Author / loma prieta

by loma prieta

Gymeteria

Marta Martinez

I thought we lived in one of those suburban cookie-cutter houses that I saw on TV, but actually, we lived in the projects in Diamond Heights. As a six-year-old I didn’t know any different.

One night, we gathered around the table for dinner and I watched my father serve plates of spaghetti from a gigantic vat. When I asked why my dad made so much pasta, he shrugged and said that he just felt like cooking an extra big batch.

The next day started out normal. I went to Buena Vista Elementary with my mom, who also taught there.  During the after-school dance class in the cafeteria/gym, or “gymeteria,” two girls started arguing. It only took a few seconds for the whole gymeteria to fill with the piercing screams of quarreling girls. The teacher brought the two culprits to the front stage for some conflict management.

While the three of them worked out the details of who started it, I heard a slow grumble grow louder and louder, coming from nowhere and everywhere. I looked up and saw hanging lights moving from side to side, like the swings in the yard. It was a sound I could feel. It was an earthquake.

All the girls scattered, screaming. I went into autopilot, duck, cover, hold, duck, cover, hold. I spotted the long cafeteria table and weaved my body over the bench seat and under the table. Just as I got my head below the table I realized, I’m all alone. Where is everyone??? They must be hiding in a better place. I DON’T WANT TO DIE ALONE! I left my safe hiding place to find our teacher, a spandexed, sweatbanded dancer, stuck to the doorway like an 80s starfish, surrounded by a herd of squawking guppies. Even though I was completely exposed, I was sure that dying with the group would be better than dying alone. As soon as I got to them, the shaking stopped and we made our way to the yard.

Eventually, I found my mom amongst the chaos of children. She didn’t come out of the building right away because she was convinced that the rumble was just the janitor dragging trashcans down the stairs.

My mom and I headed home. To wait. At least we knew that my dad and brother were together, but downtown was so far away.

The first thing we did was assess the damage. Our porch had moved a few inches away from the house and a little calavera had fallen off of a bookshelf. Otherwise, everything was just as we left it. I listened to the radio as new stories trickled in with reports of damage. A piece of the Bay Bridge has fallen into the bay… a freeway collapsed… more details to come…

My mom pulled out the address book and hopped on the phone, making quick calls to our family and closest friends to make sure everyone was okay. We couldn’t stay on the line too long. No call waiting.

About an hour passed before we heard the click of the door. They made it. My family was safe.

With the sun setting, no electricity, and strict instructions to not turn on the gas, my dad took stock of our supplies to get us through the night. The giant pot of pasta! My dad was happy to take credit for his uncanny sixth earthquake-sense.

Since we were more than covered for dinner, my uncle and grandmother, my godparents and their baby all came over to share in a candlelight dinner of cold spaghetti. My brother and I kept our ears on the radio, anxiously hoping, awaiting official word that school the next day was canceled.

gymeteria spaghetti 1989

by loma prieta

Power Lines

Al Wofford

I had just arrived home in Walnut Creek from work in Martinez: my younger daughter was already there.  We were in the family room talking about nothing I can remember, when suddenly it was Show Time.  Mantel decorations in the living room rattled a little, then it got worse and they began to fall, so I said to Camille, “Let’s go outside for this one”.

We were standing on the front lawn and as the shaking got worse the power lines nearby began swinging back and forth enough to occasionally touch, with an interesting light show.  (At one point, Camille stretched out on the lawn, clutching the ground for stability.) I made sure we were clear of places where the lines could land if they burned through and then it got much better: throughout the neighborhood the lines were touching, and the short circuits started blowing the high voltage fuses.  It sounded much like very large shotguns or maybe small mortar blasts, and then the lights started going out.

This being the Dark Ages (and not just because the power was out) before cell phones, we could only wonder what had happened to my wife, whose job required lots of driving around our county.  She showed up in a few more minutes with her own stories…

Camille and Goli, her friend from next door, refused to come in the house that night; they just walked the street and stayed out on the porch.

 

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Almaden Wave Pool

Roz Dumesnil

I was at home in the Almaden neighborhood of San Jose. Pretty pleased my husband and 12 year old son were able to get tickets to the game. I was alone, anticipating their delight at just being able to be there. That soon changed, however, as I was unable to reach them after the quake. I later learned that their upper deck seats were rolling back and forth toward the field only to snap back up again.

