^{Portion of Cypress Freeway in Oakland, after collapse.  Photo by USGS}

I was a minute away from being in the elevator.

On October 17th, 1989, that was approximately my third thought as the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake hit while I was walking to the elevators in my downtown Oakland office building at 5:04 PM.  

My first thought was, “Wow, those buildings are swaying back and forth!” as I looked out the window to some neighboring office towers while vainly trying to find a grip on the fabric cubicle partition that I’d been thrown against.  

And my second thought:  “If that building is moving back and forth that much, mine must be, too.”  Which explained why my feet threatened to fly out from under me even though I was standing on carpet and was stone cold sober.

An eternity (really 15 seconds) later, the shaking stopped and my private experience ended and the public one began.  During the quake, I was in that time-slows-down-to-a-crawl state familiar to anyone who’s ever been in an accident or other situation in which the normal rules of physical experience and thus perception seem to be broken, causing the human mind to say, “Nooooowww, wwwwaittt jjjjust a mmmmmminnnnute herrree…” like a record slowed way down on a turntable.

As my co-workers poured out of their offices, we all went into automatic mode, trained into us by years of emergency exit drills, and headed not for the elevators that I was immensely grateful not to have been in (especially when I later heard that some people were trapped in one in San Francisco for over 24 hours) but for the clattering stairwells already full of evacuees from the floors above us.  Realizing how difficult it had been to remain standing even on the third floor where I worked, I could only wonder how it had felt up higher, before remembering a much-lesser quake I’d experienced in my high-rise college dorm and shuddering. 

 As we descended, we chattered with nervous excitement, mostly about one question:  How big was it?  “I think that was at least a 6.7,” I ventured to a co-worker, as well as, “And if this wasn’t the epicenter, there’s a hell of a lot of damage somewhere.”

It turned out the epicenter was down in the Santa Cruz mountains, but the population density, architecture and freeways of the Bay Area where I lived meant we would bear the brunt of the damage and casualties.  Already, less than a mile from where I stood, the Cypress Freeway structure had collapsed.

Some of my co-workers took that freeway home, but as many people were that day, they were saved by a rare stroke of luck:  Both the “Bay Bridge World Series” between the two local baseball teams (Oakland A’s and SF Giants) and a more personal event (the promotion of a co-worker to VP) had kept most of us either in the office or at a nearby bar/restaurant, Crogan’s, where her promotion celebration was already underway.  For lack of a better place to go, when we exited the building, that's where most of us headed.

Upon walking in, we found a scene that suggested a rowdy celebration like Mardi Gras or Super Bowl victory rather than a major disaster.  Already full of people who had come to watch the World Series on the bar TV, more and more office workers were pouring in by the minute, many immediately hustling to the bar for a shot of Dutch courage.  Behind that bar lay ruins – smashed bottles all over the floor, from which a nearly overpowering smell of countless types of liquor rose.  Despite this chaos, and the glass that crunched under their feet, the bartenders were working frantically to pour drinks for all who demanded them, not even getting a chance to process their own reactions to the quake in the frenzy of demand for alcohol, any alcohol, that hadn’t yet been spilled.

Miraculously (for it was out in much of the city), the electricity was still on in the bar, and the TV tuned to local news, which rapidly began reporting what was known.  I hadn’t been in the bar very long (although time was still doing its funny bendy thing) when the very first shot was broadcast of the section that had collapsed on the Bay Bridge.  The entire bar of about 200 people gasped simultaneously in shock at this image, but it is the words of the African-American woman standing near me that I’ll never forget:  “I see that!” she yelled in a stunned voice.

I’ve always thought her words were a perfect description of both what happens in a disaster or other emergency, and also what doesn’t happen:  I personally had trouble seeing the collapsed section of the bridge, a car teetering precariously as it sloped down onto the lower deck, despite it being broadcast clearly on the TV above me.  My mind couldn’t process what I was seeing yet.  Could the Bay Bridge really collapse, even partially?  

^{SF-Oakland Bay Bridge.  Photo by USGS}

And I hadn’t even seen the Cypress Structure yet.  When it comes to that tragedy, I always think of a co-worker, traveling in Europe when the quake hit, who reported that the headline of a notorious London tabloid was:  “Sandwich of Death.”

That much-reviled freeway, which had blighted West Oakland for decades, turning a neighborhood of Victorians not far from the bay into a ghetto, deserved to die, but not to take 42 innocent people with it (the majority of the immediate quake death toll of 57).   With one great shudder, a structure that looked immensely solid had collapsed, guaranteeing Bay Area residents many future years of panic whenever they drove under any double-decker freeway, counting the seconds anxiously until they emerged before another quake could hit.

