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by loma prieta

Escaping Phelan

Mark Hanzlik

I was working on the 5th floor of the Phelan Building on Market Street in San Francisco when the earthquake hit. I had heard the original Phelan Building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and this newer flatiron had been quickly constructed immediately after the quake. So, in 1989, it seemed to be an eminently old structure to be experiencing this latest tremor.

The passage of time seemed like an eternity between the shock of the building’s heaving and shaking to my eventual arrival at home in the Outer Mission several hours later.

Shortly after the initial quake, my co-workers and I were separated as we departed the ancient building and stumbled down the closest stairway in random panic. The building had made so much crunching noise and movement during the quake, I thought for sure we wouldn’t make it out. Market Street was oddly quiet as clouds of dust and light debris filled the air. Some people were yelling, others talking earnestly about what to do next but mostly we were all looking for a path out of the downtown area where larger buildings falling seemed threatening.

Alone in my journey, I headed directly south of Market Street walking toward my destination. After what seemed like a long time, another man about my age offered me a ride on the back of his scooter. From the rear of his bike I saw more evidence of the earthquake’s destruction. My fears about what may have happened to my family and our home were the only thing on my mind. The ride carried me nearly to Noe Valley, closer to home.

I walked toward the Glen Park Bart Station, a familiar commute stop for me. It was nearly dark now and all I had to do was cross 280 on the walkway and I’d be in my neighborhood. My desire to see my family overwhelmed me as I walked down Theresa Street. There sitting outside in near darkness on the doorstep of our home was my wife and 1-year-old daughter waiting eagerly for me. After the power went out, they had moved outside to stay safe and watch for me. Despite the 6-mile journey home, the next moments were what I remember most about that day, being with my young family at home safely.

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Pants Down in the Western Addition

Ann Santos

My family and I were living in an old Victorian in the Western Addition at the time. I don’t remember being scared during the quake. I do remember standing in the doorway in between the kitchen and the living room being amazed by the swaying chandelier in the living room and the plaster coming off the wall.

When the shaking stopped, we went out to the street and saw a neighbor whose pants were halfway down his legs. He later said he was in the bathroom when it happened and got so scared that he went running out of his apartment without pulling his pants all the way back up. Ha!

677-06209600

I was a 16-year-old kid and thought the whole thing was so exciting. Felt no fear whatsoever. But ever since then, every time I feel a tremor, my heart wants to jump out of my chest. Talk about PTSD.

So many of us were in a state of shock and also very worried, but I had never seen or experienced that sense of community in the Bay Area, before nor after — there was so much openness, kindness and generosity. I always tell people I am so grateful to get to live in such a beautiful place, but I must admit that sometimes I forget how amazing the people are, too (especially with the current invisible class war).

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28th and California

Robert Lewis

I was a tender twenty-three, recently married to a woman eight years my senior, a woman from Youngstown, OH. We’d met and married in San Diego. I’d always wanted to live in San Francisco since I’d first visited back when I was thirteen. So, on my urging, we decided to make the move, selling my 1965 Mustang for moving money. I’d come up a few days before her to meet the moving van. The apartment was out on the southeast corner of 28th and California, in the Outer Richmond. It was a studio on the street level, however when you came in through the door you would take three steps down into the room, so it was really a basement-style apartment.

My wife arrived exactly twenty-four hours before the quake. We were unpacking when it hit. Now, I’ve lived in California my entire life and have been in some big quakes, but this one was crazy big. The world started to shake, the ground beneath coming alive in this rolling wave motion. Having never been in an earthquake before, my poor wife completely freaked, running around like a chicken without a head. I grabbed her and pulled her to the front door where we stood in the doorway together while the quake seemed to go on and on.

I will never forget how eerily quiet it was when it was over. A huge vacuum of silence. We saw smoke rising from the direction of the Marina. There was no power, and so we walked over to my sister and brother-in-law’s house, over on 31st and Anza. We spent the rest of that night eating a great salad my sister threw together and getting drunk by candle light, her husband wearing these funny glasses that had pen lights over each ear.

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You Can’t Do That On Television

Mitch Kocen

I was seven years old and living in Rohnert Park (about 90 minutes north of San Francisco). I was watching You Can’t Do That On Television in the living room while my dad was watching the World Series in the kitchen. The cable cut out a moment before the shaking started.

YCDTOTV 1989

Once I felt the tremors I quickly ducked under the table, just as I was taught in countless earthquake drills at school. My dad sprinted through the living room and ordered me to get out from under
the table (it was glass, a factor that hadn’t been considered in my haste to follow instructions). I stood in the doorway until the earthquake stopped, and then we both went outside.

