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Northridge Quake 30th Anniversary

Y2kTheNewOldies

Y2kTheNewOldies

www.nbcnewyork.com

Are you at risk? New USGS map shows where ‘damaging’ earthquakes are most likely to occur in the next century

A new USGS National Seismic Hazard Model released Tuesday shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in the United States.
www.nbcnewyork.com www.nbcnewyork.com
www.foxla.com

Remembering the 1994 Northridge Earthquake 30 years later

The magnitude-6.7 Northridge Earthquake struck in the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 1994. After the dust settled, at least 57 people were dead, and 11,846 people in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties were treated at hospitals.
www.foxla.com www.foxla.com


Northridge Quake was the biggest event to hit the LA area. This quake took place on a previously unrecognized fault and warned us that we have to pay attention to other faults of interest that are located in urban areas like the San Fernando Valley. Also at the time of Northridge the only way people in the area were able to get informed was via car radios at that point.

 
I remember the quake woke me up. I was away from the SF Valley that day (visiting relatives in the eastern part of LA County) but it was still quite a jolt. The radio was tuned KNX or KFWB, but the station was playing some sort of strange loop....

My job was closed for about a week or two, so I just stayed put. My apartment building in Van Nuys had been yellow-tagged (we could go in to inspect/take items, but not stay there overnight). A few things got knocked over, but nothing serious. Later the building was green-tagged and we could occupy it again.
 
I was working for Pacific Bell at the time. Got woken up at 4:17 in the morning. By about 5:30AM, I was in the basement of the building at Ventura & Kester in the company's Sherman Oaks LA Regional Emergency Operations Center fielding phone calls before others got in and establishing an HF link to the company HQ in San Ramon.
 
I got the phone call from the assignment desk at the ABC affiliate in Phoenix at 5:20 a.m. Mountain. Was on the first plane to Ontario and in the SFV by 7:45 Pacific. Worked until 11:30 that night, doing live shots for my station and other ABC stations in the Mountain and Pacific Zone. My former co-worker in Phoenix, Jay DeDapper, who'd moved on to WABC and just happened to be in L.A. for another story, handled the live shots for Eastern and Central stations.

Grabbed about six hours sleep and did it all over again for each of the next three days.
 
radiocph said:
I remember the quake woke me up. I was away from the SF Valley that day (visiting relatives in the eastern part of LA County) but it was still quite a jolt. The radio was tuned KNX or KFWB, but the station was playing some sort of strange loop....

My job was closed for about a week or two, so I just stayed put. My apartment building in Van Nuys had been yellow-tagged (we could go in to inspect/take items, but not stay there overnight). A few things got knocked over, but nothing serious. Later the building was green-tagged and we could occupy it again.
Click to expand...
I barely remember the quake.
 
Got us up out of bed. Power was out for a couple of hours in the OC. By then we were able to get the TV going and basically ignored the radio.
 
I was in an SFV location that recorded among the highest movement during the quake. My apartment door was jammed in its frame and apartment filled with "stuff" on the floor, including everything from kitchen cabinets. Mirrors shattered. Pieces of a mirrored bed headboard fell within inches of where I had been sleeping.

I broke a hole in the wall next to the door and got to my car with my daughter. I picked up a KHJ staff member and was at the station within 25 minutes of the quake, slowed by having no working street lights or stoplights.

The station lost about 15 seconds as the generator kicked in and the very scared announcer had the presence of mind to grab the "emergency instructions" posted with our license and the EAS verification codes and he began readinng that until a few of us showed up and started picking up information, mostly from local English language TV stations.

A homeless person who was recording under a bridge in Santa Ana sold me the cassette one point, complete with the overnight guy saying "Oh, s--t" in English at one of the peak movements of the quake.
 
Personal memory: The Northridge quake was felt far and wide. I was in Laguna Beach, Calif., about 60 miles south of Northridge, and there was heavy shaking and jolting. That happened at 4:31 a.m. It affected a huge part of the greater Los Angeles area.

Because I was a listener to KFWB when they were an all-news station; and because KFWB had an earthquake expert, Jack Popejoy, who gave safety information, I knew to always keep a pair of hard-soled shoes by the bed. Jack always reminded listeners to put on hard-soled shoes so as not to be injured from broken glass, before going to check on other family members. So I put on my shoes and went to my son's room. He was frightened, but soon calmed down. He went to the living room and turned on the tv. I stayed in my room, listening to KFWB, whose policy was to first take calls from listeners describing what was happening in their area. I knew that eventually Jack would get there. He ran into the studio 20 minutes later, gasping for breath, and started talking. He was on duty for about 16 straight hours. Dr. Lucy Jones from the Seismology Center at Cal Tech in Pasadena was also on the air.

It was Dr. MLK Day, so the schools were not in session. The greater Los Angeles area, Orange County, Antelope County, and many outlying areas were fortunate that KFWB had such a strong signal and could put local earthquake experts on the air so quickly.
Still to this day, I keep hard-soled shoes next to the bed, for any natural disaster that might occur.
 
Daryl Lynn L.A. said:
Personal memory: The Northridge quake was felt far and wide. I was in Laguna Beach, Calif., about 60 miles south of Northridge, and there was heavy shaking and jolting. That happened at 4:31 a.m. It affected a huge part of the greater Los Angeles area.

Because I was a listener to KFWB when they were an all-news station; and because KFWB had an earthquake expert, Jack Popejoy, who gave safety information, I knew to always keep a pair of hard-soled shoes by the bed. Jack always reminded listeners to put on hard-soled shoes so as not to be injured from broken glass, before going to check on other family members. So I put on my shoes and went to my son's room. He was frightened, but soon calmed down. He went to the living room and turned on the tv. I stayed in my room, listening to KFWB, whose policy was to first take calls from listeners describing what was happening in their area. I knew that eventually Jack would get there. He ran into the studio 20 minutes later, gasping for breath, and started talking. He was on duty for about 16 straight hours. Dr. Lucy Jones from the Seismology Center at Cal Tech in Pasadena was also on the air.

