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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!…

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Green Apple Books

David Lawrence

I was at Green Apple Books on Clement. When the quake hit, I was upstairs browsing the stacks. The books *flew* off the shelves in every direction and I thought “Oh fuck, this is IT”. I bolted downstairs and ran out of the store.

green apple books earthquake

Drove back home (I lived in the Haight at the time) and then got on my bike and rode around the city. Power was out and it seemed like the best thing to do. The next day, riding my bike on the closed, empty Embarcadero freeway was one of the best rides and views of the city I’ve ever had.

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St. Mary’s College

Rita Nazareno

I was a freshman at St. Mary’s in Moraga. I just had finished with classes that afternoon, excited for the World Series. My friend Chinggay and I got to my house to start preparing for our neighbors and friends who were to come over. I just had turned the TV on when the rumble started. Chinggay and I ran to each other and ducked under the kitchen counter. I clearly remember Chinggay holding my hands, her eyes closed, blurting ‘Hail Mary full of grace…’ as the house rocked, the television buzzing, transmitting static.

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UC Santa Cruz

Don Gates

The earthquake was on my 20th birthday, and I was attending UC Santa Cruz at the time, a few miles from the epicenter. We were in one of the biggest classrooms on campus, watching “2001: A Space Odyssey,” when it struck. Ran outside to see massive redwoods swaying like palm trees. Later that night, a few hundred people sang me happy birthday, all of us having been steered onto a local field and away from the rattled apartments where we lived. Alas, there was not enough cake to go around.

don's birthday cake

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Santa Clara University

Theo Gonzalves

That was the Fall of my senior year at Santa Clara University. I was the director of a student-run center on campus, which had its offices in the basement of a dorm. The ‘quake’s epicenter was less than 30 miles south of us. I was probably working at the front desk around that that time. It was normally dark down there; the only lighting came from pendants hanging at the end of 3 foot cables, all of which swung violently from the ceiling. When the ‘quake shook for more than a few seconds, a handful of us down there knew something was up. There’s only one entrance to the center. As soon as the shaking stopped, I ran up the stairs. Four, two-story dorms surrounded a swimming pool where I saw a small wave about five feet high gush onto the walkway. You could tell which students weren’t from California: they were the ones screaming the loudest.

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Noe Valley Video

Stan Heller

I was in a video store when the quake started. I stepped outside to look around and I saw the power lines dancing like rubber bands, I saw the plate glass windows expanding in their frames. I saw the sign over my head twist and make a very uncomfortable sound. And I thought to myself- “Stan, you are the dumbest man in the Universe”. And I turned around and went back inside.

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Geodesic Dome

Nicolas Gold

I was trying to take a nap upstairs in my parents’ house. It was a geodesic dome, and my twin bed was tucked into a corner where an internal wall met the downward arc of the roof. Just as I was drifting off, the bed began to rock and then shake. My first thought was that a mild earthquake was a nice way to be rocked to sleep. But the shaking continued to intensify. I quickly got up and went out onto the landing.

I walked downstairs as my parents appeared at opposite ends of the living room that spanned the dome. Hundreds of antiques shook and swayed. Outside, my mother’s car pitched up and down as waves rippled through the ground beneath it. The two young redwood trees behind the car shook violently. Of course it seemed to take several minutes before it had passed.

When it subsided and was gone, I assumed that it was no worse anywhere else and was prepared to go on with my day. My parents insisted that it must have made the news and turned on the radio. Sure enough, we soon heard that the Bay Bridge had collapsed (leading everyone to picture the complete destruction of the suspension bridge) and damage was widespread. Television news quickly showed the fallen deck on the cantilever section of the bridge, and for years people would wonder at the driver who headed toward the enormous gap at full tilt. The next drama was the damage and fire in the Marina district. The longest-running drama was the collapse of the Nimitz structure and the work to rescue those that were trapped, some for days.

The morning after the collapse, I remember having breakfast at Cafe Barbara in Lafayette and listening to someone at the next table describe having his flight diverted to Las Vegas and driving a rental car through the night to get back to the Bay Area. His daughter as working in San Francisco and was essentially trapped there overnight. That’s all I really recall. It must have been my first semester at Diablo Valley College, so I was probably too preoccupied with my Art History class with Ann Piper to pay much attention to anything else.

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Precita Eyes

Niki Magtoto

I was taking an art class at Precita Eyes and Mom and I had just walked to the car down the block to pack up art I had just made, so I was skipping down the street like any 6 year old might. Monica, my little sister, was KO’d in a ratty old armchair at my grandparents’ antique store (read: junk shop), Flying Machine Antiques on Church Street.  (At 2, Mony was a big snorer then- don’t tell her I said that. Though she might volunteer that info. Either way, she could sleep through anything, that’s how hard of a sleeper she was.)

As we headed back to the studio, Mom noticed the buildings wobbling a little bit, but it didn’t dawn on her what was happening because she was more concerned with everyone running out of Precita Eyes into the park so she figured some crack head (because it was a super cracky park then) or crazy homeless person had come in and created a scene because neither she nor really felt the ground moving. We walked over to the open field and sat there a while with all the other Precita kids and artists and random park people.

Though Mony was asleep, and the chair she was using as a bed was in the very center of the store (right under a support beam, probably the safest spot in the store), she apparently woke up and said to no one in particular, “Whoa, that was a big one!”

The rest of the afternoon and into the evening I remember being fascinated by the idea that if a power line was down we were supposed to jump on a car, and worrying about how Dad would get home from the UPS building.  For the next 6 years I knew I’d be judged by the kind of granola bar in my earthquake kit. Them green Natures Valley bars were highly coveted even tho they are dry as shit.