Elemental Read online

  Imagine the intersection of the 405 and the 101 as a cross. The entire northwest quadrant is the Sepulveda dam basin. For two miles west, there are only two surface avenues that go north through the basin to the neighborhoods beyond, Haskell and Balboa. For two miles north, there is only one westward access—Burbank. But there are over a million residents northwest of the intersection and their only access from the south or east is through this interchange—or through the intersections of Ventura and Sepulveda, or Burbank and Sepulveda. As quickly as Sepulveda clogged, all of the intersections and all of the surrounding surface avenues began to solidify as well. Within forty minutes, an area ten miles square had crystallized.

  The 405 and the 101 freeways only exacerbated the situation, feeding more cars into this black hole of traffic from all four compass points. With no place to go, the traffic ground to a halt both north and south on the 405 and very quickly after east and west on the 101 as well.

  With the computers down, Cal-Trans was unable to post warning bulletins on the freeway alert signs. Instead, an Amber Alert was posted to look out for a suspected kidnapper driving a black Ford Explorer, license number, etc. It was this particular (alleged) kidnapper’s bad luck to be caught on the 101 westbound at Vineland. Traffic came to a halt with the SUV pocketed between a stretch limo on the left and a battered Plymouth pickup on the right, piled high with tree branches and driven by three Mexican gardeners whose command of English was limited. Behind the pickup truck, however, was a distracted mother, whose eleven-year-old son had read the Amber Alert only a few moments before and who was now intently watching all of the traffic around on the promise of a ten-dollar bill from his mother if he spotted the suspect Explorer—but only if he kept absolutely quiet while he did, so his mother could listen to her deadbeat ex-husband (who apparently operated out of the bizarre belief that a good excuse is always an acceptable substitute for a tangible result) explain why his child-support check would be late again.

  In the middle of this conversation, the eleven-year-old suddenly began shouting and pointing. Despite his mother’s annoyed refusal to accept the obvious—that she now owed her son ten dollars that she did not have—she eventually accepted that indeed, the suspect’s vehicle was only a few yards ahead in the next lane over. By then, owing to a repeat of the same Amber Alert news bulletin on static-riven KFWB, the inhabitants of two other vehicles had also spotted the Explorer. One driver was already calling 911. The other driver and his two passengers (all of them new enlistees on leave from the marine base at El Toro and on their way to visit the Tarzana-based fiancée of the driver) exited their own SUV, two of them carrying baseball bats kept in the vehicle for occasional trips into West Hollywood for gay-bashing. With traffic temporarily halted—or so they believed (that it was temporary)—they approached the Explorer on foot. The suspected kidnapper panicked, tried to hit the gas, tried to force his way between a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle and a 1988 Honda Civic driven by a harried college student whose car insurance had just been canceled, and the result was a three-way crunch, with three soon-to-be-ex-marines banging on the hood and fenders of the locked Explorer with baseball bats. They had just escalated to smashing windows when the first officers arrived on scene and ordered them to stand down.

  From there, the situation metamorphosed into a police standoff as even more motorcycle officers came racing up the still empty shoulders of the freeway, followed by the warbling and flashing cruisers of the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department. Very quickly, this nexus of confusion and rage was surrounded by armed officers, all of them crouching behind automobile fenders with guns drawn, while two police helicopters and three news choppers circled overhead and terrified drivers in all directions evacuated their vehicles, crawling quickly away through the lanes on their hands and knees—including the harried mother, still on her cell phone, and her eleven-year-old son who whined loudly that he wanted to stay and see the kidnapper get shot. The suspected kidnapper, his vehicle permanently jammed between the Volkswagen and the Honda, was unable to extricate himself from the vehicle and sat there helplessly while police ordered him to get out with his hands up.

  The irony of the situation was that the Amber Alert had been posted with the wrong license number. The driver was not a kidnapper; his only relationship to the kidnapping was that he drove a black Ford Explorer. He had only tried to flee because he had seen three angry men coming toward his vehicle with baseball bats.

