At about 6:42 a.m. 100 years ago today, the residents of Santa Barbara were violently tossed around — some thrown out of their beds — by the heaving of a mighty earthquake.
The shaking lasted 18 seconds. On State Street, the shock produced a giant wave that lifted up entire buildings and then slammed them back down. Facades slid off, hotel guests were tossed out of rooms and 11 people were killed by falling debris. Sixty-five others were injured. The sky turned black with dust from the rubble.
Fissures 3 feet deep opened on the Coast Highway, and the concrete pavement buckled on Mission Ridge. The Sheffield Dam, an earthen structure on the other side of the front range, fell apart as the ground under it liquefied. A torrent of water 20 feet high — 45 million gallons in all — went raging down Sycamore Canyon to East Beach, dragging three homes, a car and 17 cows with it.
Amid the confusion, only a few people — a swimmer, a couple of men in a boat and, most notably, Pearl Chase, the civic leader — reported witnessing a likely tsunami, 10 feet high, that rushed in from the bay, spilled over the West Beach seawall and flooded Chapala and State streets nearly to the railroad tracks.
Throughout the town of 24,000, chimneys were sheared off at roof lines and homes slipped off their foundations. Beds, sofas and even pianos skidded across floors, and the glassware in kitchen cupboards flew through the air and shattered.
At the Santa Barbara Mission, witnesses said a priest stopped 15 parishioners from rushing out of Mass as chunks of stone towers from the building fell to the ground outside.
A deafening roar — rocks grinding deep beneath the earth — preceded the quake by two or three seconds, one witness said, adding that he was “picked up and shaken as if some monster had me by the shoulders with the sole intent of shaking my head from my shoulders.”
READ MORE: Timeline: Major earthquakes in Santa Barbara County in the past two centuries
Leaning on history
That’s just a glimpse of the dramatic events of June 29, 1925, as described in a report for the quake anniversary by Larry Gurrola of Ventura, a Ph.D. engineering geologist. On a mission to fill some gaps in the historical record, Gurrola spent weeks away from his day job this spring, digging into the archives of the Gledhill Library at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum — mainly, 100-year-old editions of the Santa Barbara Morning News and Santa Barbara Daily Press, precursors of the Santa Barbara News-Press. He found their reports more reliable and less prone to sensationalism than accounts elsewhere in the state.
“You come across a degree of exaggeration out of the area,” Gurrola said. “I focused in on the local papers. It seemed to be more accurate reporting, more consistent.”
Sunday events marking the 100-year anniversary
Day of Remembrance: Religious leaders will gather on the steps of the Santa Barbara Mission to offer short prayers and reflections about community loss and resilience. The official design for the centennial plaque will be unveiled. The service will conclude with the ringing of bells throughout the city. The event is free and open to the public. 2-3 p.m., Santa Barbara Mission
Earthquake symposium: The Santa Barbara chapter of the American Institute of Architects presents “The earthquake that built a city,” a special 90-minute symposium exploring how disaster gave rise to the vision, resilience and distinctive architectural identity of Santa Barbara. The event is sold out, but guests can contact the Lobero Theater box office at (805) 963-0761 or boxoffice@lobero.org, to check last-minute availability. 5-8 p.m., Lobero Theater
The 1925 earthquake remains the most destructive in Santa Barbara history in terms of loss of life and property. It was felt as far north as Santa Cruz and as far east as Bakersfield.
An engineering committee of experts from around the country was brought in to conduct a survey in Santa Barbara. In all, 411 commercial and government buildings were damaged, the committee found, and 18% of them, or 74 buildings, were “total wrecks.”
The Board of Fire Underwriters of the Pacific counted a total of 618 buildings that had been damaged or destroyed. And in his search, Gurrola found there was more extensive damage to private homes than previously reported, particularly on the lower Westside.
In all, the damage was estimated by the engineering committee at $15 million, equivalent to nearly $275 million in today’s dollars.
The historical record is rich in detail about the events of June 29, 1925, but there is much that will never be known. There is no scientific consensus about the size of the earthquake, where it began, whether one or more faults were involved or what the length of the rupture was. The South Coast is underlain with a network of more than a dozen earthquake faults; and there are several longer, potentially more dangerous faults offshore.
The record shows that Santa Barbara County has experienced 10 major earthquakes since 1806. They ranged from an estimated magnitude 7.0 quake in 1812 that decimated the La Purísima Mission near Lompoc, to a magnitude 5.9 quake in 1978 that damaged UC Santa Barbara.
