Mansions of Millionaires Just Miss Disaster

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7104, 13 March 1933, Page 7

Mansions of Millionaires Just Miss Disaster

WHERE THE DAMAGE WAS DONE Received Sunday, 6.30 pun. LOS ANGELES, Mar. 11. Part of the richest area in California 200 miles long by some 30 miles wide was affected by the earthquake, from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara and from the sea coast to the mountains. More than 2,000,000 people have been settled there since the last major earthquake of an apparent scries which visits South California in Nature’s continent building every 75 years or so. The belt includes a 100,000,000 dollars yearly of the citrus industry, the uicart of the motion picture industry and the largest number of homes of the wealthy from all parts of the continent- of any place in the w-orld. The motion picture plants and the homes of the wealthy in Beverloy Hills, Hollywood, Pasadena, Altadena and San Marino, in fact all of the areas of magnificent homes and estates were merely on the fringe of the jolting waves of death and destruction which centred in a triangular region with its apex in the centre of downtown Los Angeles and extending southwest through tho industrial centres of southern California.

To the south it fanned out into the oil regions of the Santa. le springs, Labrca and the groves of orange country. In the centre it went down the heart of the industrial section, embracing communities dealing with eaefi in greater severity, with the worst havoc at Longbreaeh, made wealthy by its oil royalties, and perhaps the best known sea shore city and meeca of summer visitors.

To the westward the triangle included the rich Dominluez and Torrance oil fields and the largest oil storage plants and refineries in the world in the region north of Longbeach and surrounding Los Angeles harbour. At Pasadena the earthquake was what the Carnegie Institute’s seismological laboratory had been waiting yoars for. Scientists believed Southern California would experience another great earthquake and the Carnegie Institute was built on a fault on the outskirts of Pasadena. Delicate selfrecording instruments had been installed and careful records made with the hope of being of value in studying earth disturbances leading up to this major ’quake and making it possible to forecast great tremors. It appeared that the epicentre of the present disturbance was in the San Pedro Channel.