TRONA, Calif. _ As the trio of researchers eyed the aging buildings in Trona, it was hard for them to tell which were severely damaged by the earthquakes that pummeled this San Bernardino County town in recent days _ and which were simply old and abandoned.
"Some of this damage was already here," said Kenneth O'Dell, 55, a structural engineer.
But he nonetheless noted that the earthquake had hit Trona hard, particularly because the walls of most buildings were not reinforced with steel or other material that can keep them upright, or prevent cracking during severe tremors.
"It looks like most of these structures were built during the 1930s and 1940s," O'Dell said. "So it makes sense that they weren't ready for this kind of shaking."
O'Dell had arrived from Los Angeles on Saturday with engineer Martin Hudson and his 25-year-old son, geologist Kenneth Hudson, to assess earthquake damage in Trona and nearby Ridgecrest after massive quakes rocked the region.
Their goal was to study the structural damage of the buildings in Trona so they could understand how exactly the earthquakes affected those structures and surrounding areas. These findings, they hoped, could someday be published in a research paper and help guide future geologists and engineers.
They stopped Saturday afternoon on California 178 between Trona and Ridgecrest, where the elder Hudson stood on one of the fault ruptures caused by Friday's magnitude 7.1 quake.
"It's moved everything three feet to the right," said Hudson, 52, an engineer who forms part of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, an organization based in Oakland that brought researchers together in the Ridgecrest area to study the effects of the earthquakes.
After assessing the fault rupture, the three researchers hopped in their car and headed to Trona, about thirty miles northeast of Ridgecrest. At the side of a faded pink house at the community's entrance, the researchers noted that soil liquefaction had caused portions of the ground to crack and collapse _ some of the soil had started turning into a liquid state, the researchers explained. Nearby, a chimney had caved in on one of the houses.
"We saw a lot of this type of damage in the '94 Northridge earthquake," O'Dell said.
In the end, the three anticipate that their research could help prevent future building damage during earthquakes.
"The goal of our research is to improve the designs of these structures so that they are not as susceptible, and we're hoping that our work today can contribute to that," Kenneth Hudson said.
