Author / loma prieta

by loma prieta

Home Alone

Dorothy Santos

It was a normal day at school and friends greeted me happy birthday. My friend Wendy, her cousin Cherry, and I were waiting patiently for my Dad to pick us up and take us back to our house. He dropped us off and left quickly to pick up my Mom from work. At the time, she worked in downtown San Francisco. Dad mentioned coming home right away in the hopes of setting our minds at ease that we would be okay. Naturally, he instructed us to not cook anything for fear of burning down the house and not to open the door to strangers.

Although it was my birthday, we didn’t have anything special planned for the evening. Wendy’s parents were going to pick her and Cherry up later on in the evening. They were more than happy to stay for a casual birthday dinner with me, my parents, and grandparents. It was a no frills kind of night and I didn’t particularly like the idea of going out for dinner since I loved my grandpa’s pancit and a birthday cake from one of my favorite bakeries in the Mission, Dianda’s.

Wendy, Cherry, and I waited patiently. Since the San Francisco Giants were playing in the World Series, we decided to watch the game. It started to rumble. I could see the house and whatever was in view looked as it were being plucked like a flower from the ground. Before the Big One, I never felt an earthquake of that magnitude. I felt small ones. Those little quakes made me think of the Jolly Green Giant moving around softly in his sleep. It would cause a minor shake, but nothing too terrifying or worrisome. This particular night was different. The land was angry and moved the same way my mother shook me when she was furious with my sharp tongue. It lasted relatively long and the mahogany chair was far too heavy to move away from the desk. We panicked. Then it stopped. Our eyes were big and we looked at each other. Cherry mentioned feeling similar earthquakes in the Philippines. It was good to know she wasn’t too terribly shaken (no pun intended).

But we lost power. We couldn’t communicate with anyone and had to wait patiently. We sat on the stairs looking outside to keep on the lookout for any of our family members. An hour of waiting felt incredibly long and the anxiety of wondering where our parents were after the earthquake drove us to the darker and morbid parts of our imaginations. We cried. Finally, my grandfather came home. He wasn’t the most communicative man. His silence and settling in after a long day of cleaning after students at Cogswell College was comforting somehow. My parents got home after my grandpa’s arrival. Wendy’s parents came shortly after them. They left straight away, understandably.

My grandpa was chopping and cooking. Despite the gas range working, we didn’t have electricity. In hindsight, my grandfather probably shouldn’t have cooked. Then again, nothing ever stopped him from doing what he wanted to do. It was still daylight so he cooked with a bit more urgency than usual. By the evening, we gathered up all the candles my mom and grandmother collected that were reserved for burning on Sundays in religious observance. It was a candlelight birthday dinner listening to the small magenta colored transistor radio my father bought me from Radio Shack. It came in particularly handy that evening.

Home Alone

Home Alone

My 12th birthday was one of the most memorable ones. But 2 years later, the Oakland fires happened during my 14th birthday party. I started to have a complex of starting natural disasters. So much of the movie Amelie resonated with me when I thought back to my childhood. But I grew up and realized there were no correlations, just coincidences. I remember wishing for no school the following day. No such luck.

Specific place: Bayview District (apparently, my parent’s place has the strongest, stable rock in San Francisco)

Thoughts, emotions, or associations: Watching the news and seeing the destruction across the city. Houses in the Marina District were uprooted from their foundation. The worst sight of all the images mediated through the TV screen – the split Bay Bridge. The lone car that plunged into the split made made it difficult for me to go over the Bay Bridge without panicking, for years.

by loma prieta

Helpless in Seattle

Wei Ming Dariotis

I was in the wrong city when it happened, sitting in a classroom in Seattle at the University of Washington, listening to a lecture on 18th century British literature. At some point, the professor casually mentioned that there was an earthquake in San Francisco, and I started to panic, but his manner had been so casual that I put it out of my mind, thinking it must have been a small one—the kind that so often unnerve people living far away, but leave native San Franciscans like me unfazed.

It wasn’t until later, when I got back to my dorm and started watching the news, that I realized the extent and intensity of it. When I started to understand the extent of this tragedy, I felt like someone who has failed to be present at a major life-changing event—like failing to be with one’s dying parent, or at the birth of one’s child. How could I call myself a San Franciscan if I wasn’t there at the hour of her deepest need?

As I saw the news reports of the Bay Bridge collapse and the fires in the Marina District, I imagined what it would be like to be there, helping people feel safe, helping to put out fires or even rescue someone.

