Loma Prieta Earthquake, 1989

[infrogmation]

20 years ago


"Loma Prieta Earthquake, October 17, 1989. Structures damaged in the Marina District of San Francisco. The first story of this three-story building was damaged because of liquefaction; the second story collapsed. What is seen is the third story."
U.S. Geological Survey photo by G. Plafker.



"Loma Prieta Earthquake, October 17, 1989. Menlo Park, California. Seismographs at the U.S. Geological Survey record the north-south horizontal, east-west horizontal, and vertical components of the earthquake."
U.S. Geological Survey photo by J.K. Nakato.
I like the gal's look of geek excitement. Big event!


I was in San Francisco for the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.


Below is an account I wrote shortly afterwards of the trip I took in October 1989 with my s/o at the time, Nancy. Some of you may have seen it years ago on a website I used to have.



Shakin Things Up In The Pacific North West
Being an account of a particularly moving visit to San Francisco and a drive up the USA's Pacific North-West coast to Seattle.



FROM CRESCENT CITY TO GOLDEN GATE

Hi from San Francisco!


In San Francisco Nancy and I stayed at the Villa Florence , a recently renovated small hotel on Powell Street. It was quite conveniently located for us. A two block walk took us down to Market Street, the city's greatest thoroughfare, where we could catch public transit to other parts of the Bay area. Two blocks in the other direction was the commercial hub of Union Square, and a few blocks further was Chinatown. The most famous of the cable car routes passed in front of the Hotel's door. The cable cars are sadly no longer a useful part of the local mass transit system during regular hours due to the huge lines of tourists who wait (often for hours) to board at the line's terminus at Powel & Market. Nonetheless, through the simple expediency of getting up earlier than the mass of tourists we managed to enjoy the best of the experience (a breathtaking ride over the city's hills to the Marina opposite Alcatraz & the Golden Gate, and then back) without the wait.

We continued to have an enjoyable tourist time, eating sourdough and dim-sum, admiring the view from the deco pillar of Coit Tower.

We crossed under the Bay to Berkeley the night of Friday the 13th to go to a bookstore party, then crossed back to San Francisco with some acquaintances, who took us to a party in the Pacific Heights where Nancy unintentionally made a grand entrance by wearing her fire-engine red raincoat among the uniformly black-clad artistic community.

We returned to Berkeley late the next night to be guests on the SubGenius radio show (special all technical difficulty edition) with Palmer Vreedez, the Reverend Doktor Howl and Sister Dominatrix Stigmata.

Monday the 16th we went to Japan-town to get a Japanese meal, bath and massage, and bring back Japanese comic books, canned coffee, and chewing gum.

The following day we got together with my old friend and college roommate Mr. B. Since this is the day about which I am asked the most questions, I will go into a bit more detail.


THE TRUE SAN FRANCISCO EXPERIENCE

In which there's a whole lot of shaking going on, and an old friend saves the narrator from what would be an otherwise uncomfortable situation.

My friend picked us up in front of our hotel and drove us to the top of Twin Peaks, the highest point in the area, from which a beautiful panorama of the whole San Francisco Peninsula and Bay can be taken in. After lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant we went to Golden Gate Park. We parked across from the park's Crystal Palace style Greenhouse. We wended our way through the woods, coming to the Asian Museum and the Aquarium. We took a relaxing stroll through the Japanese Tea Garden.




My friend Mr B., Nancy & I walked from the Japanese Tea Garden to the Aquarium. Of all the profusion of live and stuffed creatures there, we found the turtles the most interesting. The box turtles were very active. A small turtle was running around the tank chasing a larger turtle and repeatedly biting its tail. The larger turtle kept running away in panic, stepping over other turtles, but the small turtle kept seeking him out for further aggression. A crowd had gathered in front of the turtle tank, watching and laughing at the antics. The keeper came up and stared at the scene with a puzzled look on his face and said "They've never done that before..."

We left the Aquarium shortly before the 5 p.m. closing time and started a leisurely walk back to Mr B. 's car. We sauntered on the path through the forest for a few minutes making small talk when...

THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR

The thoughts going through my mind during the earthquake were something like this:
Something seemed to be interfering with my balance...a tremor...its' intensifying...(outloud)"QUAKE!" ...hmmm, interesting, I just said 'Quake' instead of earthquake... good thing we're in a good place, outside, no need to run... might be a big one...it's a bother to keep balanced...if this goes on two more seconds, I'm going to sit down... Oh, it seems to have stopped.

Nancy at first felt dizzy and thought she had suddenly come down with some type of illness. She was caught in mid stride, and as she tried to put her foot down she noticed that the ground wasn't quite where it had been. She looked up at the top of the trees swaying and realized it was an earthquake. It made a sound like a great number of buses reving up. The quake threw her inner ear off, and she remained dizzy after the ground stopped moving.

We waited a few seconds to make sure it had stopped, reassured eachother that we were fine and continued walking. Mr B. thought that it was a fairly major one, and they'd probably announce the magnitude on the evening news. I had been through a few tremors in Central America which weren't considered particularly big deals by the locals, and I didn't think this one was much worse. (I had been inside buildings for the Central American quakes-- I soon learned that being indoors, and hearing the structure creak and rattle, greatly magnifies the effect and appearance of the earthquake).
We passed some other people in the park and jokingly speculated on the quake's magnitude. We decided it must be a "5", since it struck at 5 o'clock. We got back to B.'s car and discussed plans...weather to continue our tour and drive around Haight Ashbury (well, its after 5:00 and most places will be closed)...maybe go get some beer and bring it back to the park to drink in case there's an aftershock...no; Mr B. decided to first drive home to take a quick look and make sure none of his stereo equipment had fallen off it's shelf.



Okay, so this photo is from the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
I didn't have my camera with me when the 1989 Earthquake hit. Sorry.

The first thing we noticed as we drove out of the park was that the electricity was off locally. The traffic lights were out, and the electric trolleybuses were pulled to the side of the road. As we drove up the hill people were out on the sidewalks looking at the fronts of their buildings. A few blocks further up a fire-hydrant had cracked or been knocked over and was gysering water up two stories high.

We got to Mr B.'s home, a two story building with two apartments per floor. The alarm was going off-- it always did when the electricity went out, Mr B. explained as he went into a utility closet and disconnected it. We went upstairs to his apartment. A few cassette tapes had fallen to the floor, no other visible effect. Mr B. put on the earphones of his walkman, his only battery powered radio. He gave us reports. Seems the earthquake was pretty disruptive. Most of the local stations were off the air; electricity was out pretty much all over. He got a station across the bay in Concorde. They were delaying the World Series game that had been about to start. They were guessing it was about a 6.2 on the Richter scale, but the building the local seismograph was in was shaken around so much the machinery was thrown off, so they had trouble estimating. Well, may's well get the beer out of the refrigerator before it goes warm. Might be a good idea to fill up the tub with water. We stood on Mr B. 's balcony with a panorama of almost the whole bay area. Smoke was rising from the Oakland/Berkeley area and from behind a hill which blocked our view of the Haight and Marina districts. The Goodyear blimp was heading up from Candlestick Park toward downtown. An aftershock struck and we scrambled in off the balcony. It was around half an hour or 45 minutes after the main earthquake, which the radio said happened at 5:05. Mr B. commented that his college geology course paid off; the fact that Twin Peaks was a solid shale outcropping was a reason he'd chosen this location for his home. The radio said there reports of damage to the Oakland Bay Bridge and it had been closed. They upped the magnitude estimate to a 6.5. Mr B. called some friends to make sure they were okay, a few called him. Phone service was erratic, sometimes no dialtone, sometimes you could dial but not get through. With the Goodyear Blimp no doubt broadcasting developments to World Series watchers nation wide, I thought some people might be worried about us. Through sheer chance I reached my parents in Florida. "There's been an earthquake here..." I began, "We've heard" my Dad said. "I just wanted to say we're both fine, and could you please forward that message to Nancy's family and anyone else who might be worried, as the phone service is quite irregular here and I was lucky to get through to you". My parents were watching the t.v. news which was evidently giving continuous coverage of the quake and sending aireal pictures across the country.

