Fernando Dam) at the north end of the Valley (just behind our house) was drained. The sides of the dam had cracked and slid into the dam, and the water had begun to leak through cracks in the dam walls, threatening the Valley floor below. We used to go up to the Odyssey Restaurant parking lot and look over the western edge, to watch the progress as the dam was breaking.

I remember seeing large chunks of the dam walls sliding slowly below the water line. "It was very close," DWP engineer John Pruitt was quoted as saying. He also said, "The potential for a catastrophic collapse of the dam was there." Since then, dams have been strengthened and codes stiffened. I believe the standard now in Ca. is if a quake goes above a 7.0, the dams must be drained and checked. (Some say that was the reason the Northridge quake was given a 6.8 rating when it felt quite obviously stronger than that. To not make them have to drain and check the dams.) The Van Norman Dam just north of Granada Hills now has a retaining wall built back from the original wall, and the original retaining wall is an emergency wall.

There was a problem evacuating 80,000 people because there was no power to run gas pumps, and also no gas as supply trucks could not manuever the broken highways. People needed gas to leave the Valley. The National Guard finally had to come in with trucks full of gas, giving people gas to leave.

My family owned the house on the hill where the Odyssey Restaurant is, and we were located high enough above the potential flood areas that our family did not have to evacuate. The Valley was dark without people in it, a rare sight. My family's house sustained damages, such as losing all of the dishes that were not locked in the dishwasher from the night before. We had a crack in the hall off the living room so that you could see the backyard through the wall. We had fissures so deep in our backyard all of a sudden, that we kids would push things way down there to try to reach the bottom, but never did find their bottoms! Our hanging lamp in the kitchen swung so wide that it hit our kitchen window and cracked it...

More damages photographed by the U.S. Geological Survey...This is the Antelope Freeway, the 210, and Interstate 5 collapsed in the Sylmar Quake...

The freeway overpasses that collapsed were quite a sight to see. As a 10 year old, I had never seen anything like that. Where the freeways were before, they now just ended in mid-air, hanging as if not finished. There was a lot of damage along the Antelope Freeway and I-5 areas, between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys. (Santa Clarita Valley is to the north of the San Fernando Valley.) The freeways north of the San Fernando Valley showed what a serious catastrophe would have faced the Valley if the quake had hit even an hour later, at 7 AM, instead of 6 AM. Since few people were travelling the roads at 6 AM, few people were killed in collapsed highways, but it is clear from the photos of the aftermath, that we just dodged a bullet there. (In the Northridge quake, we had serious problems with plates of I-5 shifting as well. One of the reasons we had to drive so slow north out of the San Fernando Valley in 1994, after the Northridge quake, was the plates were at different levels...some were a bit up, some a bit down, and all fragile...and you worried that the next aftershock could take them out too. And there was fear when one saw a truck near you on the roads too, as you wondered how much more the freeway could hold up.)

In this USGS photo, Olive View Hospital in Sylmar lost three wings (note the three arrows in picture)...

The Olive View, Holy Cross, San Fernando Veterans Hospital, and the Pacoima Memorial Lutheran Hospitals were ruined, some in quite dramatic fashion, such as entire wings separating and falling off like Legos, with people still in them. As a child, it had a really gorey and eerie feeling looking at the rubble that was once a hospital. Forty nine people died in the Veterans Hospital collapse. Three patients and one hospital worker died in the new Olive View hospital that had only been open for a month, and had to be demolished after the quake. Olive View was finally rebuilt in 1987. In 1971, the hospitals that collapsed had no search and rescue equipment whatsoever. So they could not begin rescue efforts on site without outside help. They did not have radios, flashlights, and first aid supplies on hand that morning in 1971. But now, all six floors have these supplies available for quakes. My dad drove me to look at the Olive View Hospital after the quake, we walked up to the fallen wings, and I will never forget what I saw, and felt. It is still haunting. It was almost incomprehensible. Entire concrete blocks of buildings had fallen onto the surrounding lawns, buildings and parking lots. It made me really *stop and think* about building safety, and mortality, in a way I had not before. Olive View jumped a foot off its foundation, the first floor collapsed and 3 of the side wings fell as if it was a movie set.

Up in the hills above Sylmar, in a tract housing area we used to refer to as "Hang Glider Ave," because so many hang gliders used the foothills in that area, the houses were leveled into piles of junk. We drove through their streets to see pile after pile of rubble where houses once stood. People seemed shocked, and even uncertain as to what they should do next, as they lamented sitting amidst these piles of rubble.

SCIENCE, HISTORY AND GEOLOGY OF THE SYLMAR QUAKE

* One third of all the buildings in the San Fernando Valley were damaged by this quake.

* Telephone, water and power were disrupted for days.

OTHER SYLMAR QUAKE RESOURCES

* L.A.Herald's Sylmar Quake Accounts
* California Geological Survey
* Wikipedia Sylmar Quake Page

REFLECTIONS ON LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE SYLMAR QUAKE

* The Van Norman Dam was too close to the population. It needed to be moved back.

* Freeway overpasses are horribly flawed with regards to earthquakes.

* Hospitals need first aid and rescue supplies on every floor.

* This quake shook up worldwide standards for earthquake-safe building codes, and cost the insurance industry $960 million.

* It is unfortunate that building code revisions from the 1971 quakes were ignored in L.A. County in years following this quake, thus buildings which would have stood during the 1994 Northridge quake, collapsed. My apt. building in the 1994 Northridge quake, for instance, was built AFTER these 1971 quake-inspired mandatory construction code revisions were put in place, yet my building was red-tagged after a 16 second quake. The walls were required by law to have plywood in them as reinforcement. But the construction firm that made my apartment did not put that plywood in. And the L.A. inspectors passed those walls that were not up to code. And in 1994, those codes proved useless, as contractors, landowners, and inspectors had all simply ignored them! And when these ill-built buildings *did* collapse in 1994, no one took any responsibility for my building collapsing due to illegal building code violations, but rather, they tried to say that the collapses were an "act of god." Very few people who lost things due to this were reimbursed for this folly.

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