Looking back on it, I wonder why I pictured myself as a savior rather than fearing being a victim. I was 19 years old and I didn’t know anything about fire safety or CPR. Then, as now, I didn’t really have a lot of upper body strength, so I don’t know how I thought I could have actually saved anyone from a collapsed building or bridge.

I just know that the feeling that I had not been where I should have been haunted me for years. I felt like I had betrayed my first love; I had missed her major milestone. Going forward, what deep change could I go through with San Francisco to cement our relationship? How could we continue to grow older together in light of my absence at this critical juncture?

by loma prieta

Downtown Berkeley BART

Gail M.

I was working for the University of California in an office in downtown Berkeley on Milvia when the earthquake hit. However, I had already left work and was waiting for the BART train in the downtown station on Shattuck. I sighed, “The BART train is late AGAIN!”

After a bit, we heard an announcement that the Bay Area was hit by an earthquake and all trains were stopped. Those of us waiting underground had no idea there was an earthquake, proving the BART system is very safe!

shattuck BART 1989

When we hurried upstairs there was chaos on the streets. No stop lights were working and cars were maneuvering around each other as if they were props in a disaster film. I learned later that the building I had just exited had visibly swayed back and forth to the terror of those left inside, but no one was hurt.

I was able to contact my daughter in Oakland and one of her roommates drove me home to Walnut Creek through the Caldecott Tunnel, proceeding with great trepidation in case there was an aftershock.

1989 was an era with no ubiquitous cell phones so I worried most of the night about my husband, who I knew was in a carpool crossing the Bay Bridge. He has his own story to tell, but the end of mine is that he returned home safe and sound.

by loma prieta

Lying to Los Gatos PD

Kirsten Casey

I was raised in California, so I am no stranger to earthquakes. The week of eighth grade graduation, we had a 5.8 earthquake. During my braces removal, I ran out of the orthodontist’s second floor office. Standing on the balcony, watching the Salinas Valley sway, with a full dental dam in my mouth, I was not cool. But the earthquake didn’t scare me.

When I was twenty-two, beginning to teach at a school just behind Santa Clara University, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area. Sitting at my desk, grading papers, I heard it first. That unmistakable earthquake rumble. A handyman working in my room turned to me. It kept going. He said, “We need to get out.” We ran onto the parking lot at the center of campus. The daycare kids poured out too, screaming. The earth was a rolling, liquid force. When it ended, I was unaware how devastating that rolling had been. This was before cell phones. I called my fiancé, Mark, from school, and he told me that he was talking to a Palo Alto client who asked, “Can you feel this? We are having an earthquake.” Then the line went dead, and then he felt it.

We spent the afternoon trying to track down Mark’s sister, Julie, who moved in as my roommate, that day. She left a note on the kitchen table in our Los Gatos apartment saying she was heading to San Francisco and she would see me later on. Did I mention we didn’t have cell phones? She befriended a couple in a hotel lobby who actually knew her grandparents in Oregon, but all of the phone lines were dead.

Mark’s grandmother lived a block from the school, so we met there. During dinner, Mark’s uncle insisted that Julie’s photo was the only one swinging in the hallway photo gallery (this meant she was dead.) Julie was finally able to reach us by payphone (does the next generation know what this is?). Although relieved, we slept restlessly, awakened by several aftershocks. This earthquake scared me.

Road closures prevented me from returning to our apartment until the next morning, since we lived in Los Gatos, the epicenter. Entering the apartment was eerie. Every frame was at a severe angle to the left, and every cabinet was open. Pushed from the wall, the refrigerator doors were open, with contents spilled on the linoleum. Our new TV was face down across the room, and worst of all, the toilet was full of potpourri.

When Julie arrived home that morning, we cleaned, picked up glass, straightened frames, and ran out of the door anytime we felt a slight shift. In the afternoon, we walked out to assess the damage in town, and were stopped by a police officer asking if we were residents. I am not proud of what I did. (Call it earthquake hysteria.)

