A surge in earthquake occurrences this year has shaken up the greater Los Angeles area.

Fifteen earthquakes have occurred in Southern California this year, with this being around double the average annual amount. While the record number is in part due to better technology for tracking and spreading word of quakes, Southern California has a number of gaps to address in preparation for more catastrophic events.

Jasmine Garcia, a third-year psychobiology student and LA native, said she felt both confidence and concern about the region’s earthquake preparedness.

“I feel like a lot of buildings are earthquake-ready, especially the newer ones,” Garcia said. “There are buildings that aren’t earthquake-ready, and I don’t really know how they would fix that – especially homes – because you would have to kick the residents out to renovate them.”

As residents are alerted of a record number of earthquakes both in real time and through social media, their concerns may also rise. But these concerns could be exacerbated by digital platforms – which report even the smallest tremors and the geological makeup of the area.

According to the Desert Sun, more frequent notifications – due to better earthquake detection technology, alerting measures and social media – can induce unnecessary anxiety, as people could feel that every minor event signals danger. Thus, the record number of detected earthquakes may not indicate actual seismic threat, according to the same source.

Additionally, Allen Husker, a research professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology and manager of the Southern California Seismic Network, said that the LA basin, a low-lying region surrounded by mountain ranges, can increase how strong seismic waves feel to nearby residents. This is because the basin is filled with soft, loose soils and sediments, which amplify certain seismic frequencies, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

Despite the often-exaggerated perceptions of earthquakes, city and state officials have worked to improve city infrastructure and legislation in preparation for future earthquakes, which may have serious consequences. For example, the Earthquake Early Warning system, introduced by the local government in 2019, can detect and relay warnings to the public before tremors reach certain areas in California.

Other initiatives include enhancing the resilience of the city’s infrastructure. The Alquist Act, amended in 1994, mandates that all hospital buildings in California meet strict seismic safety standards by 2030. This requires retrofitting, the process of strengthening buildings to better withstand earthquakes, or demolition of non-compliant structures.

Despite recent efforts to extend the compliance deadline to 2040, the state, citing public safety concerns, has upheld its firm deadline.

However, significant gaps remain. About 6,000 buildings in LA are still in need of seismic retrofitting, according to the Los Angeles Times. Forty-two of these buildings are located near campus around Beverly Hills, with nearly a third of them located in liquefaction zones where homes could entirely sink the ground if affected by an earthquake, according to the same source. Neighborhoods outside of designated danger zones may also face risks.

LA is home to over 12,000 soft-story buildings – structures characterized by a significantly weaker first floor – and nearly 2,000 concrete buildings, both of which may lack the necessary steel reinforcement needed to endure severe shaking if an earthquake were to occur, according to the LA Times.

Jonathan Stewart, a civil and environmental engineering professor and co-director at the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center at UCLA, said in addition to soft-story and concrete buildings, older structures are also a cause of concern.

“We have a very large inventory of older structures, and we either have to replace them, which is very expensive, retrofit them or look at them carefully,” Stewart said. “A lot of them (the buildings) have still ways to go, but there has been some real progress over the last five years or so in that firm.”

LA must also prepare for subsequent natural disasters that may be triggered by an earthquake, according to the United States Department of Homeland Security. For example, San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake resulted in leaking gas and collapsing structures that fueled city fires, as well as broken water mains that cut off the city’s water supply, according to the UC San Francisco History Library.

Husker said the same thing can happen today. Property damage and fires can be especially dangerous in Southern California, where droughts are common. Hypothetically, an earthquake that intersects with the San Andreas Fault, the 800-mile fracture in the Earth’s crust running across much of LA, could sever pipelines that supply 80% of the city’s water and inflict catastrophic consequences during fire season, Husker added.

While there is no clear indication of how the greater reported number of detected earthquakes will affect the future, Stewart said earthquakes and other natural disasters are inevitable, and the city must prepare for it far in advance of any official warning.

“What early warning cannot do is it can’t make a brittle structure a ductile structure,” Stewart said. “People who are in vulnerable structures are not safe because they have 20 seconds of warning.”