  Nevertheless, innocent or guilty, this particular blood clot in the arterial flow of urban commerce effectively shut down the 101 in both directions, trapping even more drivers in their cars. Some of them turned off their engines and got out to smoke, leaning against their fenders or lifting themselves up to sit on the still-warm hoods of their rapidly depreciating vehicles.

  Meanwhile, the clotting of the freeway system spread south and east with pernicious speed. East along the 134 toward the 5, and southward down the 101, which was already terminal. It took less than an hour for the crystallization of the system to hit the nexus of the Pasadena, Harbor, and Hollywood freeways. The four-level interchange, one of the first in the nation, was in easy view of the mayor’s office in the nearby city hall, a building that, contrary to popular belief, had not been destroyed in the 1953 attack of George Pal’s Martians and their manta-ray-shaped war machines.

  With the news media now reporting that the 101 and 405 freeways were impassable and that drivers were advised to seek alternate routes—of which there were either few or none, the best thing to do was find a movie theater or a motel and wait for the weekend. Starting at city-center, the northward crush of traffic tried to force its way up the 5, an overstressed artery that crawled along the east side of Griffith Park; the results were predictable and immediate—another nexus of crystallization. Nothing moved. The clotting of the Los Angeles freeway system was now irreversible. Within another hour, the 10, most of the 110, and a large part of the 210 were equally out of commission as were most of the surrounding surface streets. Too many cars, not enough road.

  Unable to feed their traffic flows into the northward and westward traffic channels, the 710 and the 605 also began to solidify. Crystallization spread like ice across the surface of a lake, creeping steadily and inevitably toward a frozen stillness. As fast as new cars arrived at the outward edges of the solidification, that’s how fast it spread.

  And there were still four hours until sunset.

  Most drivers, unaware of the scale of the growing catastrophe, unable to comprehend or believe that their trusted freeway system had finally, utterly, and completely failed them, remained in their cars, existing in a state of quiet desperation—or quiet domestication—most of them still believed that it was just a matter of time until traffic began easing forward again.

  The Zen master Solomon Short is quoted as saying, “No pebble ever takes responsibility for the whole avalanche.” Nowhere was this as evident as it was when the disaster escalated to its next stage.

  Start with the sweltering heat. It’s the fifth day of a heat wave with no end in sight. There’s no wind; the air is stagnant and brown. People are tired, uncomfortable, cranky, and selfish. Unwilling to be uncomfortable, every driver in a vehicle with air-conditioning has rolled up his windows and has his air conditioner turned on full blast. To power his air conditioner, he’s running his engine. Half a million vehicles. All those engines create a furnace of additional heat at ground level, encouraging even more drivers to keep their engines running and their air conditioners blasting.

  Frozen in time, as inert as the dead air above them, a million and a half cars and trucks and buses, idling impatiently, every second burning tens of thousands of gallons of gasoline into hot exhaust; as the sun’s rays bake the day, various chemical transformations occur. The exhaust becomes a rising cloud of air pollution. All those restless waiting vehicles spew a cumulative soup of toxic fumes into the brown smoky air of the basin, aggregating into an already deadly miasma that lay
s across the inert afternoon like a smothering blanket—and triggering the next stage of the catastrophe.

  Sitting alone, stuck and frustrated, desperate and angry, people begin to demonstrate irrational behavior. Some people begin honking incessantly, triggering even more stress in the people around them. Some drivers turn up their music—too loud. The hyperamplified subwoofers broadcast rhythmic pulses that feel like body punches to people in vehicles many lengths ahead and behind. Arguments begin. Fights break out. Windows get smashed with golf clubs. Ramming incidents occur. Even individuals uninvolved experience increased levels of stress. A few have panic attacks. Others suffer respiratory distress. Others go into full-blown asthma attacks. Then it gets worse. Kosh’s corollary to Short’s observation: The avalanche has already started; it is too late for the pebbles to vote.