I remember a few aftershocks, and being very frightened that more would happen. It took some time for my father to coax me out of my panic, and we listened on his battery-operated radio to hear the news of what happened around the bay. Nothing in our home was damaged, and my parents shielded me from many of the images of the destruction. It wasn’t until years later that I saw any of the photos of the collapsed bridge or the smashed freeway.

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Irish Pub

Alysoun Quinby

My family has deep Bay Area roots – three of my four grandparents were Bay Area natives, and I’ve never lived away for more than a year since moving here when I was 12. I spent my teenhood wishing I lived in SF or Berkeley, instead of in the suburban east bay (and I remember being in my backyard, watching my fat sleeping cat suddenly go from supine to bolt upright, freeze for a second and tear ass under the house moments before the Morgan Hill quake hit in 1984).

But when Loma Prieta happened, I was 18, a freshman in college in upstate New York, and I was in Manhattan visiting my Aunt Priscilla for the weekend. After a dinner out, we were on our way back to her place and stopped into a little Irish Pub in her neighborhood. The place was empty but for the bartender, slowly wiping down the dark mahogany bar with a white towel. He was tall but hunched over, silver-haired with heavy silver brows, and when he spoke I saw that he had a few missing teeth. In an Irish accent, he mumbled “No game tonight. Big earthquake.” He jerked his head towards the TV hanging behind him, and continued his thorough wipe down of the bar. I looked up at the TV and there was the Bay Bridge with a hole in it. I remember a slow motion feeling, and the weird contrast of the sleepy mundane bar scene with the bright, violent images on the TV – it felt like a David Lynch scene. We watched for a few minutes, long enough to see all the worst damage the media was looping through: the bridge, the Marina fires, the Cypress structure – a few times over, then made our way back to Priscilla’s.

My brother Mike was living in SF. He managed to call my mom before all the phone lines were completely flooded and shut down, so we knew that he was ok. It was so disorienting to feel that it was this massive emergency but that there was nothing to do but watch and wait, and eventually, just go to sleep as if it was any other night.

I remember waking up the next morning, convinced I had dreamed the whole horrible thing.

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Newton Street

Shoshi R

I was 4 and in the back seat of my mom’s silver 82 Corolla with the window rolled down. It was parked in front of our house on Newton St, near Mission and Geneva. My mom was standing in the street next to me talking with our 94-year-old neighbor Dolores.

Suddenly the car started lurching back and forth, and a brick chimney crumbled off a roof across the street down the block. My mom grabbed me out the window and put her arm around Dolores to steady her. We looked at our house and could see our golden retriever ‘Boogie’ climb under a desk next to a floor length window on the second floor. What a smartie pants! Suddenly everything stopped, and everything was quiet except for a chorus of car alarms.

We went into our house and all of my porcelain dolls had fallen and broken their faces. All of the framed pictures decorating the walls had fallen and cracked.

I remember sitting by the radio with my mom listening to reports of the destruction.My father, who owned a pet-supply store in the Sunset, had been at work and spent long hours cleaning up broken bags of dog food and bird seed.

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Holding Hands in Downtown Oakland

Ann E.

In 1989, I was living near Solano Ave in Berkeley and working at a corporate job on the 7th floor of an Oakland high rise, across from Lake Merritt. I typically drove to work and parked in a small lot on 19th near Harrison.

Earlier that day I’d had lunch with a sales rep and we joked about the “earthquake weather” we were having and the fact we hadn’t felt a quake in quite a while. Little did we know how prophetic that conversation would be.

I left work promptly at 5 and as I was heading to my car, I was admiring a very stylishly dressed woman who was walking a few paces ahead of me. Suddenly she staggered and grabbed onto a parking meter. How strange, I thought… and then a split second later the shock wave hit me too. Next I noticed the huge ground floor windows of the building next to me were crazily bowing in and out, in and out. The next thing I knew, I found myself in a group of about 10 total strangers huddled in the middle of the busy street holding hands. Apparently we had all instinctively decided that running into moving traffic was the safer option compared to exploding plate glass.

Once the ground movement subsided, our little group realized with embarrassment that we were IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET HOLDING HANDS WITH TOTAL STRANGERS!! It was like none of us were aware of how we got there.

In a shaky adrenalin daze I made it to my car. The arm at the parking lot exit was stuck and the car in front of me decided to dramatically break right through it. On the way home I took surface streets rather than my usual route on the freeway. Along San Pablo Ave, entire brick facades of buildings were littering the street and good Samaritans were directing traffic in all the intersections.

I later realized, had I left work 5 minutes earlier, I likely would have been pancaked on the lower deck of the freeway collapse.

As it turned out, the only “damage” I found when I got home was a couple of shampoo bottles had fallen into the bathtub.

