LOS ANGELES -- Nothing this catastrophic should have happened. But it did.
People died, some in buildings that fell like houses of cards. Bridges collapsed, tearing up some of the busiest freeways in the world. Gas and water lines burst, sending out fireballs and floods.
And all smack in the middle of a state that celebrates Earthquake Awareness Month each year and spends billions of dollars on seismic safety to protect it from the inevitable: the most powerful quake of the century.
Monday's earthquake wasn't it. So what happened?
"There's something wrong," says George Housner, an earthquake expert. "Obviously, there were some defects."
Obvious to everyone here - from the thousands of residents left shaken and sobered, to experts and state officials stunned by the destruction.
"This is not a big earthquake," says Richard McCarthy of the State Seismic Safety Commission. "We shouldn't have had so many failures."
Says Jim Drago of the California Department of Transportation: "We had what you would call a catastrophic collapse. This was a surprise."
California has learned plenty of lessons from other disastrous quakes - namely the 1971 Sylmar tremor near the epicenter of Monday's quake, and the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor south of San Francisco.
And many officials say without all those lessons - the tough building codes and roadway strengthening - the damage would have been worse, the toll higher.
But the anger about the level of destruction is real, and frustrations are high.
"They throw all this knowledge, supposedly, into fixing them. . . . And when they were done, they told us these things would withstand an 8.5 quake," says Realtor Joe Herrera, 64, of Sylmar. "So what happens? They just fall down again."
Hard questions are flying. Even threats.
"If somebody did not follow the new standards for earthquake construction, we'll find out quickly," says Transportation Secretary Federico Pena.
No one is under more fire than the Department of Transportation, which, after the collapse in 1989 of Oakland's Cypress Street Viaduct, was given the mission to "retrofit" bridges that might not survive a big quake.
The job cost $ 3.4 billion; just $ 1.5 billion was earmarked.
And the engineers who had started fixing the 900 bridges identified as needing work ran out of time.
So far, just 300 bridges on the list have been reinforced, and after Monday's quake, the state engineers had to admit that they made a miscalculation.
They thought two of the bridges that toppled on Highway 118 - built in 1976 - did not need any work.
Two others that fell - the 30-year-old Santa Monica Freeway and the interchange between Interstate 5 and Highway 14 - were scheduled for retrofitting within weeks.
"They obviously were on the (retrofitting) list somewhere," Housner says. "They just weren't high up enough."
Now some - including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. - are raising questions about whether raised freeways should exist here at all.
"It's shocking that freeways come down," says John Hutchinson, 27, a Los Angeles chef. "They know how to design them better and they know we have earthquakes . . . all the time. It's just ridiculous."
Still, the freeway collapses, though they will inconvenience millions of commuters for years, were not nearly as deadly as crumbling buildings.
Many died when one apartment building fell; a police officer died on the freeway.
Just as in previous California quakes, a single incident accounted for most of the deaths.
In 1971, it was a Veterans Administration hospital that collapsed; in 1989, it was the Oakland freeway.
This time, it was the three-story apartment building in Northridge, which buckled onto itself.
An identical building next door suffered structural damage, but did not fall.
Resident Erik Pearson - who helped save many of his neighbors - is upset.
"This is a post-1971 building," he says. "I checked when we moved in, but it's obviously not earthquake-safe. The whole first floor was crushed."
But the apartment wasn't the only building disaster.
In Granada Hills, a new nine-story office building housing a mental health clinic collapsed. Floors three through nine smashed into the second floor, causing the outside walls to buckle.
And in Sylmar, a seven-building complex was condemned after some floors dropped into the basement.
How can this happen? Some say housing codes and building inspections still are too lenient, even though they were strengthened in 1973.
"Our codes are minimum codes," says Tom Tobin, executive director of the State Seismic Safety Commission. "But the contractor has to know what he's doing. You can't take walls out for remodeling purpose. You can't let buildings deteriorate. And if it has tricky soil conditions, the code may not be enough."
Other officials, however, defend what happened in the quake and say that, by and large, the buildings did well.
"I'll be very candid," says David Keim, who is coordinating damage assessment for Los Angeles' Building and Safety department. "The structures in the affected area stood up very well, considering."
Says Fred Turner, structural engineer with the State Seismic Safety Commission: "For that one building, there are hundreds of others that are still standing. . . . I was surprised by the low death count."
And Keim points out that Los Angeles 10 years ago required retrofitting of unreinforced brick buildings. Now, he says, about 8,000 of the 8,500 such buildings have been adapted.
None of that pacifies Kevin Bergamasco, 32, who lived in a mobile home, now demolished. "It's hard not to feel some anger," he says. "Obviously, the city wasn't prepared."
"I think there's basically a pattern of avoidance," says Carolyn Salen, 32, a Los Angeles artist. "We have earthquakes all the time here. We're sitting on 100 faults. It's ridiculous not to be working overtime on getting ready."
Housner says there is no question that nearly everything can be made earthquake proof. But doing it takes time. And mostly, it takes money.
"We know how to do it and we can do it, but they're caught on money."
Contributing: Richard Price and Jonathan T. Lovitt
A look at L.A. freeway overpasses
Experts are trying to determine exactly how several California freeways collapsed during Monday's earthquake. They are looking at whether steel restraining cables failed or concrete support columns crumbled, as well as whether unusually strong vertical forces caused a new type of failure. The Interstate 5 overpass:
Road may have separated at expansion joint or at connection to support column. Overpass deck is one piece of reinforced concrete. Support column and deck are connected by steel rods inside concrete. Highway decks overlap at expansion joints.
Before the quake, the average commute took Los Angeles area drivers about a half-hour. How they commute:
