Los Angeles, in all its glory, is a wonder to behold. Its finest days (high 70s, sunny, breeze whispering through the palm trees) can make one believe it is impervious to disaster.
The unfortunate truth that lurks below the earth is thus easy to gloss over or even forget. Until it reminds you with a jolt.
Suddenly there is no denying the shaking, the rattling, the swaying — and one’s memory is jogged: Folded into the landscape, forever and always, is a force that no one can predict.
In recent months, Los Angeles has experienced a smattering of earthquakes that were just powerful enough to make residents stop in their tracks. One morning last week, a 4.7-magnitude earthquake was felt across all corners of the city.
“You think you’re crazy when one happens,” said Kevin Holloway-Harris, 31, who was sitting in his car at a gas station at the time. “I felt the car rumble. I thought, ‘Do I have vertigo, or did I just wake up wrong?’”
For some, the recent quakes have amplified the underlying dread of “the big one” and prompted many to wonder if the shaking is a prelude to a disaster. (The short answer is: it’s up for debate.) But for much of Los Angeles, the general response after being jostled awake, after floors and shelves have vibrated, is apathy.
The last major quake in the Los Angeles region was more than three decades ago, meaning that an entire generation has never experienced the havoc that is wreaked by one. But even older residents have come to have an untroubled outlook. And Los Angeles is a city of transplants and adaptation, where newcomers quickly adjust to their surroundings — even if they sometimes shake.
Five years ago, Mr. Holloway-Harris, a third-grade teacher and actor, arrived from San Antonio and moved into an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. On his second day in town, the blinds shivered. He panicked.
“I ran and stood under the doorway, and all my roommates were like, ‘Man, it’s just an earthquake,’ and went downstairs to watch TV,” he said.
Now after a quake, Mr. Holloway-Harris hops onto a group chat with friends.
“We’re like, ‘Did you feel it?’ But then someone’s like, ‘Yeah but Erewhon has watermelon on sale,’” he said, laughing, in reference to an upscale organic grocery store. “And then we kind of keep going.”
The recent earthquakes have been far lower in magnitude than those that became tragic chapters of California history. In contrast to the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California or the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, buildings and freeways have remained intact and glassware has stayed on shelves.
To be clear, earthquakes are unnerving. But Californians have developed a routine. It generally begins with confusion, which turns to realization, and then shock and a bit of freaking out.
Seconds later, the shaking ends, and it’s on to messaging friends and family members to compare notes on who got the alert and who felt what. Posts on social media also serve as affirmation. (“Me coming to twitter to confirm the #earthquake,” one user wrote last week.)
The day then becomes weirdly normal. Drivers continue slogging through traffic. Dog owners head outside with their pets. Colleagues meet as scheduled.
(For a truncated, cinematic version of this sequence, watch a live newscast where anchors are disrupted by shaking studio lights. A bit of fluster, and then an acknowledgment of the scene, followed by an easing back into other topics for the day.)
Within moments, it is as if a major shifting of the earth did not even happen.
After a lifetime of barely felt quakes, Andrea Gutierrez, 26, said she had experienced her strongest one yet last month, when a 4.4-magnitude earthquake was centered near her workplace in Alhambra, about eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
“I was on the sixth floor of my building, and I felt it really shake — that was the first time I was really nervous,” she said. “But once we evacuated, I was like, ‘Eh, whatever.’”
Ms. Gutierrez attributed some of her casual attitude to being in Generation Z. But even those decades older can be indifferent. In nearby Pasadena, Duncan Baird, 78, said the same earthquake had shaken his condominium and had sent his dining room chandelier swinging.
“I remarked to my wife, ‘Earthquake,’ and she replied, ‘Yep,’” he said. “It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t panic. I kind of enjoy the ride.”
A retired firefighter who worked in the area for nearly 40 years, Mr. Baird has experienced so many earthquakes that they all run together in his mind, he said.
He was working during the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake that caused the deaths of eight people, but he has little memory of it. And he happened to be off-duty for the Northridge earthquake, which destroyed buildings, toppled freeway segments and caused at least 57 deaths.
In between were other earthquakes that, while lesser known, were significant. In 1991, a quake with a magnitude of 5.8 killed a woman who was hit by a falling steel beam outside Santa Anita Park, a thoroughbred racetrack. The next year, a 6.1 quake struck near Joshua Tree, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, followed by a 7.3 quake centered near the town of Landers that killed a young boy.
At the time, the possibility of a fatal earthquake was woven more deeply into the fabric of everyday life, said Lucy Jones, a seismologist and Southern California’s pre-eminent earthquake expert.
The Northridge quake in particular spurred officials to update building codes to make homes and businesses more seismically safe.
But public interest faded as the ground grew quieter. Dangerous earthquakes became a more abstract boogeyman.
Now, Ms. Jones, 69, said, younger Southern Californians and newer residents have no concept of the disruption of hundreds of miles of freeways or of shaking that is powerful enough to toss things into the air.
This year, as more earthquake clusters with at least one 4.0-magnitude temblor have occurred, Ms. Jones said scientists had debated whether a series of earthquakes is more likely to precede or negate a bigger event.
From a seismological perspective, Dr. Jones said, it’s still unclear if the earthquakes this year are the start of a more active period or if they are just flukes. This is a challenge with earthquake science in general: It will take more decades of activity to gather enough data to build statistical models.
The unpredictability puts earthquakes in their own realm among natural disasters. With wildfires and floods — which Southern California has suffered plenty of in recent years — residents get evacuation warnings and usually feel some control over how they respond. With earthquakes, even the best phone alerts give mere seconds of lead time.
That’s why Dr. Jones and other experts hope that the recent, relatively minor quakes will serve as reminders for Southern Californians to prepare: practicing drills with their children that involve dropping to the ground, taking cover and holding on, stocking up on water and nonperishable food and removing any glass hanging above beds.
If Dr. Jones’s inbox this year is any indication, she said, people are paying attention. She has been inundated with requests to consult with schools, governments and other groups.
There are, of course, many residents who have already taken the proper precautions and feel prepared. Still, they refuse to become alarmist.
Zoe Friedlander, 62, recalled how the Northridge earthquake shook her home and how she had to repair the damage to her chimney. Yet she has the same attitude that her parents instilled in her.
“They were just like, ‘Yeah, this is something that comes with living in California — other places have tornadoes and floods, and we have earthquakes,’” said Ms. Friedlander, a retiree who used to work in information technology for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Her son, Aaron Greenberg, 33, has memories of packing and bringing an earthquake kit to school every year. Stuffed with tools like a flashlight and batteries, it also held juice boxes, granola bars and fruit cups.
“We would never use them, so on the last day of school we would get them back and it would be a fun thing where everyone got to eat their earthquake kit,” he said.
Mr. Greenberg, a software engineer, said it tends to be those who live elsewhere who are overly concerned about earthquakes.
“I think more people text from outside Los Angeles saying, ‘Is everything OK? What’s going on?’” he said. “And we’re like, yeah, it was fine.”
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