In 1935, with the damage from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake still a recent memory, SBVC hired John Buwalda of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory to assess seismic hazards. Buwalda discovered and reported the presence of the fault, specifically recommending "a thousand-foot-wide zone of no building, which basically took in almost the entire campus. They [SBVC] ignored his advice, even though they paid for his report."