The Nineteen Fifty-Two Kern County Earthquake

At four fifty-two in the morning on July twenty-first, nineteen fifty-two, a magnitude seven point three earthquake ruptured the White Wolf Fault beneath the southern San Joaquin Valley. It was the strongest earthquake to strike California since the nineteen oh six San Francisco earthquake, though far less destructive because far fewer people lived in Kern County. The epicenter was located near the community of Wheeler Ridge, roughly thirty miles south of Bakersfield.

The earthquake killed about a dozen people. Given its magnitude, the death toll was surprisingly low, partly because it struck before dawn when most people were still indoors in structures that, while damaged, tended to pancake rather than collapse instantly. The town of Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield, was hardest hit. The community of Arvin, near the epicenter, was severely damaged. Downtown Bakersfield sustained significant damage: the older brick commercial buildings along Chester Avenue, many of them built in the unreinforced masonry style common to early twentieth-century California downtowns, cracked and partially collapsed.

Two weeks later, on August twenty-second, a magnitude five point eight aftershock struck the same fault, and the buildings that had been weakened in the first event failed more completely in the second. The combined damage to downtown Bakersfield was extensive enough to reshape the built environment. Much of the damaged commercial stock was demolished rather than repaired, and the reconstruction that followed produced the mid-century modern buildings that replaced the earlier Victorian and Edwardian commercial architecture.

The geology that produced the earthquake is the same geology that produced the Kern River Oil Field: the compressional forces created as the Pacific and North American tectonic plates interact across the complex of faults in the Transverse Ranges south and east of Bakersfield. The valley floor is not stable ground in the way the flatness suggests. The faults are running under it, and the White Wolf Fault that moved in nineteen fifty-two has not finished its work.