It’s 5:54 p.m. on Friday, March 10, 1933. A 6.4 magnitude earthquake sweeps throughout Southern California, concentrating much of its damage in Long Beach. Although the epicenter is three miles off the coast from Huntington Beach, the 15-second temblor collapses dozens of unreinforced masonry buildings — many of them schools.
Long Beach’s 28 schools, each of them packed with students just a few hours before, are destroyed or severely damaged. Long Beach’s Poly High and Jefferson Junior High are leveled. In the area hit hardest by the earthquake, which includes Compton and Huntington Park, 70 schools are completely flattened. More than 230 school buildings are either destroyed, suffer major damage, or are judged unsafe to occupy.
Writes Robert Milliken, chair of the Joint Technical Committee on Earthquake Protection in a June 7, 1933 summary of the committee’s findings:
“In Long Beach, in Compton, in Huntington Park — in fact in every community where the earthquake was at all intense — severe damage to school buildings was general. Auditoriums collapsed, walls were thrown down, and the very exits to safety were piled high with debris which, a few moments before, had been heavy parts of towers and ornamental entrances. It is sufficient to suggest the terrible consequences, had the same earthquake occurred a few hours earlier.”
More than 20,000 homes are also damaged. Nearly 5,000 people are injured and 120 die – 53 of them in Long Beach. Many are killed by falling debris or collapsed houses. It’s California’s second deadliest earthquake and the fourth deadliest in the United States. There’s an estimated $50 million in property damage – in 1933 dollars. The quake also hits neighboring Orange County.
Like the Loma Prieta earthquake 56 years later, structures built on landfill — like San Francisco’s Marina District — sustained some of the heaviest damage in the Long Beach earthquake. There are 34 aftershocks over the next six hours. Bonnie Stiles Smith, an 8-year-old third grader in 1933, is among a number of survivors who offer reminiscences to the Long Beach Press Telegram in 2013, Smith remembers visiting her school, Burnett Elementary on Hill Street and Atlantic Avenue, after the quake:
“It was a two-story brick building and it was destroyed. My classroom was gone and the dome of the building was laying on Hill Street. We had to cook outside for days afterward. On the night of the quake we had chocolate pudding for dinner. My sister wouldn’t eat it again for years.”
Thousands like Smith are left homeless, camping in places like Recreation Park in Long Beach. Army and Navy personnel, along with Red Cross volunteers, offer first aid and temporary shelter. Red Cross first aid units handle 2,500 emergency cases in Compton alone. There are more than 30 food centers in Long Beach, feeding approximately 83,000 daily.
News reports stress how “lucky” Southern California is that the quake occurs when school isn’t in session. Says Carl Henry Geschwind in 2001’s California Earthquakes: Science, Risk and the Politics of Hazard Mitigation:
“Seismologists, engineers, and architects promptly and energetically asserted the need for greater seismic safety as the earthquake’s main lesson. Repeated again and again in a variety of settings, this message reached a wide audience and it drew a number of influential endorsements from newspapers and public officials.
“In addition to shaping public opinion, the campaigners for greater seismic safety also succeeded in prodding the public into action. Under the guidance of seismologists, engineers, and architects, a number of local jurisdictions as well as the state government began to incorporate provisions for earthquake- resistant construction into their building laws.”
“In a story titled “Gears Greased by Legislature,” the Los Angeles Times writes on March 13, 1933:
“Whatever legislative relief is needed to ease conditions in the Southern California earthquake zone will be speeded through the lower house by Speaker (Walter) Little, Chairman (Lawrence) Cobb of the Ways and Means Committee and the entire Southern California delegation, with all other Assemblymen in sympathetic accord. Then it will be dumped into the Senate, where fast action is assured. The Governor will complete the cycle by signing any measure in this respect as quickly as it reaches his desk.”
Lawmakers and Gov. James Rolph do respond quickly.
The Republican governor signs AB 2342 – the Field Act – on April 10, 1933. The measure is named for its author, Assemblyman C. Don Field, a Republican building contractor from Glendale. Field witnesses buildings crumple in the quake and is eager not to see such destruction again. He introduces his bill on March 23, it’s swift creation aided by modeling aspects of the measure after the state’s 1929 Dam Act. The Dam Act’s construction and design requirements are born out of the collapse of the St. Francis Dam near Santa Clarita in 1928, which killed some 600 people.
Robert Olson details the steps leading to the bill’s creation and its passage in Legislative Politics and Seismic Safety: California’s Early Years and the Field Act, 1925–1933. Waiving a number of rules along the way, both houses approve the Field Act by April 7 and impose seismic safety standards on newly constructed public schools. It’s one of the first pieces of legislation to do so in the country. Later, legislation requires upgrading existing schools as well.
Says the Field Act’s urgency clause in explaining why it needs to take effect within 30 days:
“The series of earthquakes occurring in the southern portion of the state have caused great loss of life and damage to property. The public school buildings, constructed at public expense, were among the most seriously damaged buildings. Much of this loss and damage could have been avoided if the buildings and other structures had been properly constructed. The school buildings, which will be erected, constructed and reconstructed to replace the buildings damaged or destroyed by the earthquake should be so constructed as to resist, insofar as is possible, future earthquakes. These buildings will be erected, constructed and reconstructed at once and, accordingly, it is necessary that this act go into immediate effect in order that the lives and property of the people will be protected.”
TOP Photo: Polytechnic High School after quake. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library.