  Despite the efforts of social historians, an accurate account of the events of the day remains impossible; too many events, too many scattered and confused accounts. What is certain, however, is that once the cascade of failures began, each breakdown triggered the next; but the most catastrophic of all was the failure of the telephone system.

  Stuck on the freeways, with relief from the sun still hours away, people began flipping open their cell phones and calling home, calling for help, calling ambulances and fire trucks and police, even calling Cal-Trans and the city councilmen and the Governor’s office to complain. As the channels overloaded, the system began dumping calls to clear bandwidth; people began calling their service providers to complain. In self-defense, the network went into emergency procedures and shut itself down. The result—increased feelings of alienation and isolation among those trapped in the crystallized traffic. The arteries became linear madhouses of desperate frustration. Increasing numbers of people lost control of their bladders and bowels, adding to their individual discomfort, both physical and emotional.

  As the afternoon wore on, two pregnant women went into labor and a third miscarried. Two people enroute to hospitals died in the ambulances that could not get through. A burly farmworker, one of several crammed into the back of a pickup truck, experienced debilitating food poisoning, a combination of projectile vomiting and near-projectile diarrhea that expelled more than two liters of fluid out of his body in less than thirty minutes. A fifty-six-year-old type-A studio executive experienced crushing chest pains that left him gasping for breath and too weak to cry for help. No help was available anyway. Even where calls for help could still be made from emergency call boxes, impatient drivers had already filled both shoulders of the highway in their desperate attempts to escape. The rescue vehicles couldn’t get in and the medevac choppers had no place to land.

  By mid-afternoon, a significant number of vehicles had run out of gas. Even under the best of circumstances, a single stalled automobile in a middle lane could back up traffic in all four lanes for miles. Under these circumstances, with hundreds of dead vehicles scattered throughout the system and more dying every minute, the crystallization had become complete. The vehicular arteries were solid and terminally impassible. The patient was dead, although it would be several days before any of the specialists would admit it.

  But on some unconscious level, some people were already getting a visceral sense of what had happened. Maybe their survival instincts were kicking in, or maybe they were simply overcome by frustration—but it was the final moment of breakdown, the recognition that the system had failed and could not repair itself. Drivers started getting out of their cars. They locked them up, out of some optimistic belief that they would eventually have the chance to come back and retrieve them, then they left them where they were. They gathered what belongings they could carry and abandoned their metal sanctuaries. First one or two, then a few more, and finally a veritable flood of refugees, they hiked between the sweltering lanes toward the nearest offramp and their separate illusions of relief.

  Not all drivers were that easily persuaded. They sat and waited in desperate hope, afraid to leave, afraid to let go of their attachment to their vehicles, afraid to disconnect from pernicious false identity—I am my car—that pervades Los Angeles culture. Still believing that this was only temporary, they sat in their cars, their engines still running, their air conditioners still blasting. (Even today, all these years later, archaeologists are still finding mummified bodies in some vehicles, including many varieties of small animals.)

  Some engineers argue that even up to this point, the Los Angeles freeway system might have been saved, if only the next phase of the disaster could have been prevented. Others argue that the next moments were inevitable from the first beginnings of the crystallization process. Computer simulations have given us no clear answer.

  It was this simple. All of those automobiles, all of those desperate drivers too attached to their metal and plastic personalities, unwilling to leave the technological illusion of identity, security, and safety, they sat in their wombs of music, unaware that their engine temperatures were steadily, inexorably rising. The automobile engine is designed to cool itself while in motion; it needs a steady flow of air through its radiator so it can dissipate excess heat. But now, immobilized, all of those engines running without any chance of cooling, the temperatures around them rising, overheating was inevitable. The first vehicle caught fire at 3:31. Like a good idea occurring to many people simultaneously, within the next half hour, thirteen more vehicles began to smolder, and soon, flames were licking out from under the hoods of seven of them.

