LOS ANGELES -- The freeways are broken. The water in some places remains undrinkable. And the city parks have been transformed into tent cities.
This is the look of paradise lost, a California dream turned nightmare.
In the wake of Monday morning's earthquake, a city and region have been forced to confront their mortality.
Can a place built on sun, hopes and fault lines ever be the same again?
Unlikely.
At 4:31 a.m. Monday, the ground shook with stunning violence for 10 seconds. It was an earthquake that registered 6.6 on the Richter scale, a jolt so powerful that a swath of destruction was cut from the epicenter in Northridge, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, up through the Santa Clarita Valley and then 20 miles south through Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles.
This wasn't the Big One, but it was close.
And as the aftershocks roll through the region, the millions of survivors are beginning to come to grips with a future that may no longer be as bright or as beautiful as the old California dream of endless, sun-drenched opportunity.
"We will rebuild the freeways so they can fall down again," said Michael Davis, an urban studies professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
"We will finally have more cops," he added. "And people will continue to flee Southern California."
It is a downbeat assessment matched by the alarming devastation. All power was temporarily lost. All water was stopped. Parts of eight freeways, the concrete lifelines that pulse through the region, were severed.
Fifty-five people died. More than 2,000 were injured. Damage estimates ranged from $15 billion to $30 billion.
The earthquake damage was heaped upon the all-too-familiar ills that have plagued L.A. in the past two years.
The riot after the first verdict in the Rodney G. King police beating case.
Fires in Malibu.
The economic bust triggered by the collapse of the defense industry.
The housing crash.
"Welcome to L.A., the land of earth, wind and fire," said Jackie Goldberg, a City Council member and lifelong Los Angelino.
There has always been a hard edge around the laid-back Southern California lifestyle. Nearly 9 million people are packed together along mountains and valleys that hug the Pacific and give L.A. its shape.
The fantasy of filmmaking and the beauty of Beverly Hills mansions obscure the neighborhoods where the tenements are covered in graffiti and the residents are cloaked with fear.
