It was anything but business as usual for Southern California Monday as the early morning earthquake in Los Angeles disrupted telephone service, interrupted rail traffic and temporarily forced airlines to scrap or reroute flights.
The devastation of Southern Califorinia’s economy is likely to be immense once all the damage to businesses, homes and public infrastructure is reported.
As much as three-quarters of the damage caused by the quake will not be covered by insurance, industry officials said. The 1989 quake in San Francisco caused $7 billion in damage, most of it uninsured.
Los Angeles International Airport, shut down so that authorities could check runway conditions, reopened within a couple of hours following the quake. United Airlines, the largest carrier at the airport, was forced to cancel about 30 of its 220 daily flights there.
In addition, buckled roadways made it difficult for airline passengers and crew members to get to the airport.
Flight disruptions in Los Angeles had only a minimal effect on traffic into and out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. A United spokesman noted that flight delays and cancellations along the East Coast because of severe winter weather Monday were having a far greater impact on flights in and out of Chicago.
For the Los Angeles-area business community, communicating by telephone with the outside world was sometimes more difficult than catching a flight. Pacific Bell, the regional telephone company, blocked calls to Southern California to keep the telephone network open to people in the area.
In addition, American Telephone & Telegraph, the nation’s biggest long-distance operator, lost some long-distance service to four area codes around Los Angeles because of a power failure at one of its switching stations during the quake. As a result, AT&T officials said callers trying to reach telephone numers within area codes 213, 310, 805 and 818 encountered busy signals or recorded messages saying that all circuits were busy.
Hardest hit among the railroads serving the Los Angeles area was the Southern Pacific. One of its freight trains derailed near Chatsworth, Calif., during the quake, knocking 29 of 64 cars off the tracks. One of the derailed cars leaked sulfuric acid, causing an evacuation of the immediate area. And a section of Southern Pacific track in Los Angeles was blocked when a chunk of Interstate Highway 5 fell across it.
Schaumburg-based Santa Fe Railway, another major freight railroad serving the area, said it halted 10 trains on its major east-west route between Chicago and Los Angeles for three to five hours while train crews, aided by a special earthquake computer at Santa Fe’s Schaumburg headquarters, checked the railroad’s tracks, bridges and signals within 75 miles of the earthquake’s epicenter.
Santa Fe officials said there were no reports of damage along its tracks in the quake area. As a result, they said, shippers can expect normal movement by rail to and from the West Coast.
Some crude oil pipelines in Southern California, were at least temporarily shut down.
As expected, insurance stocks dipped on the nation’s stock exchanges Monday in the disaster’s aftermath as investors attempted to figure out the quake’s impact. And the stocks of publicly held California construction firms surged in anticipation of quake repair projects.
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