Loma Prieta

          I don’t remember exactly why I drove home by a different route, that October Tuesday twenty years ago. I only knew for some reason that day I didn’t want to be on El Camino Real during  evening commute time. So I drove home by a more residential route, still feeling the guilty thrill of being able to buy ice cream with no negative repercussions.  It was a warm day for mid-October, even hot. Summer wasn’t ready to leave, yet.  Sunny warm fall weather that came to be referred to as “Earthquake weather” after that day.

     Even I, the emphatic sports non-fan knew the third game of the “Battle of the Bay” World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s was due to be played up at Candlestick Park that evening.  My mother, spending a  year living in San Francisco, was backing the Giants.  My sister in Oakland, was an Oakland A's partisan.

      Even on my alternate route home, the traffic was heavy as it was just past five p.m.   Then suddenly, I felt as if I were on some kind of combination of the Whirling Teacup ride at Disneyland and a very out-of-control roller rink. Beneath us all, the San Andreas Fault was letting go of a whole lot of tension by making the adjacent tectonic plates dance. We’re not talking about a waltz, either. Everyone I talked to later on who had been driving when the earthquake hit had the same thought of “Oh shit, I’ve blown a tire.”

       I managed to pull over without hitting or getting hit by anyone else when the shaking stopped. I switched off the ignition and just concentrated on breathing. Although the ground was no longer shaking, I sure as hell was. For the record, experiencing a serious earthquake first hand is piss-in-your-pants scary. Hurricanes may last longer, and tornadoes may be louder and floods much wetter, but at least you have some warning that they’re coming. With an earthquake, where you are when it hits determines a lot about whether you survive.  And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do but find something or someone to hang onto until the shaking stops.

    People were hurrying out of their houses now, looking around wildly, all of them showing some variants of surprise and fear. I was definitely thinking in small picture terms, having no idea of what the past thirty seconds had done to San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz. After all, all the buildings I was passing by were intact and standing. The sun was  still out, the cars were now obediently moving in straight lines again, like freight on conveyor belts. We’re back to normal now, right? Hands, stop shaking on the steering wheel, please.

    I got my first inkling of the magnitude when the first traffic signal I came to was non-functioning. And another when the first fire station I passed was ringing its alarm bell. Two firefighters were out on their driveway though, looking as if they wished someone would give them a clear order of what to do first. It was an emergency of course, but where? Whose need should they respond to first?

      I made it home to the apartment complex I'd moved into about six weeks before. It was intact and standing, to my great relief. My neighbors, most of whom I didn’t yet know, were milling about, standing in doorways and on balconies, calling to one another:

“Everybody okay over at your place?”

 “Wow, wasn’t that scary?”

 “We’ve got some broken dishes, over here.”

“Anybody know how big that was on the Richter Scale?”

     When I passed the swimming pool at the rear of the property, it was about a third empty, and the concrete surrounding it was still wet. Inside my apartment, all my framed pictures were hanging at about 45 degree angles on the walls, and my table lamps were lying on their sides. No sign of either of my cats. The floor around the cat’s water bowl was wet. But there was no other obvious earthquake damage, to my great relief. There was also no electricity, but I unloaded my groceries in my dark little kitchen, then righted my lamps and straightened my pictures. It was something to do, before hunting for my frightened cats. PG&E would certainly get the lights back on any minute.  It was scary, but it's over. Everything's normal now, yes sir.

     The phone was working, anyway. I heard it ring in my bedroom and pounced on it.

       “We’re okay at our house. Are you okay over there?” It was my Dad on the phone.   “We got through to Ann in Oakland and she’s okay.  We're trying to get through to Alan and Linda, but haven't reached them yet.  They say the epicenter was up in the Santa Cruz Mountains.” (They were and are okay, escaped with some minor damage to their house in Felton.) 

      “Mraaaow?” Panther, my then-cat slipped out from under my bed as I talked to my Dad, hearing words that now expanded my post-emergency tunnel vision considerably. Of course an earthquake that big would have been felt all over the place, and not just where I was on the road. I hadn’t even been thinking clearly enough to worry that other members of my family might not be okay.  It was the only way to keep from panicking. And I’d had no idea how wide-spread the Earthquake damage had been.

      David my oldest brother, was the safest of us all, living in North Carolina at the time.  Later, he told us how he'd turned on the TV to watch the World Series, and ended up glued to the earthquake newscasts all evening instead.  When he wasn't trying to reach us by phone in California, of course.

           I hung up, and noted that it was getting dark in my apartment already, and the electricity showed no sign of coming back on. A jolting aftershock at around six p.m. sent both cats scurrying back under my bed for safety, and I headed outside where it was still light out. My neighbors were still milling about talking about their experience when the quake hit. One man was out on his upper floor balcony with his transistor radio, calling news relays to everyone else around.

Is he crazy standing up there? I wondered, watching him while standing on my ground floor back patio under my upstairs neighbor’s balcony. What if there’s another bad aftershock? If an aftershock had hit, I'd have been very flat toast.  Oh yes, I was thinking very clearly, that day.

