The Northridge earthquake hit the Los Angeles region before dawn on Jan. 17, 1994. Its magnitude was 6.7 \u2014 much smaller than California’s great earthquakes \u2014 but its location made it enormously destructive.<\/p>\n
The quake occurred beneath the heavily populated San Fernando Valley. Freeways collapsed, apartment buildings suffered severe damage and fires broke out as utility lines failed.<\/p>\n
Northridge demonstrated another important feature of California’s seismic landscape: A destructive fault doesn’t have to produce an obvious surface rupture. The earthquake occurred on a blind thrust fault, meaning the fault doesn’t reach the ground in an easily visible line.<\/p>\n
Southern California contains numerous active faults in addition to the San Andreas, including systems around San Jacinto, San Bernardino County, Ventura and the Los Angeles basin. Other significant California earthquakes have occurred near Long Beach, Santa Barbara, Cape Mendocino, San Simeon, Big Bear and Superstition Hills.<\/p>\n
That makes earthquake risk a statewide issue rather than a problem confined to one famous fault.<\/p>\n
The 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake still offers one of the clearest demonstrations of what a great San Andreas earthquake can do. Its magnitude 7.9 rupture shifted parts of California by as much as 30 feet (9 meters). The reason it didn’t become a catastrophe on the scale of 1906 wasn’t because the shaking was weak. There simply weren’t nearly as many people and buildings standing in its path.<\/p>\n
We created this article in conjunction with AI technology, then made sure it was fact-checked and edited by a HowStuffWorks editor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Northridge earthquake hit the Los Angeles region before dawn on Jan. 17, 1994. Its magnitude was 6.7…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-460623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}