Santa Barbara’s Old Earthquake Yields New Discoveries

Santa Barbara’s Old Earthquake
Yields New Discoveries

Insights Emerge as City Celebrates
100-Year Anniversary of
1925 Temblor with Event Series

By Matt Kettmann | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
June 12, 2025

Larry Gurrola considers himself a “geologic historian.” | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Jump to Earthquake Centennial Events

Imagine you’ve arrived for your Monday morning shift down on State Street by the railroad tracks, and you’re looking toward the Pacific Ocean as the 6:40 a.m. sun lights the sky. There appears to be a large wave approaching from the channel, but suddenly, it’s the earth — not the sea — that begins to rise from the shoreline and roll up the block. Earthen waves slam into the imposing Hotel Californian, and you watch as the neighborhood’s largest building crumbles to the ground in seconds.

The crazy crest sweeps you off of your own two feet, but you still manage to spot it rolling all the way up State Street, toppling brick and wooden structures all the way to Carrillo. What you can’t see is that the wave keeps surging, causing the San Marcos Building at Anapamu Street to telescope in on itself, and the water tower above the Arlington Hotel to plummet, both incidents crushing people to death below.

Perhaps, instead, you managed to snag an early tee time to start your week at La Cumbre Country Club, when a wild roar of the earth gives way to a violent jolt. The hills start to rise and fall, the entire landscape not shaking in scattered bursts — like those you’ve come to associate with the typical earthquake — but rolling along as if atop a long underground wave. Across town on Mission Ridge, that same wave triggers audible blasts as it buckles the pavement.

Or maybe you’re visiting from out of town, staying along the waterfront, when a large wave hits the beach right before the ground begins to make crunching noises and heave your way. The floor jumps up as you attempt to flee outside, like sudden waves roiling a calm canoe.

Of course, all of these things did happen in Santa Barbara, at 6:42 a.m. on June 29, 1925, when a massive earthquake rattled the region, killing 11 people and decimating the city’s commercial core. From that tragedy would come a new vision for Santa Barbara, which was rebuilt with an emphasis on Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and a reverence for historic preservation that persists today.

But there may still be much to learn from these survivor accounts, which come from newspaper coverage of the quake. The first is from Southern Pacific Railroad gatekeeper Charles Turner; the second from an unnamed golfer who said the quake felt “as if some monster had me by the shoulders” with the intent of shaking off his head; and the last from Ole Hanson, the former mayor of Seattle and founder of San Clemente, who compared the noise to “a million dogs crunching bones.”

These accounts are by no means new, having been published widely at the time and rehashed over the decades for articles, books, and relevant milestones, such as Santa Barbara’s ongoing celebration to mark the 100-year anniversary of the quake. But taken together, a fresh look at these descriptions of what happened during the Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925 are leading to a host of new discoveries, at least in the eyes of one expert.

“I sometimes refer to myself as a geologic historian,” explained Larry Gurrola, an engineering geologist whose PhD from UCSB focused on the earthquake hazards of Santa Barbara. “The key to understanding the hazards of today is to look at the recent past.”

Ground Rolls & Tidal Waves

Among other revelations, Gurrola’s recent review of the archives — which has been published by the Coast Geological Society, with the subtitle “What We Learned After the Shaking Stopped” — indicates for the first time that the 1925 earthquake featured a “ground roll,” in which the earth moves in a visible wave that those observers witnessed. “This is the first evidence of ground roll making its way up State Street,” said Gurrola. “It takes a sufficiently large earthquake to produce them, but it’s also because of the site conditions of Santa Barbara.”

Specifically, the areas of lower State and Bath streets sustained significant damage. “That’s unconsolidated sediment, with high groundwater,” he explained. “When you apply earthquake shaking, the areas start to liquefy, and they can subside. This whole area is susceptible to very hard shaking.”

Gurrola also compiled evidence to suggest there was more tsunami-like activity than previously thought. Pearl Chase, who’d soon pioneer Santa Barbara’s civic style, was a primary witness of that, with a few more reports — a swimmer who was suddenly on sand, a ship lurching far ashore, a fissure in the sea floor — as corroboration. (Gurrola’s adjacent research almost certainly confirms that the large quake of 1812 did cause a significant tidal wave.)

Gurrola was also surprised by the many foreshocks — possibly several hundred small earthquakes — that were recorded by water pressure and temperature monitors but not felt by the sleeping populace. “To get these precursory warnings of something bigger coming is not common,” he explained.

Then there’s the force of the quake itself, which the reports suggest was far more violent than most anyone had experienced in earthquakes before. “I found that a lot of people were knocked to the ground — that says something about the initial shock,” explained Gurrola. “When you start to focus on the local news reports, you really get a sense that this earthquake was strong.”

