LOS ANGELES -- Angry Californians want to know why their freeways collapsed - despite more than 20 years of work to secure them against earthquakes. "They said it was fixed and everything," says Joseph Miranda, an aircraft mechanic at McDonnell Douglas. "It doesn't surprise me the state hadn't finished the work. . . . It's either the budget or time."
Steve Saville, spokesman for the California Department of Transportation, said all the damaged freeways - major thoroughfares that pour thousands of commuters daily into some of the city's densest areas - had been retrofitted with steel cables designed to help them withstand an earthquake.
Robert Wesson, with the U.S. Geological Survey, was surprised that the 30-second earthquake wreaked such havoc with freeways when standards had been improved and freeways upgraded after the 1971 Sylmar quake.
And since the 1989 San Francisco quake, the state reinforced about 300 bridges - a third of the ones that needed it.
"What we've done over four years has, quite frankly, been monumental," said Department of Transportation spokesman Jim Drago. "Obviously, when anybody is hurt or killed, it's not enough."
One person died on a freeway in Monday's quake: a Los Angeles motorcycle police officer, who was riding over a 75-foot-high overpass near Sylmar when it collapsed.
