There's nothing fun or attractive about a major earthquake. After centuries of study and research, we human beings have no idea when the next one will hit. When it does, it will be the worst 48 seconds of our lives, when everything we've spent decades building vanishes while we're still waking up.
So why list Temblors as one of the things we still love about LA? Because human beings, including (and maybe especially) Americans and Californians, are resilient creatures and occasionally even generous to a fault (pun intended!). And nothing brings this out like natural disasters.
We've seen it ourselves, after the Northridge quake of 1994. We've read about it in accounts of the 1933 Long Beach quake. Yes, the photos show horrendous damage, but they also show Angelenos—that's right, all of those selfie-takers from the nation's Capital of Narcissism—rushing in to provide aid and succor to complete strangers.
The historical face of these disasters isn't a broken bridge or a fallen building, but a dirt-faced citizen with a shovel and a nurse with a stretcher.
Resilience takes many forms, of course. And in LA, the jokes and obsessive picking over theories about the “Big One” can occasionally reach the macabre. That Big One is supposedly going to happen when the San Andreas Fault ruptures north of town. Even a medium-strength quake will unleash a thousand ugly ripples through the hundreds of subsidiary faults that trickle into every corner of the LA basin.
Liquefaction in the sands will sink or upend entire waterfronts full of beach housing. The gorgeous clay cliffs will tumble into the ocean, and LA will vanish in a cloud of dust. It could happen a hundred years from now, or it could happen before you finish reading this paragraph.
[Or maybe not?]
But in the meantime, every Angeleno has a curious earthquake story. One of our favorites concerns a meeting we were attending a few years ago when a minor temblor shook the building. The speaker, a Michigander who’d visited several times before, barely paused in his delivery. None of the Angelenos even flinched, except to burst out laughing at the five Midwesterners who immediately dove under the table.
We were fast asleep on January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55AM when the Northridge quake shook the foundations of our sand-based beach house 54 miles distant. When we awoke, we were already standing in the corridor outside our daughters' bedroom, with two shrieking children hanging from our fists. Sometimes, it's comforting to know how you'll react when you have zero time to think about it. And nothing suggests answers to all of the questions you might secretly harbor about yourself or your character quite like an earthquake.
Read about the San Andreas Fault at Wikipedia.
And on Google Maps: Parkfield, CA, two hours north of the city, might style itself as the Earthquake Capital of the World, but Portuguese Bend and Smuggler’s Cove, both in Rancho Palos Verdes at the elbow sticking out into the Pacific Ocean from LA County, are as geologically unstable as they come.