Frank Muñiz recalls the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 17, 1994, like they were yesterday. Muñiz and his wife were in their Mission Hills home with their two young children; everyone was asleep and safe in bed when they were awakened by “the entire world shaking right under us.”
“It was very violent shaking,” said Muñiz, who was working as an advisor in the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) at California State University, Northridge at the time. As the house rocked and trembled, he managed to make his way to his kids, to make sure they were OK. “After the shaking ended, I remember walking out the front door and I could see some of the transformers up on the [utility] poles exploding – it almost looked like fireworks going off.”
Several miles away, on Dearborn Street near Reseda Boulevard – about a block from Cal State Northridge – then-recent CSUN graduate Martha Campos had been sound asleep on the couch when her life was suddenly and dramatically upended. Her roommates were away, so Campos was alone in the apartment when she heard and felt what seemed like “a giant snake that was rumbling its way up from the earth and crashing through the apartment building,” she said.
“I fell off the couch and was on the floor,” recalled Campos. “As it continued to shake, I heard loud noises all around me – things breaking, the shattering of glass and water splashing.”
When the trembling subsided, Campos quickly grabbed some essentials – her tennis shoes, her glasses and a blanket – and headed outside. Although she didn’t know what she would find outside her front door, looking around the wrecked apartment she knew she might not be back.
She was right. According to the Earthquake Country Alliance, the 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake damaged or destroyed 82,000 residential and commercial units, and 5,400 mobile homes. Campos was among an estimated 125,000 people who ended up at least temporarily homeless. The devastation was widespread across the Southland, including at CSUN.
Northridge Earthquake Ravages CSUN
In the days and weeks after the earthquake, the extent of the destruction at CSUN became clear. All 100-plus structures on the 353-acre campus, including 53 major buildings, sustained some level of damage, said Carmen Ramos Chandler, director of Media Relations at CSUN. She was working for the Los Angeles Daily News at the time and saw the catastrophic effects throughout the campus up close and in person while reporting on how the disaster had impacted the college.
Some structures were damaged beyond repair and later demolished, including the University Tower apartments, the South Library, the Fine Arts building and Parking Structure C on Zelzah Avenue, which collapsed. The image of the buckled four-level parking garage, which had been constructed less than two years earlier, became widely associated with the devastation at CSUN.
The east and west wings of the Oviatt Library (since renamed the University Library), located in the center of campus, suffered significant structural damage, and the library windows “exploded out,” said Chandler. She said the extensive damage could be attributed in part to the “vertical thrust” of the Northridge quake, which occurred on a blind thrust fault, according to reports.
“The analogy a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] engineer gave me was to imagine that a giant was standing over the University Library and picked it up … and then just let it [drop] – that was the earthquake,” she described.
Overall, the campus of Cal State Northridge sustained between $250 million and $350 million in damages, according to the Southern California Earthquake Data Center.
“At the time of the earthquake, this was the worst damage to a public university in the history of the United States,” said Chandler. “It wasn’t until [Hurricane] Katrina that any single natural disaster had caused so much damage to an institution.”
“CSUN was completely thrashed,” said Carlos Guerrero, a lecturer in Chicana and Chicano Studies at CSUN, who has worked at the university for over 30 years. He recalled feeling gutted when he first saw the earthquake-ravaged campus. “The earthquake was really destructive.”
And deadly. At least 57 people died in the earthquake, including 16 at the Northridge Meadows apartment complex alone. The two upper levels of the building pancaked down onto the first floor. CSUN students Jaime Reyes and Manuel Sandoval were among those tragically killed.
Muñiz, who now serves as director of EOP and the Student Support Services Program at CSUN, said there was a quick and robust response by all emergency service agencies providing aid on campus, including FEMA.
“FEMA came in right away and FEMA funds helped CSUN reopen,” said Muñiz, who has worked at the university since 1980.
Over the 10 years following the earthquake, CSUN received over $400 million in earthquake aid from FEMA and the state Office of Emergency Services. The funds were specifically slated to repair all damaged buildings and facilities throughout the entire campus. The funding was also used to rebuild certain structures from the ground up, such as the Administration Building, which reopened as University Hall (later renamed Valera Hall) and Manzanita Hall, built to replace the Fine Arts Building and to house the departments of Communication Studies and Journalism.
