In 1935 , with the damage from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake still a recent memory , SBVC hired John Buwalda of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory to assess seismic hazards . Buwalda discovered and reported the presence of the fault , specifically recommending " a thousand-foot-wide zone of no building , which basically took in almost the entire campus . They SBVC ignored his advice , even though they paid for his report . " The trustees of SBVC hired Professor Kerry Sieh , also of Caltech , to perform a seismic hazard study in 1995 – 96 . This confirmed the danger of the fault to the campus . Excavated trenches revealed that the surface trace of the fault passed through four of the school 's buildings . Eight other buildings were determined to be at risk due to secondary ground fracturing or their location across an active surface fold caused by shallow blind thrust faulting . The buildings , most over 50 years old , were not built to modern seismic standards and it was decided that creating new buildings away from , and parallel to , the fault would be more sensible than retrofitting the aging ones
1933 Long Beach earthquake
1933 Long Beach earthquake
San Bernardino Valley College