I am a rule follower, not a rebel. Yet, I lied to a cop. I made up an address in a restricted area of town, and he was really, really pissed. I don’t know what possessed me to do this. My future sister in law looked at me with shock, horror, and a little admiration. Before the Internet, and the constant stream of information, before everything could be answered by looking at a screen, we had to go out into the world and lie to cops. I lied because I loved that town, and I wanted to see what needed fixing. I lied because of morbid curiosity. I lied because this was the first time I understood that some things are beyond our control, especially when they have to do with fault lines.
los gatos 1989

by loma prieta

Cupertino Flag Football

Mark Isero

When you’re a suburban high school sophomore, being a referee at a middle school flag football game is a good way to make some extra money. So there I was, on the field at Cupertino Junior High School, officiating away, trying to be authoritative, whistling plays dead, looking for penalties I didn’t know much about, when the shaking began.

flag football 1989

It was strong, of course, but not particularly scary, given the expansive field around me. I crouched down and turned around. The windows to homes across Homestead Road began to shake, and memory says they broke, but that’s probably false. The middle school football players stopped in the middle of the play, and after less than a minute of shock and confusion, the coaches decided to call the game.

For me, that meant getting home. Maybe the first step, I thought, was to call my parents from the pay phone near Mrs. Schaefer’s old typing classroom — just to say I was safe, and would it be possible to pick me up? But the lines weren’t working, and for some reason, I wasn’t particularly worried. So I walked the two miles home, noticing that few cars were on the road and that everything was a bit more eerie than normal.

by loma prieta

Babysitting for KPIX

Patricia Wakida

Its 1989 and I’ve landed a job with an Asian American newscaster, Wendy Tokuda, and a Jewish American television producer, Richard Hall, who is Wendy’s husband. As their babysitter. They have two splendid hapa daughters— Maggie, a gleeful five year old, and Mikka, an eight year old bookworm who splits her after-school extracurricular time between piano lessons and Hebrew school, and tonight she is dedicated to her studies of the Aleph-Bet. It is also a night that has been dubbed the “Battle of the Bay,” an epic World Series showdown between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants, and reports off the streets of the obscene levels of public swaggering and chest puffing in anticipation of Game 3 are off the charts.

I arrive at the family’s home in the late afternoon to take Mikka to Hebrew school and then begin preparing dinner with Maggie within my sights, at the kitchen table. I have been warned that their Mom won’t be home until late tonight due to the game since, yes readers, she’s one of the live reporters broadcasting from Candlestick, and boy it’s gonna be a doozy.

Despite the fact that both parents work in television, the two girls are curiously uninterested in TV, so it’s a rare night that I switch on the portable kitchen set that night, its tiny screen no larger than a slice of bread, and tune into KPIX to catch glimpses of the game. There she is, wearing giant earphones over her coiffed hairdo, clutching a microphone and greeting audiences when…

All of a sudden, the kitchen begins to sway ominously. On screen, Wendy’s entire body language turns to steel and with a grimace, she says what we are all thinking… “That was an earthquake.”

I turn to look at Maggie, who is seated at the kitchen table clutching a crayon. She cocks her head sideways as if she is listening to the sounds of the earth grinding, then turns and looks askance at me. The brass chandelier above the table rocks from side to side as I sweep her into my arms and carry her into the doorway, mindfully turning off the gas burners as I pass. Its just my luck that there is another adult was in the house— the girls’ dad is just downstairs in his home office, and now he is bounding up the stairway to assure his bewildered kid and I that we were all ok. I am grateful that he volunteers to venture out onto the streets to pick up his daughter Mikka, who assured us later that aside from suffering the effects of a room full of frightened children, she was perfectly fine. Even from across the room, I can register Wendy’s terror on the TV screen in the last seconds before Candlestick lost power and the station went black—a terror that was almost audible in my mind, so clearly did it cry out: “Where are my children?”

I don’t know why exactly but later that night, I decide that I must spend the night in my dorm room at Mills College, roughly nine miles away. After calling my mom minutes after the quake struck (and am lucky to get through since ten minutes later all lines are completely jammed with panicked calls), I borrow a car from the family and drive towards school. The streets are both eerily quiet and electric with danger. I turn off Grand Avenue onto the 580 freeway, climbing nervously up the onramp towards a stream of cars that in my imagination are fleeing the ruins of the city. In slow increments, rolling up above the dashboard is the fullest October moon I had ever seen, rising into the darkness, pale as ice, ruling the night.

For more 1989 tv amazement, check this out!

by loma prieta

Acorn Signs

Nobe Hendricsen

The strongest earthquake in area since 1906 and here we were. What a scare! It was 5:00 pm but we were still working at Acorn Signs, my shop on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto.