Certain structures, including the South Library, University Tower apartments and the parking garage, were never rebuilt. The site of the collapsed garage is now home to CSUN’s East Field.
A Community Bands Together
Despite the widespread damage to the university, then-CSUN President Blenda Wilson was determined to reopen the campus and welcome students back for the 1994 spring semester. The Jan. 17 earthquake had struck during winter break and students were due back on Jan. 31.
“Wilson said, ‘All Socrates needed was a tree to stand under and students who wanted to learn,’” recalled Chandler about Wilson’s efforts, inspiration and call to action. “So, [Wilson], in her bullheadedness, said, ‘We are going to reopen, and you all are going to help me.’ And they did.”
Muñiz described the reopening of CSUN as a team effort by staff, faculty, administrators, state agencies and FEMA. People were asked to volunteer their time and the initial emergency meetings were held on a grass field on campus. After setting up office space and phone lines, they answered calls, created a phone tree to call students and other people, and basically did “whatever we could to get the campus [running] as soon as possible,” recounted Muñiz.
“It was with the whole CSUN community coming together that we were able to open,” he said.
Wilson directed campus officials to obtain “every available trailer west of the Mississippi” (which cost $5.5 million for one semester and was paid for by state and federal funds) to provide more than 300 temporary classrooms and offices across campus, said Chandler. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson waived existing highway rules to facilitate the legal transport of the extra-wide portable buildings into and through the state.
In addition, a 10,000-square-foot tent was erected near Lindley Avenue – dubbed the Lindley Library Dome – to serve as a study area for students and house books and other materials.
Under Wilson’s leadership, CSUN reopened on Feb. 14, only two weeks later than originally scheduled. Most of the approximately 24,000 students attended classes in trailers on campus, and about 25 classes were held off-site, at Pierce College, LA City College and UCLA.
To help keep things operating in the pre-social media era, signs were posted across campus and on nearby major roads with a phone number to call for updated information. In addition, everyone on campus was encouraged to do “whatever they could,” regardless of their job title or “whether you had a Ph.D. behind your name or you were a high school graduate,” recalled Chandler, who started working at CSUN a few months after the Northridge earthquake.
That spring semester, Guerrero said faculty members were also encouraged to be flexible and “figure how to work with students,” especially those most impacted by the earthquake, in terms of grading, assignments and providing support.
“We had many students who ended up homeless – we even had students who died [at Northridge Meadows],” he said. “There were many circumstances to deal with; it wasn’t business as usual.”
Campos, who is now an academic advisor with the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Liberal Studies at CSUN, said many people at CSUN went above and beyond to help students as well as one another, including Muñiz and his wife Elva, who opened their own home to Campos.
“My apartment was pretty messed up and I wasn’t able to go back – I was homeless,” said Campos, who started working at the university in the EOP office during the spring semester after the earthquake. “My friend Frank [Muñiz], who I had worked with, let me stay at his house. He and his wife Elva and their family were a blessing to me.”
Working together with a common goal – to reopen and recover – fostered a spirit of community between individuals and departments that might never have interacted otherwise, said Chandler.
“Many friendships formed during that period of time, friendships that probably wouldn’t have existed,” she said.
Continued Growth and Lessons Learned
Just as friendships flourished, the campus has thrived and grown as well via capital campaigns to construct: a grand staircase leading up to the University Library; the 1,700-seat Soraya (formerly known as the Valley Performing Arts Center); and the 138,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Student Recreation Center.
To help accommodate the growing student body – which was 36,000 in the fall of 2023 – CSUN has built additional student housing, including the Freshman Dorm Complex. Other expansions have included Northridge Academy High School on CSUN’s North Campus in partnership with the LA Unified School District; and the addition of a 1-megawatt fuel cell power plant.
Today, CSUN ranks as the number two public university in California and number 12 in the nation, according to the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2024 Best Colleges in the U.S.
Muñiz said he believes working in community and “thinking outside of the box” helped CSUN overcome the havoc wrought by the earthquake, helped position the university for later growth and prepared them for dealing with the unexpected, including the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Campos agrees.
“We weren’t afraid to try new methods,” she said. “We problem-solved and moved forward.”