Despite the communal atmosphere of the bar, I was anxious to get home to my apartment just a mile away and see what had happened.  I brought along a co-worker who wisely decided to sleep on my sofabed rather than drive the 40 miles home to hers on freeways in God knows what condition.  But by the time we left Crogan’s, darkness had fallen, and I was surprised to find that power was out in my neighborhood.  Greeted at the front door by my building manager, she later recounted how large my eyes were with supposed shock and fear, but I blame the flashlight she shone in them.  As she escorted me up the stairs, lighting the way to my door so I could get my key in the lock, I asked this deeply Christian woman if she’d been scared during the quake only to have her reply serenely, “Oh no, dear, I have peace of mind.”

Entering my apartment, I quickly found my own flashlight and began to inspect the place while my friend Julie looked for a place to lie down.  There was a predictable amount of items knocked over or spilled, but nothing serious until I stepped into the bathroom and heard the crunch of glass under my feet and pointed the flashlight to the bathroom window, which opened onto an airshaft (a relic of the building’s 1920’s vintage).  

Something ( I later found out it was a small chimney) had fallen from the roof down the airshaft, striking my bathroom window and exploding the old, non-safety glass all over the bathroom.  Huge jagged shards covered the floor and every surface, filled the toilet and had even somehow sailed over the top of the closed shower curtain and down into the tub, like the flying daggers of an enemy bent on assassinating whoever showered inside.

I realized that had I been home, and anywhere in that bathroom at the time the quake hit, I would have been pierced with those shards and either instantly killed or bleeding to death in a city where emergency help was suddenly overwhelmed.

Timing is everything in life, the old saying goes, and I never knew it so well as at that moment.  Not being in the elevator when the quake hit was a small blessing, but this was a stay of execution.  

Like most people who experience an event like this (even those who don’t narrowly miss daggers of glass), I immediately vowed to live my life more fully, with less fear and more gusto, with more giving and less complaining.

In the coming days, everyone in the Bay Area seemed to feel the same.  People were extraordinarily nice to each other for days and even weeks after, realizing that beyond life itself, human connection is the most precious commodity we have.  We smiled and were patient and accommodating.  We greeted strangers we would have previously ignored and talked to neighbors and friends with new warmth.  What had been a cool impersonal city became a small community.

And we understood each other’s fears without being told, such as the day a week after the quake when I had to stop at a traffic light under a freeway overpass, only to notice that I and every other stopped driver began slowly inching into the intersection despite the cross traffic, because the fear that the overpass would collapse felt unbearable.  And the cross traffic seemed to understand this too, weaving around us without honking or complaint, as we all found ways to get where we were going once again.  

For at least a year afterward, no gathering seemed to pass without someone mentioning where they were when the quake hit, and triggering everyone else present to tell their own quake tales, like groups of mothers who begin sharing childbirth stories.  I was a corporate trainer at the time and for months had to build in time at the start of each class for this ritual, as the pre-class conversation among attendees inevitably drifted to the topic, which held all in its thrall until exhausted.

On the first anniversary of the quake, I was the one traveling in England, and I was shocked that not one person, having heard where I was from, asked me about the quake.  I couldn’t imagine why people would be so incurious about such a huge event, one that, like many other people, I still felt repercussions from, such as my illogical thoughts in touring 400 year old thatched cottages in Stratford that they would be very bad places to be in a quake, a calculation I now instantly made about any structure I was standing in or near.  I also hated to sit by windows, or walk under large ones (many huge windows in places like downtown SF had shattered and rained down on the sidewalks and pedestrians).  Brick buildings I once would have found charming now conjured up only the dread words “unreinforced masonry” -- dangerously prone to collapse upon unsuspecting people (as also happened in SF).

On October 17, 1989, my world had been literally shaken up and never would I again feel that earthquakes were kind of fun, enjoying their rolling rhythms while making a game of guessing their intensity, as I always had up till then.  

Now when the earth shakes here in California, I act without thinking, jumping up and running to the nearest doorway within seconds, as I did during a middle of the night quake last year, prompting K to both laugh and marvel at my uncharacteristic athleticism.  But we sleep right under windows, you see, and I haven’t forgotten what that can mean.

The SF Chronicle's website has a comprehensive Loma Prieta section looking back at their news coverage at the time and also describing what happened afterward as a result of the quake: You can find it here.