My friend gave me a turn getting updates from the radio. There was a fire in the Marina district they were having trouble fighting because of low water pressure. They were telling everyone to turn off their gas and to tell everyone else to turn off their gas (in the 1906 earthquake the out of control fires afterwards did many times the damage of the estimated 9.0 earthquake itself). They were taking calls from people with working phones to get area damage reports. Someone called saying he was the last car to get across the Bay Bridge-- he saw a section collapse in his rear view mirror like a garage door closing behind him. They said the stadium at Candlestick Park had been damaged, the World Series would be delayed for a day, maybe moved to Oakland if the stadium there was alright. The San Francisco Airport was closed. Mr B.'s neighbors and his girlfriend arrived. We started a bar-b-q on the grill on the porch, emptying salmon and chicken from the powerless refrigerator/freezer. A neighbor opened up a bottle of wine, candles were lit as dusk fell. The Goodyear blimp and a small swarm of helicopters hovered over the Bay Bridge and areas from which smoke rose.

The radio said the Quake hit hard in San Jose and Santa Cruz. It was the worst since 1953. The Berkeley Library was on fire. The Bay Bridge had collapsed, but amazingly noone was killed. Parts of the Interstate in Oakland had collapsed. The Golden Gate Bridge was okay. The BART subway under the bay was fine; an official said it was "probably the safest place you could be in an earthquake". They were moving the World Series out of the Bay Area. The fire in the Marina District was spreading.

The moon peeked out from the mountains beyond Oakland and rose blood red through the smoke. The hill in-between us and the Marina District was backlit in red flame. The great city stretched dark infront of us, the only lit buildings being a couple hospitals with emergency generators and the U.S. Mint building. Great lines of car headlights showed the line of Market Street.

I told my friend it would probably be more trouble than it was worth getting back downtown to our hotel and asked if we could sleep on his floor tonight; he said of course, he even had a mattress for us.

The evening went on. A neighbor bought out a large portable radio. The quake estimate was upped to 7.0 and stayed there the rest of the night. It took some time before the quake's worst disaster was understood: a large portion of the elevated double-decker Interstate 880 Nimitz expressway had collapsed. They estimated some 600 people killed. (Fortunately the number eventually turned out to be much lower, but the scene was quite horrific.)



"Two Mile Sandwich". Nimitz Freeway, photo by sanbeiji / Joe Lewis

The radio announcer continued to read off damage reports from phone callers and wire services. At one point he said "Oh no. As if we didn't have enough problems...They're sending Vice President Dan Quale here to look at the damage".

The blimp circled the business district, the programmable light display on its sides beaconing a message we were too far away to read. We wondered what it said. Courage? Turn off your gas? A neighbor brought binoculars. The blimp floated over the darkened city bearing the important message "GOODYEAR".

We cheered when they announced that the Marina fire was finally under control. We watched electricity came back on in a few areas across the bay and in South San Francisco. They said it might be days or even weeks before the Pacific Heights & Marina District got power and water again. Somewhat after midnight we were finally exhausted enough to go to sleep. We were woken around 3 a.m. by an aftershock. I heard the building creak and rattle and felt the quake roll through under my body, from my feet at the south-west to my head to the north-east. We found the electricity was back on, and turned on the t.v., which was providing continuing coverage, plus replays of the footage from earlier.


In the morning Mr B. was hoping we could execute our pre-quake plans; Mr B., his galfriend, Nancy & I would drive up to the Napa Valley, see the sights, visit a vineyard. The reports of closed streets, however, made that seem impractical. Mr B. & I drove out to see about getting some groceries. It was no problem getting a full tank of gas nearby. The first grocery store we drove past was closed. We noted a wine & cheese store nearby was open in case we found nothing else. The next grocery store we came to was open. It was crowded, but not unmanageable. We got a shopping cart by following another shopper to her car, got groceries, and were back within a couple hours. B's galfriend cooked up a hearty brunch while we watched continuing developments on t.v. Much of the city was still without power. Windows in buildings downtown had exploded out during the earthquake injuring people on the street. I tried calling our hotel repeatedly but got no answer. By early afternoon they reported that although some BART stations were closed, most of the public transit lines were running. I decided that I'd better go check out the situation at our hotel now, so that no matter what the circumstance I'd be able to get back to Mr B.'s before dark.