  But the fire trucks couldn’t get to them. The shoulders were jammed. Cars with plastic gas tanks exploded with surprising fury, and the fires began to spread, leaping from vehicle to vehicle with alarming speed. Drivers who only moments before had been completely resistant to leaving the comfort of their sedans panicked and fled. Soon, there were firestorms. The biggest raged on the 405 where it intersected with the 101, at the heart of the first big clot in the system. Another firestorm flickered to life further south on the 405 where it intersected with the 10. A third fire exploded just west of where the 10 intersected with the 110 and also where it fed into the 5. In a very short time, the two fires met in the middle and expanded into a terrifying wall of flame that cut across the heart of the city.

  Aerial tanker drops helped to slow down the flames, but it wasn’t enough. Before the end of the 7:00 news broadcast, the governor had declared the city a disaster area. All across the world, people clustered around television screens, mesmerized by an event that was both incomprehensible and horrific. Los Angeles was choking to death on its own vomit. Like a great beast shuddering to a halt, the city of the angels was collapsing and shutting down.

  Even after the fires were contained, even after the last smoldering embers were extinguished, most of the inhabitants of the city continued to believe that normalcy could be restored, that someday traffic would flow again. Maybe they believed this because there were still pockets of mobility scattered throughout the urban sprawl, quiet neighborhoods where housewives could still drive to the corner market for milk and bread and eggs; but by the fourth day, as the stores began to run out of perishables, the problem of resupply became critical. How could the city feed its stranded millions?

  Despite promises from local, state, and federal authorities that the freeways could be restored and working again within a few days, well, maybe two weeks at the most—all right, full recovery was probably at least a month or two away, but the city could function and survive, just a little more time, that’s all we need—despite all the promises and reassurances, by the middle of the week many Angelenos were beginning to experience growing fear, frustration, and skepticism.

  The city hadn’t yet succumbed to panic, but the seeds were growing. Many of those who lived on the edges of the city, especially those who had access to uncongested avenues, began evacuating themselves voluntarily to other communities. In the first week alone, Orange County took in over 40,000 refugees, San Bernardino accepted 50,000; many went to the homes of friends and relatives, others went to
hotels, the most desperate camped out in tent cities erected on the grounds of local high schools, colleges, and the parking lots of several major malls. But there were still over five million people within the affected areas of the city.

  At least twenty thousand came out on motorcycles or motor scooters; while the trip through the surface streets was slow, it wasn’t impossible. Many more rode out of the disaster area by train. Metro-Link borrowed trains from as far away as Seattle to ferry passengers from Union Station to refugee camps in Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Palmdale.

  Even more came out of the frozen zone by subway and light rail. The Green Line and the Gold Line and the Blue Line were major arteries. The Red Line funneled people from the mid–San Fernando Valley down to Union Station, where they could transfer to the other colors of the rainbow, or to other trains that would take them even farther out.

  A few people, not a significant number, escaped by helicopter. Van Nuys Airport and LAX became hubs of activity for those who could reach them, with planes landing and taking off as fast as the overstressed controllers could open flight paths in the sky. The lack of aviation fuel deliveries to the airports meant that planes had to fly in carrying enough fuel for their outward journeys. All of the airports in the zone were given double-black stars, an unprecedented new classification which meant that travel to or from was at-your-own-risk. It meant limited-to-zero availability of rescue and emergency vehicles and facilities.

  But the refugees from deeper inside the disaster zone, where there was no access to rail or air, had the most difficulty extricating themselves. Some refugees walked as far as ten miles to reach a subway station, or a Metro-Link access. Amtrak brought in emergency trains on freight lines, putting up awnings and tents and benches to create makeshift stations at convenient street-crossings and overpasses. The crowds gathered and waited. Many arrived with bicycles, overloaded with their belongings. Red Cross helicopters lowered food and water to the waiting masses.