LOMA PRIETA, 25 YEARS LATER Twenty-five years and one day ago, at 5:04 p.m., I was driving on the lower deck of the Cypress Structure (the elevated double-deck section of I-880 in Oakland, along the path of what is now Mandela Parkway). Exactly 24 hours later, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, flattening the Cypress Structure, pancake style, killing 42 people. I guess its a good thing I didnt wait a day for that errand. When the quake struck, I was in a meeting upstairs at the Pacific Center in Berkeley. A few books were thrown off the shelves, but we guessed the quake to be something in the magnitude 5 range, and went on with our meeting. When I went downstairs a little before 6:00 p.m., the front desk volunteer had the radio on, so I heard that the Bay Bridge had collapsed, the San Mateo Bridge was closed for inspection, the Cypress Structure was destroyed, and the Marina District in SF was on fire. Reports from Santa Cruz, which was much closer to the epicenter and much more heavily damaged than most of SF or the East Bay, were not yet making it onto the news, but clearly it was a much bigger quake than we had guessed. I walked the few blocks to my apartment in Rochdale Village (one of the Berkeley Student Co-ops, on Haste just west of Telegraph), where there was not only no damage, but a couple of things that had been pretty precariously perched on my dresser hadnt even fallen off — in spite of (because of?) the fact that my apartment was only a couple of blocks from the Hayward Fault. My flatmate was repeatedly picking up the phone and hanging up, unable to get dial tone. I explained to him that the telephone system was completely overwhelmed; if his call was not urgent, he should wait a couple of hours, but if it was urgent, he needed to pick up and wait for dial tone, even if it took a couple of minutes, because each time he hung up and tried again, he went back to the end of the queue. Under normal conditions, you arent even aware that there is a queue for dial tone, because you get to the front within a second or two at the most, but when everyone is trying to make a call simultaneously, you may have to wait a couple of minutes, even if youre trying to call 9-1-1. I made my way to Kidd Hall (just north of UC campus), the co-op house where I had lived until two months earlier, and watched the TV news with my former housemates. However, KRON-4 was broadcasting live news without closed captions at that point, so I did my best to give a sign language interpretation of the news for a deaf housemate. I still remember that was when I learned the sign for bridge. The news reports got wildly distorted, rather like a game of telephone. For instance, there was a fire at an auto body shop in downtown Berkeley, in the same block with the main city public library. (Some paint and chemicals had been knocked over, causing a substantial fire.) That morphed into the Berkeley Library is on fire, which then morphed into the UC-Berkeley main library has burned to the ground. For weeks afterwards, the UC library got calls from all over the world, from people asking how they could help rebuild the collection. The next day, in something of a daze, I walked probably at least 10 or 15 kilometers, obsessively gathering every newspaper I could get my hands on. (I finally let go of my collection only about 3 years ago.) I had the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner (a 16-page joint edition, in lieu of the usual several sections for each paper), the San Jose Murky Snooze, the Oakland Tribune, the Sacramento Bee, and the L.A. Times. My faculty advisor for my masters project was utterly unsympathetic for how rattled I was for a couple of days. My brother and my father both came to the Bay Area shortly afterwards, for professional reasons. My brother was Dan Rathers personal assistant, and my father was a consulting engineer who specialized in earthquake damage. I think the aftershocks still stand as the strongest quakes William has experienced, but Dad had been through worse aftershocks — not as strong in absolute terms, but with much less robust building codes — in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1972. A week and a half later, I went to a Halloween party at a friends house in Half Moon Bay, and Dad met me and Perry Logan the next morning and drove us down to Santa Cruz to see some of the damage down there. I remember a car showroom that was heavily damaged, but most especially the large building with the video arcade at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which my father said wouldve been difficult to do a worse job of designing to suffer maximum damage and maximum risk to life and health in an earthquake. I was dressed all in orange and black, but Perry was dressed as Peter Pan; Im sure we were quite a sight, walking around Santa Cruz. On a later visit to the Bay Area, my father pointed out the Flatiron Building on Market Street in SF, with the advice, If youre anywhere near that building in an earthquake, RUN AWAY. Four years later, I was working on the 35th floor of 425 Market Street. Several of my co-workers had been there, on the 35th floor, during the Loma Prieta quake, but I was spared that thrill ride. The whole building swayed by a couple of meters for the full duration of the quake. The residue of my experience is that today, 25 years later, I have food, water, and other emergency supplies for several days, and all of my tall furniture is bolted to the wall — all of my shelf units, my free-standing kitchen pantry cabinet, and the chest of drawers at the foot of my bed. It never ceases to amaze me how few people take even those simplest of precautions against the inevitable NEXT major earthquake.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 02:28:04 +0000
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