Estimates of magnitude on the Richter scale have varied from a long-believed 6.3 all the way up to 6.8. With all this info now in his mind, Gurrola believes it was certainly a 6.5, maybe higher. “Santa Barbara is on an earthquake belt,” said Gurrola. “There are very large faults in the area, both onshore and offshore, capable of producing a Northridge-like earthquake, or even larger.”

Gurrola shows off fault evidence near Loon Point. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Debris Flow to Quake Dive

Gurrola’s 1925 earthquake deep dive was actually inspired by a similar approach to what he did in response to the 1/9 Debris Flow. As Montecito aimed to rebuild following that disastrous mudslide, Gurrola was enlisted by the Partnership for Resilient Communities to determine how common these incidents had been in the past.

While other scientists claimed that similar debris flows were rare, Gurrola used historical accounts from newspapers and museum archives to show that, in fact, at least four more major mudslides had happened over the past 200 years before January 9, 2018. But funding for his continued work on the project was spent elsewhere, and instead paid for preventative measures that he sees as short-sighted.

So Gurrola was in a bit of a slump when the Coast Geological Society asked him to lead a field trip for the 100-year anniversary of the 1925 quake. He decided to take a five-month sabbatical to prepare, applying the same archival methodology he used for the debris flow to the earthquake evidence.

“I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if anything has been missed?’ ” he said. “It really served me well having a geologic background doing the historical research for debris flows. That’s when I decided I was just going to do my own research and write my own historical report.”

He fell headfirst into the archives, following rabbit holes to deeper rabbit holes, spending much time at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum’s Gledhill Library. “Once I delved into the history, it was fascinating,” said Gurrola, who came to appreciate the many newspaper stories from Santa Barbara publications. “Looking at the historic record, the local accounts are more accurate.” When it comes to papers from outside the region, Gurrola said, “You have to learn how to filter out sensational accounts and exaggeration.”

The resulting document, titled Tectonic Geomorphology, Structural Framework and the Seismic Hazards of the Santa Barbara Fold Belt: What We Learned After the Shaking Stopped, served as the guidebook for Gurrola’s May 3 tour for Coast Geological Society. The 93-page pamphlet, a mix of historical reports and more technical geologic analyses, will next be used by the Statewide California Earthquake Center during a June 29 tour for researchers from across the state, and then discussed during the following day’s scientific workshop at UCSB. And for the rest of us, it’s been posted for free at eq25.org/resources.

He’s happy to be able to share what he’s learned. “It’s just exciting to bring what I know and share it with people and see their eyes open,” said Gurrola, who also gave a June 9 talk about his findings at Dargan’s during one of the Museum of Natural History’s Science Pub nights. “I consider this my outreach.”

But don’t miss the underlying message: Santa Barbara’s mountain-to-sea setting is beautiful for the same reason that it’s dangerous. Our incredibly active geology means the next Big One could come any day.

“The land is coming up one to two millimeters per year,” said Gurrola of how dramatically the earth is shifting here. “Over a human life, that’s nothing. But compared to other earthquake areas, that’s actually quite high.”

The Mission’s bell towers crumbled. | Credit: Courtesy

Our Earthquake Centennial Celebration

A broad coalition of Santa Barbara nonprofits, museums, libraries, associations, and businesses are uniting to celebrate the centennial of the June 29, 1925, earthquake under the banner of EQ25: A City Transformed. Their impressive calendar of nearly 30 different talks, tours, exhibits, and special events — including about 10 that have already happened — culminates on the weekend of June 28 and 29.

The centennial’s largest public event will be on Saturday, June 28, when the Great Quake Day block party takes over the 1100 block of State Street between Anapamu and Figueroa. There’ll be an earthquake simulator, a vintage car show, a coloring zone, a history walk, and a disaster preparedness plaza located in San Marcos Plaza, whose building was destroyed by 1925 quake.

The Day of Remembrance on June 29 includes the unveiling of a plaque during a ceremony at the Santa Barbara Mission at 2 p.m., followed by church bells ringing 11 times at 3 p.m. to mark the lives lost on June 29, 1925.

The Casa del Herrero Centennial Community Day also happens on June 29, with three two-hour sessions that include mini-tours of the “Hearst Castle of Montecito” and a workshop. See casadelherrero.com.

Lastly, on June 29, 5-8 p.m., the 1925 Earthquake EQ25 Symposium will occur in the Lobero Theatre, where the American Institute of Architects, Santa Barbara, will present a 90-minute “then and now” exploration of the quake’s historical, architectural, and cultural impacts of the 1925 earthquake.

Editor’s Note: The story was updated to correct the time of the Day of Remembrance event on June 29, which begins at 2 p.m. and ends with a bell ringing at 3 p.m.