Still to this day, I have a mini panic attack if I have to be stopped in traffic under an overpass.

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Dumbarton Bridge

Michael Tebow

I was young during the Loma Prieta Quake. Turned 7 that year. My family lived in Newark, in the East Bay towards the south end of the bay. There was 6 of us total, mom and dad, my older sister, older brother, me and then my younger sister. All us siblings were two years apart, so you can imagine the crap my mother had to deal with. My mother grew up in Palo Alto, so most of our time was spent there, including doctors and dentists appointments. That day was a Tuesday; we were all headed back to Newark from the dentist. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, so a day spent with all of us was very stressful.

We were on 101 almost to the exit to get into 84 and make our way across the Dumbarton Bridge and head back to Newark. My mom was upset about the noise we were making and then felt her car shake. She cursed and pulled over and at the same time noticing a motorcyclist and other motorists pulling over as well. I think she all at once realized what was happening. As a California/Bay Area native she had felt earthquakes before, and having seen no damage in our immediate area, she pulled back onto the freeway and we continued home.

Not long after we got over the bridge did my mother realize how large and potentially deadly this earthquake had been for her four children. The KGO transmission towers that were a symbol to us kids as “we’re almost home” had been heavily damaged. My mother’s first thought was that she just took her four young kids over a bridge that might had been damaged as well. She later realized that the bridge was closed to traffic soon after we made it across. Mostly because of the severe damage to the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge.

We made it home without a scratch and realized the full destructive power of the earthquake. Our house was fine except for some cracked sheetrock and a few pictures that had fallen. Watching the news, we knew that we were extremely lucky.

KGO towers 1989

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Highway 17

Jamie Batt

I was on the bus heading home after a day of school at Los Gatos High…we were about halfway up Hwy 17 when I noticed that something was amiss. I gazed out the bus window with a growing sense of confusion: the trees on the hillside to the right of the bus were swaying wildly- I couldn’t remember any wind that day, I looked out the left window and the confusion turned to awe and fright very quickly.

The cars on the other side of the road were rolling, and the center divide was cracking before my eyes. This is when I realized that the motion of the bus was not at all normal. The other kids on the bus were exclaiming and moving chaotically from one window to the next trying to figure out what was going on…the bus driver had stopped the bus but it was still moving, she kept telling us to stay calm and that everything would be OK.

Once the rolling stopped- the bus driver decided that she had to get us all to our bus stops and safely home…so up we went. The hardest area to traverse was on Summit Road where a giant fissure had opened up- but that bus driver was able to maneuver us safely around it and to the last stop.

When I made it home, everything in the house was on the floor: the wooden legs of my bed had scratched circles into the wood floor from the motion of the quake. I will never forget how out of control everything felt- or how small and insignificant I felt…nature at its scariest.

Downtown Santa Cruz was never the same after the quake. Some of my favorite old buildings were now blocks of rubble behind chain link fences…the buildings that eventually went up to take their place have no soul- no sense of history and time…I walk down the Pacific Garden Mall now, I don’t think it is even called that any more, and see everything that is missing…shadows of the past, and I feel an overwhelming sense of not right-ness.

I don’t visit Santa Cruz much any more. It just isn’t the same.

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Walking Home from SF State

Jeffrey Linn

When the quake hit, I was studying in the library at SFSU. I felt the first slight shaking, and wondered if it was an earthquake, but as it got stronger, I knew that it was. The lesson of many years of California elementary school earthquake drills kicked in, and I dove under the heavy library table. Seconds later, shelves were jumping up and down and books were falling down all around me. I was horrified as the thought came to mind—“I’m in the old part of the library!” Fortunately, the structure held, and when the shaking stopped, I looked out from under the table. The piles of fallen books had released decades of accumulated dust, and a cloud was slowly rising to the ceiling. I’d never realized that old books were so grimy.

Afterwards, I had to make my way back home to the Mission. Because of the power outages, all electrified transportation was out of service—no Muni, no trolleys. So I started walking home. By the time I made it to the Inner Sunset, it was getting dark, and the bars were starting to fill up. I peeked through the window of the Little Shamrock on Lincoln & 9th, and saw brief images of the fire in the Marina and the collapsed deck of the Bay Bridge. Then the power went out, and I kept walking.

By the time I made it to the Castro, it was dark and the bars were packed. Everyone knew it was a huge event, and the folks of the Castro are never ones to pass up an opportunity to throw a party. There was a sense of both revelry and generosity–the Walgreens had closed, but the manager and employees were standing in front of the store, handing out free batteries and flashlights to whoever wanted them. It was festive and joyous. The rest of my walk was quiet and uneventful. When I got back to my apartment on Oakwood Street, it was dark—the power was still out, but was restored within an hour.