Los Angeles Vs. Nature
By: Lorik Gagica
Tags: Nature, California, Los Angeles, Life, Urban Planning

Besides, Los Angeles has a certain deficiency in terms of public spaces. For several decades back, Los Angeles lacked parks and the natural beauties, which made one of the attractions of Los Angeles, were destroyed by fire or were privatized like beaches. In 1928, parks comprised only 0.6% of the city’s area which is a dismal percentage, and very few square meters of beaches were public to the citizens of Los Angeles County making Los Angeles the only major city in the United States so contemptuous of public spaces.

Devastating natural disasters

“No place on earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California” a 1934 Los Angeles Times article once said. And you just read the biggest lie ever!

Was it a kind of propaganda to attract new arrivals and to comfort the population? Or simply a total ignorance of the natural problems of the geographic location of Southern California? It’s worse than that. The development of Southern California over the decades to the present day is the equivalent of playing with fire all these years (An expression that is taken, ultimately, literally with one of the major natural disasters in Southern California, wildfires).

“California, often to its own surprise, has developed a style of urbanization that not only amplifies natural hazards but reactivates dormant hazards and creates hazards where none existed”. Southern California faces several natural disasters that are largely inevitable.

Earthquakes

Let’s start with earthquakes, which is a hallmark of Southern California. The vast majority of earthquakes in this area are caused by several faults, including the San Andreas fault (image 1).

The San Andreas Fault is the main threat not only in the sprawling Los Angeles area but also in all of California. This fault is at the meeting point of two tectonic plates that rub against each other and its size is such that it is about 1,200 km long and is visible from space (According to Southern California Earthquake Data Center).

Earthquakes, including the epicenter, which is hundreds of miles from Southern California, can be felt in Los Angeles like the 1983 earthquake of the small Californian town of Coalinga with a 6.7 magnitude on the Richter scale. So, what happens if an earthquake hits Los Angeles?

On October 1, 1987, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake killed eight people and demolished several buildings in Whittier (A city located just southeast of Los Angeles) and the culprit of this earthquake, according to seismologists, was a fault that is just below Whittier and that the latter has tended to expand below the Downtown district of Los Angeles and this can cause serious earthquakes in the future.

Also, in the counties that make up the Los Angeles agglomeration, more than 50 active faults have been discovered (image 3) just under this Californian urban immensity making the latter a future victim of devastating earthquakes and Angelenos fear the “Big One”, that is to say, the earthquake that will devastate everything, of which Northridge was a sort of foretaste.

It is expected that there is an 80% to 90% probability that there will be an earthquake of magnitude 7 or greater somewhere in Southern California by 2024, which will have a good chance that it’ll be the “Big One” that Angeleno citizens fear.

Besides, from several studies, the amplitude tremors’ waves in the Angeleno basin could be ten times greater than in areas outside this basin and the tremors’ energy could be amplified between 200% and 400% directly below the skyscrapers of the Downtown district.

The Northridge earthquake (a Los Angeles neighborhood located in the San Fernando Valley) in January 1994, with a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter scale, was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history with $42 billion of damages (Overtaken by hurricanes like Katrina in 2005 or Harvey in 2017, according to CNN) but remains the country’s most expensive earthquake.

There were 72 deaths during this tragedy and the death toll could have been much more excruciating if the earthquake occurred during school hours, there could have been thousands of injured and dead people because of the debris that fell inside school buildings. This could have applied to shopping malls with thousands of people who could also have been victims.

The Northridge earthquake revealed a serious crisis in the quality of residential construction. Indeed, after inspecting several houses, engineers concluded that at least 1⁄3 of the damage caused by the earthquake was directly due to poor construction. The many stucco apartment complexes are simply lethal traps and especially those that built with garages or carports. Stucco is a marble-like material, usually composed of slaked lime, fine plaster, glue, and marble or chalk dust.

As Davis said in his book named Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster, “In Southern California, we bury our dead and then we forget”.

Even after a disaster like Northridge, authorities build massively to cover the tangible evidence of this disaster, as if nothing had happened, a situation that can be defined as a “disaster amnesia” because Los Angeles must recover from its splendor.

In a way, the Northridge earthquake may have opened people’s eyes to the power of an earthquake of this magnitude. Huge buildings, whether assembled with steel or not, are likely to be in danger even with moderate tremors as long as they are on the Los Angeles Basin and the same goes for the very many residential buildings that need earthquake reinforcements.

However, several other earthquakes happened around and in the Los Angeles area, such as the 1971 San Fernando earthquake of magnitude 6.6 or the 1992 Landers earthquake of magnitude 7.3 (Located in the Mojave Desert, approximately 170 km west of Los Angeles) that injured more than 400 people which it was believed that the “Big One” had finally arrived (According to the United States Geological Survey).

Southern California is a regular seismic zone, there were more than 340 earthquakes of magnitude 1.5 and above, only for the year 2018 just in the Angeleno region (According to Earthquake Track). Added to this, is the risk of a tsunami on the Angeleno coast, on which signs are installed, indicating a tsunami danger zone in the event of an earthquake and tells us to go high ground or inland (These signs are usually found in beachside tourist areas such as Santa Monica, Venice Beach or Newport Beach).