As rumor had it that some downtown streets were buckled or strewn with broken glass, we thought it wise not to attempt the trip in my friend's sports car. Mr B. drove me down the hill and dropped me off at the MUNI station at Market & Castro. A long line wrapped around the block, which I soon noticed was for the Bank of America. There were no crowds to get on the MUNI. The underground trolleycar took me as far as Market & Van Ness, on the outskirts of the central business district. Lack of power could take it no further. Army generators powered arc spotlights which provided the only light as my fellow passengers and I walked up the still escalator at the Van Ness street station.

Gasoline buses took the place of the usual electrics on Market Street. They didn't ask to see transfers or insist on taking money. Almost all the businesses along San Francisco's main business thoroughfare were closed, the street seemed to be populated by a mix of homeless and transients and businessmen checking their buildings for damage. I got off at Powell and walked the two blocks to the hotel. A man on one corner was hawking copies of the Sacramento Bee, special Earthquake edition. A newsstand half a block from the hotel was the only business I saw open, selling the one-section thin San Francisco Examiner Earthquake Extra from behind the darkened counter. I was pleased to find the doors of the Villa Florence Hotel open. The lobby was lit by several dozen candles. The desk was manned by one young lady with the same neat hair and smiling face she wore before the quake, and a harried looking older man in a suit & tie who seemed to be a manager or owner. The hotel had no phone, no electricity, no water. They were trying to move all the guests who had nowhere else to go down to the second floor so they'd have less of a walk. A delivery boy came in with a boxload of flashlights. The man taped a couple to the the railing of the otherwise darkened stairwell between the first and second floors. I overheard them checking out a guest who was moving to a hotel in a part of town with electricity. They said they weren't charging for last night, nor for drinks out of the room's honor bars. People were successfully hailing cabs out front. I walked around the corner to see if the Post Office in the Macy's building was open so I could send off the suitcase full of books. It wasn't. I learned that several of Macy's windows had exploded outward during the quake, severing the fingers of a woman standing on the sidewalk. I went back to the hotel, took out the penlight Mr B. had loaned me and went up to our room on the fourth floor. I packed up our bags, including emptying out the honor bar. I brought the suitcases down and checked out at the desk, leaving addresses for them to send us the laundry we had left the day before the quake. I got a cab to take the luggage & me back up to my friend's house. The cab driver said he was in his car during the quake, and didn't think it was much of anything at the time. But then he started taking the news camera men to the Marina District. He said the streets were buckled in some places. He said "It as really strange. On one side of the street a three story building would be still be standing, on the other side you see just the top floor of this other three story building flat on the ground-- like it was a one story building, but it had two more stories that are just gone. Looks crazy."




Back at Mr. B.'s place, I got my camera out of my suitcase and took a couple photos of the view from the balcony.


I managed to phone the airport branch of Avis rental cars that evening. They arranged for me to have a car the next morning; although the downtown Avis office had no phone service, they were somehow still connected by computer so they could take care of things.

The following morning we took a cab to the rental car place and drove north out of town over the Golden Gate Bridge.

We felt relived to be out. Over the past two days I was sometimes unsure if it was the ground that was shaking or me. We later learned that the minor aftershocks during that period numbered in the thousands.

Comments

[mshollie.livejournal.com]

Let's go to San Francisco...hopefully, when there isn't an earthquake going on. :)

Or shall we go to Mexico instead?

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you were there! My step-daughter was living there then. Incidentally I like the 1906 photo...my paternal grandmother was born in San Francisco in 1902. She only remembered her parents talking about it as she was too young to recall it herself. Santa Rosa, where her family eventually settled, was flattened by the '06 quake.
http://users.ap.net/~chenae/socoquake.html