CATASTROPHE "A Bad One"

"A Bad One"

A few minutes after 9 p. m. E. S. T. last Friday, Jesuit Fathers in their universities at Georgetown and Fordham watched seismographic needles squiggle excitedly across white paper drums. In snowy Cambridge, Harvard seismologists estimated the disturbance to be 2,600 mi. away. "You might be interested in knowing," a woman telephoned the New York Times, "that I have just tried to communicate with Los Angeles by telephone. The operator said: 'Sorry, I can't connect you. We're having an earthquake.' "

Deep in thought, Professor Albert Einstein, who planned to leave the U. S. this week, strolled across the twilit campus of California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. He did not at once understand why the tall palm trees had begun to dance crazily or why the students had begun running out of their dormitories. In Los Angeles, where crowds going home to dinner had complained of the sultry, oppressive atmosphere, electric lights blinked. A newspaperman, looking down on the city, saw the square 28-story tower of the City Hall sway ten feet like a huge tree. Masonry and cornices began to fall. The floor he was standing on bent gently up and down. An old Californian at his elbow said: "This is going to be a bad one." A cloud of dust began to rise through the stricken town. . . .

In Hollywood, Reginald Barlow had just called to order a meeting of cinema stars--among them Clark Gable, Jack Oakie, Claudette Colbert, Wallace Beery, Richard Barthelmess--to discuss a prospective 50% pay cut . "If this is an earthquake," said he, "I need not remind you that the safest place to be is where you are."

It was going to be a long earthquake. At 6:06 p. m. (Pacific Time) a second shudder ran under California's coastal apron, from the winter & summer colony at Santa Barbara to the port of San Diego, 200 mi. south. The old Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Building buckled, collapsed. Two warehouses fell apart. Into frenzied suburban streets slipped the walls of small apartment buildings, leaving rows of cheap bedrooms suddenly and immodestly bare. A housewife scrambled through her kitchen, fell over her cat, broke her kneecap. Panic-stricken motorists ran down pedestrians, ran into each other.

The seventh major temblor hit at 7:55 p. m. Added to the nightmare were the screams of the injured and dying, the wail of fire-engine sirens. Fires had broken out, fed by sprung gas mains. Luckily most water mains held. But the Huntington Park High School had to be dynamited when fire got beyond control. At Watts, the city hall, school, postoffice and Odd Fellows building lay in desolate heaps. At Artesia another school burned. At San Diego radios went off and the First National Bank's burglar alarm went on. Throughout the area trains had all halted where they were to prevent derailment. In San Pedro Harbor the cruiser Northampton, feeling a sharp tug on her anchor chain, got up steam in readiness to run to sea.

In Manhattan, Citizen Herbert Hoover made a hurried call to Pasadena, learned that his wife and Herbert Jr. were uninjured. From Washington President Roosevelt wired Governor Rolph: "If anything is needed wire me at once. Trust preliminary reports are exaggerated." The President ordered the fleet off San Pedro and San Diego to give aid.

It was now expected that the worst was over, although on the street in Los Angeles one could still feel but not hear an ominous underground rumbling. At 9:10 came a shock even more terrific than the first.

Their preliminary flashes sent, press associations began to get an idea of the scope of the story.* Treading their way across roads strewn with wreckage, reporters looked in vain for the nocturnal orchard of cherry-colored lights on the derricks of the great Signal Hill oil field. All lights were out. But two tanks at the Union Oil Co. refinery in San Pedro were ablaze.

Pushing into Long Beach, reporters found that that town was hardest hit. A theatre, the Woodrow Wilson High School, the Press-Telegram building were wrecked. Two firemen were crushed in their firehouse. Fifty-one citizens were dead. The Seaside Hospital had partially collapsed, killing ten patients. Doctors treated hundreds in the streets, operated under automobile headlights on people lying on litters which still trembled with the ceaseless subterranean labor. Death and injury came in weird forms. Many people hurt themselves leaping from windows. An expectant mother, pulled from wreckage, died as her baby was born.

And the earth still trembled. By early morning the major temblors had been estimated at 23. In the devastated area, which extended as far as 60 mi. inland, property had been destroyed in 14 towns and cities. More than 4,000 had been injured. The dead were reckoned at 116.