My husband Howard had called to say he was getting a massage and would swing by my shop after his massage so we could go to dinner. During his massage, he thought a train was going by but once he realized what it was, it was every man for himself! He jumped up and rushed to the doorway blocking any escape for the poor masseuse!

In the meantime, all power was off at Acorn and I tried to get info on the car radio but couldn’t get any news. Son Bill in Phoenix called to see if we were OK  and relayed what he was watching on TV regarding the damage, including the collapse of the span on the top deck of the Bay Bridge.

We had minimal problems in our home. Strange that the shaking had knocked spice bottles to the counter, but had somehow opened the cupboards, dumped the bottles and then closed again. Friend Robin’s parents’ condo in Los Gatos was in shambles. Large pieces of furniture went flying. Her mother, who had taken the day off and was in bed due to illness, had the scare of her life when their large armoire came crashing down at the foot of her bed. The kitchen floor was covered with all the broken china and glassware that flew out of the cupboards.

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Swaying Signal

Lee Wofford

I was traveling back from Napa and stopped at a hanging traffic signal.  I watched the signal swaying and then my car just jumped sideways to the median island.  I turned the radio on– the announcer was saying, “We are experiencing an earthquake”.  I managed to get the car back in the lane and headed home.  When I got there, Al and Camille were outside in the front yard.

by loma prieta

220 Sansome to the Ferry Building

Michael Nolan

Veronica’s voice returned on the phone.  She and colleague Zula were now under a desk at Port offices in the Ferry Building.  I was on the 14th floor of 220 Sansome, corner of Pine, when Loma Prieta struck. We had been discussing the San Francisco Sailing Center project proposed for Piers 24-26 on the waterfront.

I felt stable again after the dizzying sway of the building where I sat, grateful I faithfully held onto the phone during the earthquake.

I followed other building tenants as we descended the 14 floors to the street below.  I walked onto the sunny and relatively calm streets of the financial district, headed to 814 Mission, the old Call building where I used to work at the SF State Downtown Center.  They had phone service and I reached my children in the East Bay who were deeply concerned about my safety.  And I about theirs.

by loma prieta

Genius of Love

Cheryl Dumesnil

I was driving my beat-up Mercury Lynx from my job at Muller Construction Supply to Bellarmine College Preparatory, the high school where my brother went to school and where my boyfriend was the set designer for the theater. Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” was playing on the radio when my car started chugging. “Damn it, what’s wrong with my car now?” I thought. “Flat tire?” Then the radio cut out. “Something’s really wrong with my car,” I thought. Then I saw people running out of the bodega on the corner. “Something’s really wrong with my car,” I thought. “So bad people are running out to look at it?” Then I noticed the stoplight in front me, bouncing on its pole. “Earthquake,” I thought, relieved that I wasn’t staring another huge car repair bill in the face.

genius of love car 1989

I’d lived in California all my life. As far as I was concerned, “The Big One” was an earthquake myth—a thing we talked about that probably wouldn’t ever happen. I came to understand the gravity of the ’89 earthquake in slow stages.

When I arrived at the high school, all the theater geeks—including my brother and boyfriend—were standing outside. The building had been evacuated. Someone said the Bay Bridge had collapsed, and one of the boys started crying—his father commuted on the Bay Bridge.

We had a limited ability to make phone calls, but somehow I convinced someone to let me in the cinderblock theater so I could call my mom. I told her, “I think I’ll just go out to dinner and drive home later, when there’s less traffic.” “You will NOT,” she said. “You will come home right now.” Had I experienced the earthquake in a building instead of in a car—where I was insulated from the noise, where the tires absorbed much of the shock—I might have understood the tone in Mom’s voice. Instead, I was pissed that I couldn’t go out to dinner with my boyfriend. I begrudgingly packed my brother in my car and headed home. It took two and a half hours to drive fifteen miles.

Later that night, after watching images of earthquake damage on the television, I called my boyfriend, also a long-time Californian. We talked about how weird it all was, how our understandings about earthquakes had changed, how we used to think earthquakes were cool, but how suddenly even a little aftershock seemed scary. “Here comes another one,” he said. It took a couple seconds for the trembling to travel the 15 miles between us. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I felt that, too.”

That change has been permanent. Even twenty-five years later, when I feel an earthquake start rumbling, instead of thinking, as I had throughout my childhood, “Oh cool! An earthquake!” I wonder, “How long will this last? How bad is it going to get?”