I was standing at the kitchen sink when it hit – about to make a snack before the game. As I felt the first rumblings I looked up to find a gigantic wave arching across our deck. We lost half the pool water that day – in one wave alone. Best guess? About 12 feet high. Tremendous power behind the sound of that wave. Can still hear it 20 years later.

seiches pool 1989

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Spokane Haircut

Elisa Dumesnil

I was in the middle of a haircut in Spokane, Washington while away at Gonzaga University for my second year of college. The hair salon was in the lobby of some chain hotel on the other side of the Spokane River. The Bay Bridge World Series game was on the salon TV and had just started. I watched with great anticipation and excitement as I knew my father and (then) 12-year-old brother, Pete, were there at Candlestick Park. All of a sudden, video cut and the screen went to black. A few moments later, signal returned and so shaken was I from seeing the footage of folks scrambling out of their seats at Candlestick … I left the salon chair mid-cut, hair wet, and grabbed a cab back to my dorm — wet towel still on my shoulders.

earthquake haircut 1989

In the lobby of Madonna Hall, my sophomore year dormitory, fellow students from the Bay Area began to gather around the lobby TV, many scared and crying because no one could contact family back home. I’d tried my folks’ home number repeatedly and kept receiving a busy signal. The student life office of the school sent Jesuit priests our way for comfort. I remember the heartsink that set in when the local Spokane news stations switched over to their Bay Area major network affiliates. It was surreal seeing our hometown anchors on my university TV. Something was not right in the world when Elaine Corral and Dennis Richmond were in my Washington state dorm lobby. We knew it was big.

Those were long hours, waiting to hear if family was safe and house still standing. Being a few states away and not having experienced it at home, all we could rely on was the news footage. Of course, only the most apocalyptic footage aired: so there we gasped, watching the Marina burning out of control, cars falling through the Bay Bridge collapse onto the lower deck, while others were being pulled out of pancaked vehicles in Oakland’s Cypress collapse. As news traveled in from different Bay Area kids who may have been able to reach a parent at home, my roommate (from Belmont, CA) and I were on pins and needles. Waiting to find out if my dad and brother were okay while being shown those images was surreal.

Friends who knew little of earthquakes (most were from from Montana/Oregon/Washington/Idaho) did as good good dormmates do … ordered delivery pizza and smuggled in a few cases of Schmidt beer. After seeing the same awful images repeat on TV, a bunch of us Bay Areans ended up ditching out of the lobby and gathering on some old wood bleachers on the field in front of the COG (university cafeteria). October nights in Spokane were cold, but when you’re 19 … that never matters. A boy I’d recently met on campus (after learning he was also from San Jose, CA) walked me back to my dorm that night. Everyone else went back to their rooms and this boy and I sat on the steps of Madonna Hall talking. For hours. About home, about being far away from home, about the families we were worried about. I can still see and hear his laughter when he realized he was talking to a girl with half a haircut. After all those hours of worry, at long last some laughter! And his was infectious.

I remember how he put his arm around me as we sat on the steps of that dorm. I remember feeling so far away. I remember The Cure’s “Lovesong” blasting out of the second “boys only” floor of the dorm. I remember thinking that this boy beside me was kind of an angel. Eventually, I returned to my dorm room to find a message on my answering machine (the kind with actual cassette tape) from my mom. Still waiting for Dad and Pete to get home, she kept saying everything was fine, but her voice was scared and shaken: “It was a big one. It sure was a big one. I’m okay. I think the house is okay. But it sure was a big one.”

That boy from San Jose who was kind of an angel passed away in 2013. What I didn’t know on the night of ’89 earthquake was that he would grow be one of the sweetest young loves of my life.

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Transmogrified

Barbara Golden

I was playing at a dance class for kids at a rec center in East Oakland. It was somewhere on Avenue A near a bakery. Suddenly, it sounded like rocks on the roof: the piano slid away. The kids started running out the door. Seven-point-something earthquake.

 

piano earthquake 1989

Driving home to Berkeley on the 880, the radio saying “Cypress Freeway is down, get off the freeway, the Bay Bridge is down.”  Around High Street, I go to drink with my mechanic Marvin, a tumblerful of Bushmills straight. My house, on Walnut Street in North Berkeley, is unscathed. From my roof I see San Francisco burning. Write music now, ’cause you’re gonna die! Before the quake I swam a mile, I kept singing M’s song, “Young Man Transmogrified.” It is gypsyish, romantic. I always think: “Would W. like it?”

“Outward over matter, he moves guileless, like a deer.”

Did not sleep at home. Too afraid. Went to Toyoji’s in Oakland– on his street, in the headlights, I saw a huge rat. All T’s bookshelves were down and there was glass everywhere. We had a lot of red wine and slept with our toes touching.
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GM Factory

Katherine Sherwood

It happened 1½ months after we had arrived in the Bay Area from NYC for me to take a job at UC Berkeley. I had been in earthquakes before. My newlywed husband, being the staunch New Yorker he was, hadn’t been.

October 17th is my birthday. I was in bed with a terrible cold, high on cough medicine, watching the World Series. Jeff was in his studio. We lived in what had been a former GM factory. It was on International Blvd and 105th St – the last street of Oakland before San Leandro started. In one direction there was super Crackville, in the other, whitebread America. We felt closer to Oakland’s troubles after spending a decade in NYC.

Our 2000 ft. loft was one of twenty built in one wing of the building. Jeff had his studio at the very end of another wing– same size, but undeveloped. He used to ride his bike within the building to get there.