As dawn broke, 2,000 bluejackets and Marines, under the orders of Admiral Richard Henry Leigh--who had been shaken out of his Long Beach apartment but went back to bed as the shocks continued--patrolled the Long Beach area. At Long Beach, Marines guarded prisoners taken from the tottering jail. Only one arrest for looting was reported. People were still scratching desperately in the rubble for their missing and dead.

Day After the earthquake, many a curious tale was told.

Passengers on a coastal vessel which left San Pedro just before the first temblors, told of watching the cliffs at Palos Verdes slide into the sea.

In Hollywood, where studios were only slightly damaged, Maurice Chevalier was recording a love song beside a pool of swans. He & swans instantly stopped work. Marlene Dietrich was autographing a photograph for a friend. The pen made a wild sweep. Miss Dietrich dated the picture to commemorate the occasion. Carole Lombard was flung from a fitting stand in the wardrobe room.

Manager Bill Terry of the New York Giants had just come back to his hotel after winning an exhibition game from the Chicago Cubs in Los Angeles. "I never experienced anything like that in my life," he said. "At first I was inclined to take it for a joke and I remember making some crack about guessing the shock of the Giants' winning a ball game being too much." Manager Terry fled to the middle of a square outside the hotel, surrounded, like a hen with chicks, by the whole Giant team. At length Trainer Willie Schafer was prevailed upon to go back into the hotel and get the players' overcoats. Trainer Schafer's earthquake experience was trying. He was taking a shower at the ball park when the first shock hit. The next thing he knew he was standing on second base stark naked.

Hearst Colyumist Arthur Brisbane, whose employer has large realty holdings in Los Angeles & vicinity, deprecated the disaster thus: "A succession of comparatively mild earthquake shocks . . . damaged certain buildings, insecurely built. . . . Earthquakes still arouse superstitious fear, as the appearance of comets used to do. This one will be much exaggerated in other parts of the country, particularly where the rapid growth of Southern California has aroused jealousy."

Fault. Leland Stanford University maintains Professor Lydik Siegumfeldt Jacobsen and a vibration table by means of which he simulates the shocks and temblors of earthquakes. Miniature buildings on the table rock, collapse or remain upright as actual buildings might behave under natural conditions. Skyscrapers of more than 30 or 40 stories are generally flexible enough to resist earthquake oscillations. Buildings of four to 30 stories run greatest risk because they tend to vibrate in unison with quakes. Last week's earthquake proved Professor Jacobsen's thesis. In Long Beach & vicinity mainly low structures were wracked and razed. Skyscrapers stood unharmed.

A close observer of the vibration experiments has been Bailey Willis, Leland Stanford's professor emeritus of geology. Southern Californians consider fluffy-bearded Professor Willis a mischievous hoot owl because, after the devastating 1925 earthquake at Santa Barbara and during the Los Angeles boom, he indiscreetly predicted that the next violent upheaval of the Pacific Coast would occur, as it did. in Southern California. At that time he commented: "Men's memories are sadly short, when they can find cheaper ways of doing things. Yet we can be, and some day will be, reasonably safe against earthquakes in American cities." The entire Pacific is rimmed with earthquake potentialities, he then reminded the world. Earth is faulty and under cracking stress all along the west coast of North and South America (with an easterly loop which includes the West Indies). The terrestrial weakness stretches across Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to Kamchatka, whence it passes southward through the Japanese, Philippine and South Pacific archipelagoes.*

Events of recent weeks testify to the earth faults--earthquakes in Japan and Cuba a fortnight ago, in Chile the prior week, in Alaska concurrently. Argentina and Germany, apparently thrown off bal ance, also quaked. Mt. Vesuvius in Italy, Mt. Krakatoa in the East Indies, seethe.

* The Los Angeles outlet of C. B. S. felt the first tremor while the "MARCH of TIME" was being broadcast. The staff hastily improvised after the broadcast, began reporting the catastrophe as soon as the program was finished.

* The faults extend westward through the Himalayas, the Persian plateau, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean. The Atlantic and its coasts are comparatively stable.

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