It has been 25 years since a violent, pre-dawn earthquake shook Los Angeles from its sleep and caused widespread devastation and left dozens dead.
Now more than two decades later, these remarkable images show how the city recovered from the $25 billion worth of damage by repairing major roads and apartment blocks.
At 4.31am on January 17, 1994, a hidden fault lurking under the city's San Fernando Valley neighborhoods unleashed a magnitude 6.7 earthquake that shattered buildings, broke water mains and ignited fires.
The so-called blind thrust fault - one with no surface features to reveal its presence - caused a block of earth to move upward. Most of the energy was released toward mountains that line the northern side of the valley, but there was more than enough energy sent in other directions to cause devastation.
The ground shook horizontally and vertically for up to 10 seconds, most strongly in an area 30 miles in diameter around LA's Northridge neighborhood.
It has been 25 years since a violent, pre-dawn earthquake in Los Angeles caused widespread devastation and left dozens dead. These images show how the city recovered from the $25 billion worth of damage. Pictured above is the Northridge Meadows apartment complex where 16 people were killed
Interstate 10, the Santa Monica Freeway, split and collapsed over La Cienega Boulevard following the Northridge quake in the predawn hours in Los Angeles 25 years ago
It was felt as far away as Las Vegas.
The state said at least 57 died in the earthquake, though a study issued the following year put the death toll at 72, including heart attacks. About 9,000 were injured.
The greatest concentration of deaths occurred at the Northridge Meadows, a 163-unit apartment complex where 16 people were killed when it collapsed onto the parking area below, crushing first-floor apartments.
The complex was rebuilt following the earthquake and remains standing today.
The catastrophe at Northridge Meadows revealed a particular seismic hazard due to so-called soft-story construction in which a building's ground level has large open areas for purposes such as parking spots or shop windows.
The widespread damage to buildings, freeways and infrastructure made the Northridge quake the costliest U.S. disaster at the time.
A portion of the Bullock's department store in Los Angeles' Northridge Fashion Center collapsed in the Northridge earthquake. Pictured on the right is an aerial view of the shopping mall since it was repaired
Bricks and debris surrounded a building housing Ara's Pastry on Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles following the Northridge earthquake. Today, the building is fully repaired and still maintains the original signage
A parking structure at California State University collapsed in the January 17 earthquake. In the years that followed, the area was turned into a sports field at the Los Angeles campus
The covered body of Los Angeles Police Officer Clarence Wayne Dean lies near his motorcycle which plunged off the State Highway 14 overpass that collapsed onto Interstate 5 (left). Twenty-five years later the road overpass has been repaired
According to Earthquake Country Alliance , 82,000 residential and commercial units and 5,400 mobile homes were damaged or destroyed, nine parking structures toppled, nine hospitals were evacuated due to structural or other problems, seven key freeway bridges collapsed, and hundreds more were damaged.
Some 200 steel-frame high-rises sustained cracked welds.
Vivid images from the quake included scenes of vehicles stranded high on an elevated section of freeway with the road fallen away in front and behind, and the wrecked motorcycle of a police officer who plunged to his death off the end of a broken overpass while rushing to work in the early morning darkness.
The California Department of Transportation, which had already retrofitted many of the bridges that ended up being damaged, would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to further strengthen numerous bridges identified as being at risk.
The damage to hospitals led the state to require strengthening of those buildings.
Since Northridge there has been a push toward progress - sometimes frustratingly slow - on everything from making buildings safer to increasing society's overall ability to deal with seismic threats.
Gas from a ruptured supply line burns as water from a broken water main floods Balboa Boulevard in the Granada Hills area of Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 1994
The Northridge Meadows apartment complex in which 16 people died when the upper floors collapsed onto the so-called soft story ground floor is seen on Feb. 16, 1994
A computer-generated graphic displayed at a news conference at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
California State Route 118 in Simi Valley, Calif., is seen collapsed during the Northridge earthquake on Jan. 17, 1994
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News Photo Photos show how Los Angeles recovered after Northridge earthquake
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