When the quake occurred, Jeff saw 40,000 feet of 3-foot-diameter concrete columns do the hula dance. Then he ran to get under the only door jamb, and it fell apart as he grabbed it.

Afterwards, he rode his bike back to me and declared, “We are going home!!!”

That is when I realized that the amount of trauma you’d experience was completely tied to what you had witnessed visually. Our windows in the loft were tinted, and of course the cough medicine helped too. The combination of lying in bed, only seeing the sky and of course the tranquilizing, otherworldy effects of the cough syrup gave me a unique vision, one that was the complete opposite of Jeff’s.

After weeks of my coaxing we did in fact stay in California.
by loma prieta

Mirror in the Bathroom

Christine Wong Yap

It was a beautiful, sunny day—the kind that usually gets fogged out in Daly City. I had gotten home from middle school and to kill time before dinner, I went to my older sister’s room. She was sitting on her bed reading a book or magazine. Just as I hit the power button on our Commodore Amiga PC, rumbling started, so for a half a second, my mind raced for a connection, as if I caused it. My second thought was that Dad was jumping on the roof—he was both a handyman and a prankster. But the shaking got violent and I think I looked at my sister, and we both said, “Earthquake!?” as we dived under the desks.

Growing up in California, we practiced earthquake drills in school. Mom didn’t have this benefit, so she panicked and yelled at us to go downstairs into the garage, as if to bunker down. I remember being on all fours under the desk, helplessly looking at my Mom standing in the hallway, unable to explain why we weren’t following her.

Afterwards, in our know-it-all, child-of-immigrants ways, we showed her how to brace in a doorway. We understood that’s what grown-ups were supposed to do. But this advice wasn’t actually all that great, and has since fallen out of usage.

When we assessed the aftermath, we found that a magnifying mirror fell from the bathroom windowsill and broke. Our relief that there wasn’t worse damage was tainted by superstitious beliefs—the broken mirror as an omen of bad luck.

daly city mirror 1989

Luckily, Dad was only a few blocks away when the quake struck, on his way home from the auto shop. His calm demeanor contrasted Mom’s nervous nature. Their marriage was like an arms race of world outlooks, one given towards fear, the other, obstinately insisting on relaxation. I was very curious to have Dad explain what it was like to experience an earthquake in a car, and consequently burnished a vision of him placidly steering his light blue 1980 Ford Fairmont as it wobbled across the asphalt into the late afternoon sunlight.

 

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China Basin Building

Valerie Soe

I was working at the China Basin Building south of Market, which is a big ol’ five-story concrete former warehouse. It was the end of the workday and the third game of the Bay Bridge World Series was on the TV in the conference room. Suddenly the building shook violently like a huge hand had picked it up and rattled it around. I could see my boss mouthing “Oh shit” right before the fire doors slammed shut.

After the crazy shaking stopped we all made our way out of the building down the pitch-dark emergency stairwells. I got to my car and turned on the car radio and one of the reporters said he could see the 880 freeway collapse in West Oakland and that there was a hole in the Bay Bridge. When I drove home I could see bricks all over the roadway from buildings that had fallen apart. That was when I knew it wasn’t just your garden-variety earthquake.

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Cypress Structure

Miguel Farias

I was a courier, driving the bay area, for the Fuji lab in Anaheim. My route started at SFO and ended at OAK.

On that afternoon, I was driving home after delivering the processing orders at the airport. I took the normal route back up 880 through the maze to reconnect with 80. I was on the Cypress Street overpass, on the bottom level. I didn’t have a clock built in to the car so I carried around a travel clock. As i was sitting there, not moving in bumper to bumper traffic, I looked at the clock, it said 4:45. It took like 15 minutes to complete the drive through the maze and I as I approached the Richmond San Rafael bridge, the earthquake struck. It felt like I had a flat tire. cars were pulling over, all around me, but i kept driving.

cypress structure 1989

When I got home, my mom and my sister informed me that there had been a big earthquake. I turned on the TV and the first images I saw were the Cypress Structure flattened and the newscaster was guessing 40-60 cars had been crushed under the fallen overpass. My knees buckled and I felt faint. I fell back on the couch and almost threw up. I couldn’t believe what i was seeing. It was so heavy.

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Grad Housing

Melinda de Jesus

I had just moved from Pennsylvania to do my PhD at UC Santa Cruz. On my arrival at SJO, Prof. Mary Kay Gamel, whom I stayed with as I searched for housing, told me to stand in a doorway should an earthquake hit. She said I’d never forget that tip as it was shared at my very first moment in NorCal.

Three weeks later, I found myself in the doorway of UCSC grad housing, clinging for dear life. I remember thinking, “How do people live like this?” as I assumed the Loma Prieta was merely an everyday kind of earthquake. Lol. I also thought I’d never finish my lit degree, would have to leave CA altogether…And there I was last week, in the doorway of my Oakland bungalow, riding out the Napa 6.0!…