        “But I’ve been invited up to Berkeley to watch the game with my friends,” a woman neighbor said to the radio man, standing with car keys in hand and her purse over her shoulder.

    “Look, you don’t want to be on the road, right now,” he answered. “Especially not to the East Bay. There’s earthquake damage all over the place. The Bay Bridge is down, and part of the freeway in Oakland has collapsed. The game got called off, anyway.”

   This news sobered me even more than my dad’s phone call. The words that the Bay Bridge was “down” had summoned the apocalyptic vision of my mind of the entire bridge having collapsed into the waters of San Francisco Bay, and with it, all the people who had been driving across it when the quake hit. Later, when I heard that the damage had actually been a single section of the upper deck collapsing onto the lower one, it was something of a relief.  Still awful, of course, but not nearly as disastrous as my mental picture.   What scared me even more was that my mother hadn’t yet called.

     Nobody was thinking in terms of carbon footprints yet in 1989, but with all the driving around she does to visit far flung friends all over the greater Bay Area, my mother’s was probably astronomical. This is a woman who thinks nothing of going up to San Francisco and Berkeley for concerts and plays  two nights in a row, and driving back the same night. I gave up trying to keep up with her weekly schedules long ago. On the night of the earthquake, it was entirely possible that she could have been on the Bay Bridge at the moment the earthquake struck. I became more and more freaked out as the darkness fell that night, and my repeated attempts to get her on the phone  at her apartment met with infuriating busy signals or a phone that rang and rang and rang with no one there to answer it. Nobody had cell phones yet either, of course.   I couldn't understand why, if she were home and on the phone as the busy signals suggested, was she not answering but let the phone ring and ring when she must have known the rest of the family would want to reach her?

     I finally heard from my sister around nine o’clock that night, as I sat on my bed, eating Hagen-Dasz coffee soup by flashlight, jumping at every aftershock. Pan was pressed beside me all night for comfort; I don’t know if he knew how much it helped to have him there. Izzy had been grabbing a snack from her bowl in the kitchen but a particularly strong after jolt brought her tearing back into the bedroom where she scooted under the bed and wasn’t seen again for several hours.

       “Mom’s okay, I’ve heard from her,” Ann calmed my freaked-outness when we connected.  She laughed. “You want to know where she was when the earthquake hit? She was trying on clothes in Macy’s on Union Square!” We both laughed then if a little hysterically. Knowing our mother’s keen interest in clothes and shopping, her being in a department store was splendidly typical. We teased her about this for years afterward.

     I finally heard from my mom herself around ten-thirty that night.   “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling!” I very nearly yelled at her when we’d each established the other was okay.

      “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I was over at Steve and Martin's apartment. Ellen Siegelman couldn't get back to Berkeley with the Bay Bridge closed, so she's spending the night at their place.  Even though it's scary, we were eating tuna sandwiches for dinner and having a great time.  Steve and Martin just walked me home."  In view of the hours of extreme anxiety I had just passed, this was both comforting and infuriating information.

     “You should have seen Union Square,” Mom went on. “When I came out of Macy’s, I saw all the front windows of Magnin’s were shattered. It was amazing.”

                           Interior of the Geary Theater in San Francisco, October 17, 1989

           (Yes, the performance was cancelled)

   Turning off the flashlight that night to go to sleep took a lot of faith that the sun would be out again the next day.  With all the outside lights at my complex out because of the power, I don't remember the darkness ever feeling so complete or so pressing since.   The next morning, the power still was off, but the sun was up, and the San Francisco Chronicle was on my front doorstep, as usual.

 “Hundreds Dead in Huge Quake!”

 the headline screamed. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only person who was made jittery by the quake. There in the paper for the first time, I saw pictures of the (mostly)intact Bay Bridge, the pictures of the fires in the Marina District:

And the horrible concrete pancake that had been the Cypress Structure twenty-four hours before.  In fact,  the entire  Loma Prieta death toll was about 63 people, most of whom had been unfortunate enough to be driving along the lower deck of the Cypress Structure at 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, October 17, 1989.

      It had been an odd quake in certain respects. While those near the epicenter certainly felt the strongest shaking, and certainly experienced damage, the most notable damage was seen in San Francisco—miles north of  the epicenter, and in Santa Cruz and Watsonville,  several miles south of the epicenter. In this way, San Francisco learned about the dangers of building on landfill , and of building multi-level freeways, and then failing to maintain them.

      Unreinforced masonry, another bad idea on the Pacific Rim was responsible for some deaths in Santa Cruz, as well, with the collapse of Bookshop Santa Cruz on the ruined Pacific Garden Mall.

 About a week later, California got a post-disaster visit from the then-President George H.W. Bush. “Jee-sus,” the president gasped, when shown the former freeway and current tomb that was the Cypress Structure in Oakland.

Even Vice-President Dan Quayle was moved by the destruction he’d witnessed and the tent cities of the newly homeless in Watsonville and Santa Cruz.

       “It was a heart-rendering sight,” the Vice President told the press gravely.

Belated photo Credit: All photos used in this post are scanned from "The Quake of '89" By San Francisco Chronicle Books, the photos being taken by Chronicle staff photographers.