It was Dr. MLK Day, so the schools were not in session. The greater Los Angeles area, Orange County, Antelope County, and many outlying areas were fortunate that KFWB had such a strong signal and could put local earthquake experts on the air so quickly.
Still to this day, I keep hard-soled shoes next to the bed, for any natural disaster that might occur.
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Yeah. KFWB was my favorite back in the day. "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world",
 
Daryl Lynn L.A. said:
The greater Los Angeles area, Orange County, Antelope County, and many outlying areas were fortunate that KFWB had such a strong signal and could put local earthquake experts on the air so quickly.
Click to expand...
That is a surprising observation, as KFWB is not by any means a great signal... lower half of the OC iw poor, particularly at night and the High Desert is out of its decent listenable coverage area.

The 5 mVm (too little today but OK twenty years ago) barely reaches Santa Ana on one side, and does not bet to Santa Clarita at the other. At night, the useful coverage is quite a bit less.
 
DavidEduardo said:
That is a surprising observation, as KFWB is not by any means a great signal... lower half of the OC iw poor, particularly at night and the High Desert is out of its decent listenable coverage area.

The 5 mVm (too little today but OK twenty years ago) barely reaches Santa Ana on one side, and does not bet to Santa Clarita at the other. At night, the useful coverage is quite a bit less.
Click to expand...
It could be that 30 years ago, the KFWB signal came in more clearly at night because other stations near that frequency were off the air at night. Maybe there was less interference, so the signal , even though it may have been weak, still sounded clear. We were in Laguna Beach, which is about halfway down the coast between L.A. and San Diego. At any rate, I was grateful for the outstanding job they did in broadcasting during earthquakes.
 
How many stations got toasted and where off the air for a while? I mean, like studios damaged/destroyed, towers collapsed,etc? When the quake happened, I was wondering about how many where knocked off the air when the quake happened but I never did hear of a definitive number.
 
Yabadabado1 said:
How many stations got toasted and where off the air for a while? I mean, like studios damaged/destroyed, towers collapsed,etc? When the quake happened, I was wondering about how many where knocked off the air when the quake happened but I never did hear of a definitive number.
Click to expand...
None with destroyed studios. The Heftel stations at Hollywood and Vine had no generator, and it took about 10 hours or so to get a movie business portable generator in and hooked up. I was too busy keeping my stations (KHJ and KWIZ) on the air to worry about others so I may have missed some off-the-air operations.

The quake was in the NW part of the San Fernando Valley. Only 670 AM is in the vicinity, with 1260 being about 15 miles away. I don't know about the Class A FM that is now part of Que Buena, but most other stations were too far away and, at worse, had power failures.
 
Daryl Lynn L.A. said:
It could be that 30 years ago, the KFWB signal came in more clearly at night because other stations near that frequency were off the air at night. Maybe there was less interference, so the signal , even though it may have been weak, still sounded clear. We were in Laguna Beach, which is about halfway down the coast between L.A. and San Diego. At any rate, I was grateful for the outstanding job they did in broadcasting during earthquakes.
Click to expand...
1994: No LED lighting, not even compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL's). There were fluorescent tubes, but your radio needed to be near the ballast to have reception interfered with. The Internet largely meant AOL or dial-into message boards, accessed by 56K dialup modems and landlines, from PCs or Macintoshes. No WiFi or Bluetooth. Routers were devices found in big data centers, not in people's homes. The power companies like SoCal Edison or PG&E hadn't begun experimenting with broadband over power lines (BPL) yet. DSL and broadband-over-cable were also a few years away. Light dimmers existed but were somewhat esoteric. Electric cars: two decades away.

Edit: there's also the question of what was being used for street lighting back then. IIRC, it was mostly mercury vapor lights, with some solar vapor. No LED lighting whatsoever yet, so that RFI wasn't a factor. Today it's a big one.

Those are the major generators of radio frequency interference (RFI) in the 2020s, and a big part of the story of AM radio's collapse. But from the perspective of 1994 and the Northridge Quake, all were a long ways away in the future. That's why KFWB could be as impactful as it was back then.
 
Here is another difference between 1994 and 2024 specific to broadcasting. In 1994 there was no way for the co-owned TV stations outside the affected areas to take over the TV feeds and anchor the quake while the affected news staff have to comply with an emergency order to evacuate.

Yes I mean in the event local LA TV stations have to evacuate the news director and anchors out of the building because of aftershocks or their building collapsed or they got red and yellow tagged by the city then their sister stations in San Francisco or Sacramento can take over the anchor duties via their networks app.


Examples are KABC 7 News feed will be taken over by the KGO-TV News staff, KTLA News will be taken over by either KRON Staff or KTXL Staff, KCAL News feed will be taken over by CBS Bay Area or CBS Sacramento staff, NBC Los Angeles feed will have to be done by the NBC Bay Area staff and Fox Los Angeles will be taken over by the Fox Bay Area staff.

The recent examples from the past decade a disaster caused local anchors to evacuate under emergency orders and their related affiliates in other parts of the country had to take over anchor portions of the news segments.

www.newscaststudio.com

CBS New York turns local news over to Los Angeles as studios remain closed

While the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City was essentially out of commission for ... Read More
www.newscaststudio.com www.newscaststudio.com

www.wfaa.com

WFAA helps KHOU during Hurricane Harvey coverage

KHOU in Houston was knocked off the air.
www.wfaa.com www.wfaa.com
 
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