Author / loma prieta

by loma prieta

Stanford Co-op Playground

Lindsey T

I was 3 years old, in preschool at a family co-op on the Stanford Campus. At the time of the earthquake I was on the rickety, wooden deathtrap of a play structure that sagged when too many kids were on it at once and in retrospect shouldn’t have been able to withstand a strong wind, much less a 5.9 earthquake. (Unsurprisingly, in the ’80s everyone was less concerned with safety.) Like so many play structures, it was built to resemble a castle, and the vertical poles that held it up were carved into gentle points at the top – all the better for defending against an imaginary siege, perhaps.

When the shaking started I was on the top level of the castle, getting ready to go down the slide. I don’t remember being afraid or having any awareness that something major was happening, but I do have the most vivid visual memory of my pudgy baby hands grasping the poles on either side of the slide, and watching them sway in front of me.

In my mom’s retelling, she was so worried about finding me bewildered and traumatized by the event. After all, at 3 years old it’s a lot to make sense of. But by the time she made it from her office across campus to the co-op to pick me up, I was back on the slide, shrieking with glee. All in a day’s adventure at the castle, I guess.

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Home in San Leandro

Sheena L.

I was seven years old and home from school when the shaking started. I was watching Square One Television (a kids’ show about math!), my favorite show. I remember clinging to the corner of my couch, and as my favorite show went to static and the huge orange tree outside our window started swaying violently, I went from confused to dismayed. I remember staying very still and thinking, “is this ever going to end?”

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Les Misérables

Allen Sawyer

I was meeting my friend Pam on her dinner break; she was stage-managing Les Miz at the Curran Theatre. The show hadn’t opened yet, and they were rehearsing the barricade scene, which meant there was a large pile of “rubble” on the stage.

The adult cast and crew were released but Pam had to stay at the theatre until the two child actors could be picked up by their parents. While we waited, Pam and I went around the stage with flashlights calling out to each other–“This brick’s plastic- it’s part of the set, this brick’s real- it’s earthquake damage…“

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Downtown Santa Cruz

Fern Selzer

I was in my downtown office in Santa Cruz and my client was in the waiting room when the earthquake hit. I’ve been through a lot of earthquakes, but this time it was like being on a bucking horse. I had to hang on the doorjamb just to keep from falling down. My client was in another doorway in another room and we yelled back and forth to each other as the earthquake was going on. Absolutely everything in shelves or on the wall went flying through the air.

Then there were a lot of people running and yelling in the streets and someone who had been in the Acapulco restaurant a few blocks away said the ceiling fell in and that people were seriously injured on Pacific Avenue.

I didn’t know where my daughter was exactly, as she was carpooling home from high school. So I wanted to get to her ASAP. When I went outside to my car, the whole sky was full of what looked like smoke, but I found out later it was dust from the buildings that had collapsed. I got in my car and had to get across the San Lorenzo River to get to Capitola. The bridge had a big crack in it, probably about six inches wide all the way across the bridge and the cars were stopped. I felt frantic to get to my daughter so I just passed the stopped cars and drove over the crack. Fortunately my car made it without getting one of the tires stuck in the opening.

4 R UMAX Power Look 2000 V1.8 [3]

The streets were jammed, but I kept taking back roads and worked my way to the carpool pick up spot. I was a bit panicked when I found that my daughter wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but I drove home, nearby, and she had walked home. She was standing out in the street with the neighbors, who were all staying outside because of the aftershocks.

My daughter and I drove to a nearby park to use the pay phone. There were a number of young men playing basketball as if it was a regular day, so it was peaceful there.

I couldn’t get through by telephone, so about an hour later I came back to Santa Cruz to check on my mother and grandmother. By then I had heard on the radio which bridge was open. The air in Santa Cruz smelled like natural gas. When I came to my mother’s house, the door was wide open and they weren’t there, so I was afraid one of them was injured but I didn’t know where to look or what to do so I went back home. There was so much chaos, damage and injury around that it was really frightening not to know how your friends and family had been affected. It would have been much less scary with cell phones. But some of the landlines worked and later messages got through and we all found out that everyone in the family was okay.

That night we slept out in the back yard because of the aftershocks. We listened a lot to the local KSCO and KGO radio and heard about what was going on through the newscasts and talk radio.

There was no gas or electricity for a few days. All the schools and businesses were closed, so it was kind of a holiday atmosphere, though a gloomy one, like when JFK was shot, because everything stopped and people were sociable and not in a hurry. Of course, that was not the case for those who had any major damage or injury and for emergency workers.

When I think back now, I see that, during that whole experience, what was really important to me was getting in communication with people that I cared about.

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Candlestick Limo Service

Geoff Butterfield

I was in my early twenties when the Earthquake happened, making my living as a limo driver while I attended SFSU. I had a job that day to drive a Hollywood film executive and his grandson to see the World Series game at Candlestick. I dropped them at the ticket gate and told them I would pick them up at that same spot after the game.

20 minutes after I dropped them off, the earthquake hit. I was actually sitting in the back of the limo, watching the pre-game on the TV when it felt like I had been hit by another car. I jumped out of the limo, all fired up to confront whoever had just hit my car and was stunned: all the cars in the lot were bouncing up and down. It was like a low-rider convention!

The game was cancelled and people started to leave. It was still light out and I was actually surprised at how smoothly people seemed to get out of the stadium. Everyone was pretty cool about it, but— I couldn’t find my people! I later learned that the exec had panicked and grabbed the first ride he could get. However, I stayed there until 9:00 that night — I refused to leave until I knew they weren’t there.

I remember driving down 3rd Street that night and thinking it resembled a scene from “Escape from New York”. Lots of tough characters out in the street along with the occasional trash can fire, but all was well. Made it home to Noe Valley without incident and spent the rest of the evening at the Rat & Raven commiserating with the neighbors.

