As a result, if a Northridge-magnitude earthquake were to strike somewhere in California again—which scientists say is a near certainty within the next 30 years—many Californians could be on their own to pay to repair or rebuild their houses, replace their belongings, and live elsewhere until important repairs were completed. California faced a different kind of financial crisis after the Northridge earthquake, when insurers discovered they had underestimated the costs associated with a major seismic event.
Many insurers no longer wanted to offer earthquake coverage, and because California law required that residential insurers offer earthquake insurance when selling residential policies, these insurers chose to abandon the market altogether. By , the companies representing nearly 95 percent of the California residential insurance market had either restricted or stopped offering homeowners policies.
Unavailability of home insurance meant that potential purchasers of homes could not get the homeowners insurance required to take out a mortgage, which sent the California housing market into a tailspin. Structural damage was reported to more than 12, homes, businesses, schools and hospitals, leaving many people homeless for extended periods. Damage was wide-spread: Sections of major freeways with unwrapped supports and unextended expansion joints collapsed; parking structures and office buildings with concrete framing non-ductile collapsed; and numerous apartment buildings suffered irreparable damage.
Damage to wood-frame apartment houses was widespread in the San Fernando Valley and Santa Monica areas, especially to structures with soft first floor or lower-level parking garages. The high accelerations, both vertical and horizontal, lifted structures off their foundations and shifted walls — laterally triggering major fires. In all, eight Southern California freeways were damaged, including the Highway 14 and Interstate 5 interchange.
The interchange's collapse cut off freeway access to Los Angeles for hundreds of thousands of residents of northern Los Angeles County. Ironically, that interchange had collapsed 23 years earlier, during the Sylmar Earthquake of Citation Hauksson, E. Seismology: The Northridge Earthquake and its Aftershocks. Earthquakes and Volcanoes , 25 1 , Request Interview.
At a. The quake was caused by the sudden rupture of a previously undocumented blind thrust fault. The Northridge quake, named after the San Fernando Valley community near its epicenter, was the costliest in U. Damage was widespread, as buildings, shopping centers, parking lots and portions of major freeways all collapsed. At least 57 people perished, while thousands more were injured. At the Northridge Meadows apartment complex, 16 people were killed, all of whom lived on the first floor, when the three-story, stucco-and-wood structure fell down on them.
A motorcycle police officer died when his vehicle plunged off of a just-collapsed section of freeway. The fact that the quake occurred on a federal holiday Martin Luther King Jr. Day and in the early morning hours when most people were home in bed was critical in reducing the number of casualties.
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