Ramirez plucked his water tumbler off the floor and returned it to the conference table. The glass had danced over the edge during the quake but landed unbroken on the carpet. Based on the sounds he heard during the trembler, plenty of other damage had occurred.
“Reports!” he shouted at staff members as they hunched over laptops and fiddled with iPhones. “Magnitude! Origin! Was that the San Andreas?”
“No, sir, the quake was in the valley. Geological surveys report it came from the Sierra Madre fault. Epicenter in north L.A., southern edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. San Fernando area.”
“Goddammit, it was strong.”
There would be damage. There had to be damage after a quake like that. His mind was spinning. How bad? How would emergency services cope without transportation? He noticed that fortunately they still had power at City Hall.
“I’ve got reports of flooding in Sylmar,” an aide said. “Water at least a foot deep in places. Level is rising.”
“Water at the two-ten freeway,” another added. “Flooding in San Fernando.”
“What happened?” Ramirez said.
For a minute the only answer was the clattering of keys and murmuring into cell phones. Then someone spoke.
“The Pacoima Dam has failed, sir. Repeat: the Pacoima Dam has failed.”
“The dam was at nineteen hundred fifty feet elevation,” another aide said. “The reservoir is draining into the valley.”
“What’s the capacity?”
“About six thousand acre-feet.”
Enough water to bury six thousand acres of land under water one foot deep. Not good, but not too bad in the grand scheme of things. The San Gabriel Reservoir, also in the Angeles National Forest about forty miles east of Pacoima, held eight times as much water.
“This time of year, it wasn’t full, was it?” he said.
“No sir. Estimate reservoir was at… less than 50% of capacity.”
“Three thousand acre-feet. We can deal with that.”
Or more to the point, the residents of Sylmar would have to deal with that. There was precious little the county’s public services could do for them right now. A couple of feet of water over an entire community was a helluva mess, but it shouldn’t kill anybody, at least not right away.
Damage reports came in: damage to older buildings, cracked roads and sidewalks, palm trees down. The power was out in more than ten thousand homes. A few structures had collapsed. In ordinary times, heavy equipment would rush to the scene and rescue people trapped in those buildings. But L.A. was becoming Port-au-Prince. Earthquake victims were on their own.