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Mervyns and BART Barf

Allan B.

Oh man, I was a 19 year old retail clerk in the Mervyn’s break room when the earthquake happened. It was just me and two other clerks, both African American women. (That old Mervyn’s no longer exists: it was in the El Portal Shopping Center in San Pablo.)

The quake hit and I was too embarrassed to actually hide under the table but when the tiles in the false ceiling started getting dislodged, I went under the table. I was also thinking how fucked it up was that I was 19 and if I died, I would die a retail store clerk and not even a clerk at a real store like the Gap.

mervyns 1989

Everyone in the store lined up to use the pay phones, but the lines were super busy and you could only get through by yelling really loudly into the phone, which of course meant you had to hear what everybody else’s conversations were like with their family.

I was living in Hercules then and going to the nearby community colleges (both DVC and Contra Costa) to get enough credits to transfer to Cal. If I didn’t have Cal to graduate from, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

One thing I really liked though was that BART was like a booze party for weeks afterwards since it was running all night. I’d go clubbing (which in the Bay Area means closing out the club at 2 AM like a boss) and hop on BART which was full of people from the clubs.

There would be guys on the BART vomiting from too much partying and they would STILL try to hit on someone, smelly barf breath and all. I was in shock when one of them actually managed to get a number. Halloween was great that year for East Bay people since we no longer needed to drive our asses back home. BART was our designated driver.

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So we hung out

L.I.
As my high school senior year journal reminds me,
“Went over [to my first love’s apartment] to watch the World Series and eat pizza, but he cooked me dinner instead 🙂 yum! And there was no game ‘cuz of the earthquake. So we hung out.”
 
(I seemed to do a lot of eating pizza and “hanging out” that year.)

This was in Baltimore. Being a teenager with no loved ones in the Bay Area, and no idea yet that I was destined to move here six years later, the earthquake seemed a little abstract to me.
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SOMArts Lot

Johanna Poethig

It was a hot day on the scaffolding at SOMArts on Brannan Street under the freeway. I was peacefully working on my own, adding final touches to my mural, Artifact, on one side of the building overlooking a big empty lot. This was before Toys R Us, Nordstrom Rack and Bed Bath and Beyond built their monstrous shopping palaces on what should have been a new sculpture park in my opinion.

I climbed down and got into my old yellow Volvo. All of a sudden the car began to rock and roll. I thought someone was pushing on it and turned my head quickly to see no one there!

somarts lot 1989

I shot out of the car and ran into the center of the abandoned lot. Jim, the current director, Conrad, and 2 other artists from SOMArts joined me as the ground rolled underneath us. Worried about Chris working in the basement of our apartment building on Oak Street in the Upper Haight, I drove home gingerly avoiding all the bricks and shards of glass that had fallen onto the streets.

That night the aftershocks freaked us out and we wondered if we should camp out on the Panhandle.

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Galería de la Raza

Eduardo Pineda

At Galería de la Raza at 24th Street and Bryant, I don’t remember the sound but clearly remember the floor of Studio 24 rolling like waves at the beach under my feet. The shelves that ran half the length of the store loaded with Mexican glassware and ceramics lifted and dipped with each wave. The drinking glasses, pitchers, candlestick holders, figurines, dishes, and cups, levitated and gently fell back on their respective shelves shifting slightly as they landed. Very little broke, because the earthquake seemingly rolled down Bryant Street. Had it arrived perpendicularly down 24th Street, I‘m sure the shelves would have tipped over and everything would have spilled creating a carpet of sharp glass and clay shards at our feet. I stood hanging on to one of the pillars, Umberto at another. In my nervousness I just babbled calmly about mundane things unrelated to the violent shaking.

When it stopped I called my parents in Chicago from the payphone on the corner to tell them I was okay and asked them to tell Susie I was safe when she called since I called first. This out-of-state call-in procedure was one of the few disaster preparations we had arranged. My mom told me the Bay Bridge was broken. Realizing I wasn’t going to make it home to Berkeley until the next day, I walked the four blocks to Ray’s house in Balmy Alley. Frank and Nora arrived seeking refuge too. I took a romantic photo of them in Ray’s doorway illuminated by car headlights as night arrived early in the Mission; the streetlights and houselights dark without electricity. The car radio told us the Cypress freeway collapsed in Oakland. We opened bottles of Gundlach-Bunschu wine from Sonoma, toasting our good fortune. We made a plan to wake up early if the power was restored to get to the ATM machine before the money ran out. I fell asleep on Ray’s couch.

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MUNI Misadventure

Karla Milosevich

I was working a temp job on the 12th floor of a downtown office on Spear Street, and had just gotten off work. I caught the 14 Mission bus to go to the café on Valencia Street where my sister worked, but accidentally boarded the express one, which was headed towards Daly City. I couldn’t get off before the freeway so I was standing in the crowded bus, holding the rail over my head, looking out the window and lamenting how much longer it was going to take me to get home.

We were stopped, waiting for a light, and then the bus kind of rolled and it sounded like metal on metal, I figured we were having an accident on the side I couldn’t see. It seemed like a car was scraping against the bus. But then I could also see a guy who had been asleep in his car– he woke up and was all startled. I was wondering about the connection because his car wasn’t touching the bus, then people started saying “Earthquake”, “That was an earthquake!”

We sat there for a few minutes, then got on the freeway anyway, business as usual. I got off as soon as I could, in the way outer Mission. Around then, all the buses stopped running, so there was no way to get back. This was before cell phones, so I started walking to the Mission. As it happened, this guy I know, Dave Cohen, happened to be driving by and gave me a ride home. That was pretty lucky! That’s when I started to hear about how much damage there was.