Melanie Williams taught business law at Cal State Northridge 30 years ago, when the most powerful earthquake to strike an urban area since 1933 damaged all 107 buildings on the campus in the San Fernando Valley.
The parking garage was flattened. Though its core remained intact, the 1980s-constructed wings of the library became a mix of twisted metal and crumbling cement. Hazmat crews extinguished a fire in the chemistry labs.
All told, 51 main buildings were severely damaged.
While most recommended that the university close down for awhile after the Jan. 17, 1994 temblor, CSUN president Blenda Wilson was adamant that classes resume as soon as possible. The campus reopened exactly four weeks later. Wilson had ordered giant blimp-like tents for the administration and more than 350 trailers for classrooms, bathrooms and faculty offices.
Business law professor Williams remembered, “They told us we could get into our building for one hour.”
So she climbed up the stairs to the fifth floor of the damaged building to retrieve her teaching materials and was met by a security guard backdropped by nothing but blue sky.
Her office was the last one standing on that floor. She pushed open the office door and saw bookshelves, filing cabinets and resource materials piled on the floor. She retrieved the books needed to teach her upcoming class but the floppy discs containing her lesson materials were damaged and useless.
Her colleague, a philosophy professor, asked the guard to let her into her office, Room 526. “The officer said, ‘Ma’am it is gone.’” But she kept asking to go to her office, unable to contemplate the fact that the wing of the building with her office had been sheared off by the power of the 6.7 magnitude quake.
“It was in rubble on the ground,” Williams said on Tuesday, Jan. 9.
And so began the start of the 1994 spring semester at CSUN, which sustained $350 million in damage, the highest dollar toll from a natural disaster of any public university in the United States at that time, said CSUN spokesperson Carmen Ramos Chandler.
For the next few semesters, Williams taught in one of the trailers equipped with desks, a whiteboard and a projector. She met with students at her makeshift office, the bleachers of the baseball stadium.
“People really banded together,” she said. “We got stuff done. Even if it was on the bleachers of the baseball field. You didn’t hear people complaining.”
Williams brought her 2-year-old son to class because her babysitter became ill. “The students adopted him. They would bring him toys, candy and gave him a whiteboard marker to let him work on the board,” she remembered.
Professor Nate Thomas, who heads the film production option at CSUN’s Department of Cinema and Television Arts, has been teaching there for 34 years. During the reopening of the university in February 1994, he was lecturing in a temporary trailer, located next to the collapsed parking structure, which was still settling from the force of aftershocks.
“While I was teaching, you could hear it creaking. It was very eerie,” Thomas said on Wednesday, Jan. 10.
During one lecture, the dean interrupted and said Thomas would have to clear out. Vice President Al Gore was visiting the campus and he was posing for a photo right in front of the crushed parking structure. Later, President Bill Clinton visited the campus, he said.
Around 2001, thanks to money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Thomas began teaching film studies in a brand new building, Manzanita Hall, fully equipped with film cameras, TV video cameras and editing rooms.
Thomas remembers visiting the Human Resources Department in one of the giant balloon-like tents. “It looked like a big MASH unit. They had their offices in there.” In the next three to four years, the trailers and tents were removed as new buildings went up and damaged ones were restored, he said.
Jean O’Sullivan was working in administration for the Department of Kinesiology. O’Sullivan was a graduate student in English and taught some classes in those infamous trailers, when she wasn’t helping direct students and staff to their temporary digs. Now she’s a digital content and communications specialist for the College of Health and Human Development.
“It was really smooth and really thoughtful,” she said on Wednesday, describing that time 30 years ago just after the earthquake as the college resumed classes. “It was almost like everybody knew that feeling of appreciation. It was harmonious.”
When the earthquake hit, it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and almost no one was on campus at 4:31 a.m. Nowadays, Thomas sometimes arrives at 7 a.m. and he’s practically alone on the giant campus during that time.
“I still get some anxiety because I still think about that earthquake. And when we get tremors, well, it is still on your mind,” Thomas said.