Today, Gurrola and Craig Nicholson, a UCSB research geophysicist, will lead a group of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, California Geological Survey, Caltech and other universities on a field trip sponsored by the Statewide California Earthquake Center. They will look at South Coast earthquake faults, marine terraces and other evidence of quake activity in the local topography.
On Monday at UCSB, the group will exchange presentations on the 3-D geometry of the local faults and how they interact.
“There is a very strong debate about how large an earthquake the fault system in the Santa Barbara-Ventura area can produce,” Nicholson said. “The 1925 earthquake is still relevant.”
VIDEO: The 1925 quake makes an appearance at the 2025 Solstice Parade
Size matters
The Richter scale, a measure of the power of earthquakes, was not invented until 1935. Charles Richter placed the magnitude of the Santa Barbara quake at 6.3, using data recorded at distant stations. That number stuck until 1975, when the late Art Sylvester, a UCSB geology professor, elevated the quake to a magnitude 6.5, based in part on eyewitness accounts he had collected from 50 survivors.
In 2018, Sue Hough, a USGS seismologist based in Pasadena, compared the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake with 1994’s magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake, among others. She concluded that the 1925 event was probably a magnitude 6.5. But others have placed it as high as a magnitude 6.8.
“Different people are looking at different data,” Nicholson said. “It’s part of science. Right now, the most reliable number is 6.5.”
The Richter is a logarithmic scale. For each whole-number increase in magnitude, the seismic energy released in an earthquake increases by about 32 times. That means a magnitude 7 earthquake produces 32 times more energy — or is 32 times stronger — than a magnitude 6 quake.
That’s why each decimal point matters. According to a USGS online calculator, a magnitude 6.8 quake is 2.8 times stronger than a magnitude 6.5.
In 1999, the late Ed Keller, a UCSB geology professor, and Gurrola, then his student, studied the sea cliffs on the South Coast, looking for signs of prehistoric quakes. They discovered the land was being uplifted at a rate of 1 to 2 millimeters per year, about the thickness of a fingernail. Infinitesimal as it seems, that rate is indicative of a relatively high earthquake hazard — perhaps even a magnitude 6.8, they concluded.
The historical record, Gurrola says, supports a magnitude of 6.7 or 6.8 for the 1925 quake. More eyewitnesses reported being knocked down by the impact than previously thought, he found. Those accounts, plus the extensive damage to the downtown, the lower Westside and Goleta — and especially reports of what is known today as a “ground roll” up State Street, at the La Cumbre Country Club, at the Rose Garden by the Mission and on Mission Ridge — all point to a larger event, Gurrola said.
“The ground roll phenomenon was not previously known,” he said. “I was excited to find that. We can look at geology that’s thousands of years old; it tells us something. But really, it’s the recent history that gives us vital information about how the ground responded to the earthquake shaking. It helps us to identify the areas that liquefy.”
One of those, Gurrola said, is the Funk Zone, a district of popular restaurants, wineries, breweries and art galleries between Garden Street and the waterfront at Cabrillo Boulevard, bounded on the west by State Street. It’s where the El Estero, the former slough, was used as a dump for earthquake rubble and garbage and was later filled in for development.
“The Funk Zone is a cool place to go,” Gurrola said. “You just don’t want to be there in an earthquake.”
IN PICTURES: 1925 earthquake destroys Santa Barbara
The next Big One
The epicenter of the 1925 quake has not been identified. Scientists have pointed, variously, to the Mesa, Mission Ridge and More Ranch faults onshore and the Rincon Creek fault offshore, or some combination of these.
Gurrola, who studies the onshore faults, believes the quake occurred on the Mission Ridge fault system, which includes the More Ranch and Arroyo Parida faults and extends from Ellwood to Ojai. If all of these segments ruptured at once, he said, the result would be a magnitude 7.2 quake. But a Northridge-style quake would be more characteristic of the onshore faults, Gurrola said.
Nicholson said that, in combination with the onshore faults, the offshore fault system is capable of producing larger earthquakes of magnitude 7.4 or 7.5. That’s because the onshore south-dipping Mission Ridge and Mesa faults have merged with the offshore north-dipping Red Mountain and Pitas Point faults to form a “master” fault deep below the ocean floor, he said.
It is this complex system of interacting faults that was responsible for the Santa Barbara earthquakes of both 1925 and 1978, Nicholson said. The Red Mountain and Pitas Point faults are part of an even larger fault system that extends 75 miles from Ventura to Point Conception.
Speaking June 9 to a sold-out crowd at Dargan’s Irish Pub & Restaurant in Santa Barbara, Gurrola explained why the city is in an active earthquake zone. There’s a big bend in the San Andreas Fault, he said, where the North American and Pacific plates are colliding with each other, not moving but rather getting squeezed. It’s just west of Frazier Park.
The stored-up energy in the earth’s crust in Santa Barbara will periodically cause the faults to slip. The resulting quakes have created the hills and valleys of Santa Barbara, including the Mission Ridge and Sycamore Canyon, and the Mesa and Goleta Slough, Gurrola said.
County history goes back only 250 years, he told the crowd, but it shows “we’re getting one big earthquake in a century.”
Nervous laughter ensued as everyone mentally added 1925 plus 100.
“Is it time to sell my house?” someone asked, to more laughter.
The good news
Albert Einstein, the great theoretical physicist, once said, “In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.”
That was true for Santa Barbara in 1925. From the outset, the city had some luck. When the quake hit, two quick-thinking men — Henry Ketz at the Southern Counties Gas Co., at Montecito and Quarantina streets, and William Engle at Southern California Edison on Castillo Street — cut the gas and power to the entire town. That prevented a conflagration such as the one that burned down San Francisco after the magnitude 7.9 quake of April 18, 1906.
In San Francisco, the fire caused more damage than the shaking did. But after the 1925 quake in Santa Barbara, architects and engineers were able to study the damage and identify what worked and what didn’t. The lessons they learned became the impetus for the first national uniform building code, developed in 1927. Crucially, it incorporated requirements for supports strong enough to withstand horizontal shaking.
In 1930, the Santa Barbara City Council lowered the maximum allowable height of commercial buildings to four stories, or 60 feet. In 1972, the voters enshrined the height limits in the City Charter.
In 1986, California changed the state building codes to require seismic retrofits of brick buildings in earthquake-prone areas. If — or more likely, when — a major earthquake occurs in Santa Barbara again, those retrofits may not save the older buildings from irreparable damage, but they will save lives.
Today, many of the older homes in Santa Barbara have been bolted and strapped to their foundations. Some homeowners have removed their brick chimneys too.
Best of all, after the quake of 1925, the city got a makeover. Civic leaders, including Pearl Chase, had long dreamed of a downtown built in the “Spanish colonial revival” style, with red-tiled roofs, arched doorways and pedestrian “paseos,” thick white plaster walls and deep window recesses. Now, they saw their chance.
“There are good things that come from earthquakes,” Nicholson said. “There was a silver lining in the case of Santa Barbara. It redefined itself as this beautiful coastal city with a very dramatic architecture and design.”
Even Santa Barbara’s new police station will reflect the legacy of 1925. To meet the state’s higher earthquake standards for “essential services facilities,” the building will have solid concrete walls and a frame of extra-thick steel columns and beams, Brian Cearnal, the project architect, said.
The site, at Cota and Santa Barbara streets, is currently undergoing soil preparation. To support the slab foundation, Cearnal said a grid of enormous holes 8 feet across and 20 feet deep will be dug into the ground and filled with a thick mix of water, cement and soil. It’s a soil-strengthening system called “deep soil mixing.”
“The codes have just gotten increasingly more strict, relative to earthquake safety,” Cearnal said.
The station will have a basement and three stories within the city’s height limits. It is not located in the downtown area designated as Pueblo Viejo, where Spanish colonial design is mandated, Cearnal said, but it will have a red tile roof, plaster walls, copper gutters and wrought-iron railings and lighting.
“We obviously felt this was an important civic building of Santa Barbara and we needed to reflect that,” he said. “In Santa Barbara the expectation is our buildings have a certain amount of romance and charm.”
A police station with charm? It all goes back to 6:42 a.m., 100 years ago today.
Melinda Burns, a former senior writer for the legacy Santa Barbara News-Press, is an investigative reporter with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. In 2000, she covered the 75th anniversary of the Santa Barbara quake for the paper, interviewing a few survivors who had been children when it happened. One of them recalled going wild with delight when the Wilson School crumbled to the ground.