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Marin Hot Tub

Katherine Pitta

I was just starting my freshman year of high school in the fall of 1989. I was at home, alone, doing about the most stereotypical thing that someone from Marin County could be doing.

I was lounging in my parents’ hot tub.

I am no stranger to quakes at all, since Stinson Beach is right in the San Andreas Fault zone. That day was strange and surreal though.

So, anyway, I was there, lounging in the hot tub. I remember distinctly my rabbits in their hutches making warning “thump” sounds, and then the neighborhood dogs howling.

And then it hit. I always have joked as an adult that I felt like I was an olive being sloshed around in a martini glass, and that’s not far from the truth. I was jostled about, not too hard, but enough to scare me. I remember looking up at the house, and seeing the houses move up and down.

marin martini olives 1989

I remember jumping out after the rolling was over, and running inside. I was at home alone, my mom having driven over the Hill to Mill Valley to get groceries, my brother was at work, and my dad was also at work in SF.

I turned on the TV (the power didn’t get knocked out where we were) and just sitting down and watching all the TV coverage… seeing the World Series interrupted, the anchorwoman crying (I can’t remember who that was now) and all the other stuff. Of course I picked up the phone and started frantically trying to call people, anyone, to find out if my family was OK. All the lines were jammed.

It was a really weird and scary feeling for me, being all alone, only a fast busy signal for company, wondering what had happened to them.

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Menlo Park Safeway

Caitlin Crisan (Davis)

Walking through the aisles of Safeway as a hungry, slightly overweight 5 year old can be exciting, intimidating and overwhelming in any circumstance. My mother, begrudgingly dragging me along on her weekly grocery trip was shopping with a mission – keep squeeze-its and fruit-by-the-foot away from daughter’s mouth, get in and out as quickly as possible. Finally reaching the front of the seemingly never ending checkout line, the building began to rumble. A store filled with tall shelves of jars, boxes, cans and fruit is not an ideal place to be when the big one hits. Items fell in heaps around shoppers while carts rolled on their own through frozen food sections and into the deli counter. I, of course, immediately looked to the candy displays tempting me as bars fell to the floor. Surely no one would notice a missing pack of Big League Chew or a Caramello bar amid this chaos.

As the power shut off and the checkout computers died, shoppers abandoned their carts and ran outside to the open parking lot to safety. However, my mother, always the rational, time-manager, could not fathom leaving behind all the hard work she had done. Finally, she successfully made it through the grocery store with her chunky toddler and now she has to leave a full basket behind? The thought of going through this grocery charade again made her head spin. She wagered with the checker – can I pay in cash? How about Traveler’s Check? TWA Credit Card? Diner’s Club?

The true challenge came after being ushered out of the store. Her chic 1987 Mazda 626 with red cloth interior was in the now-unlit basement parking garage. With a slow-moving daughter in tow and the shopping bags she managed to talk her way into taking with her, navigating the garage was a seemingly impossible proposition. Before the true Silicon Valley boom, Menlo Park was a charming white-picket-fence neighborhood of warm, successful middle class families driving Volvo station wagons with kids facing the car behind them in what was always referred to as “the way, way back”. There were no tech bros busy checking Tinder or executives flying down El Camino in their Teslas. An equally frantic mother of two found herself in the same pickle as my mother and they concocted a plan to free their autos. I was placated for the moment with a push pop, while my mother’s new friend watched over the children and my mom rescued the cars from below with the help of a keychain flashlight.

Years later, my mother still bumps into her at that very same Safeway, now renovated with an organic nut bar and olive cart, and plenty of Teslas in the parking lot and tech bros on Tinder.

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Lake Merritt

Monisha Bajaj

On October 17, 1989 I was in the 8th grade and at a soccer game we were playing in one of the grassy areas around Lake Merritt. In the running and jumping of the game, I didn’t realize it was an earthquake until I saw this huge art deco apartment building across the street from where we were—the Bellevue-Staten building—swaying and then feeling the ground moving under my feet.

We moved to the center of the park area and watched as loose bricks from the apartment building started crashing down into the windshields of parked cars on the street below. We could hear the glass breaking loudly since this was before car alarms that would drown such sounds out. My friends and I just huddled close and waited it out.

Lake Merritt

The coaches had no way of communicating with our parents (no cell phones back then!) and it was after 10pm that night by the time we got back to our school given all the traffic. Many parents were waiting in the parking lot, nervously chatting and so relieved when we finally showed up.

As news broke the next day, one of my classmate’s cousins was one of the people crushed when the Bay Bridge broke and we heard of many other harsh stories from the quake. I was thankful that the inconvenience of being stranded by the Lake was the only hardship I faced that day.

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54 Felton

Gabe Wachob

On the evening of Oct 17, 1989, I was a 16 year old senior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. When the earthquake hit, I was on the 54 Felton on my way home after a late day at school (why I was going home at 5, I don’t remember). It was a normal day, except abnormally hot as we all know, except about 2 minutes after we crossed Mission (on Persia), while at a stop, someone started trying to tip the old bus over. Or so we thought. It was a strange experience – those old diesel buses were not exactly lightweight… When I looked up (during the shaking) I saw “standing waves” in the electricity lines above. I knew it was an earthquake.

The bus continued on the route – I don’t think we knew the magnitude of what had happened. It was clear, as we continued on, that it was a serious event, however. Driving through a part of town with 2 story stucco-d houses with garages on the first floor, we could see big cracks in the stucco around almost every garage.

54 Felton 1989

It was *really* hot when I got home, and my parents and my grandfather (visiting from Bakersfield) were at Candlestick for game 1 of the World Series – it was a strange day, earthquake or not.

No major damage (though I distinctly remember a shelf speaker had fallen neatly in a garbage can – of all the random memories I have). So here I was, an only child, experiencing the earthquake (and more importantly, the big aftershocks by myself) while my family was stuck at Candlestick. This was before cell phones – so I had no idea what was going on. You couldn’t even make an outbound call without waiting 30 seconds for a dial-tone. The power was out, people came out on the street (which, for my neighborhood, was extremely rare). But strangely I wasn’t scared. I was in a 6 hour adrenaline rush that night..

We were lucky – by the next morning, the power was on, no interruption in water or gas service, etc. I spent the next couple of days hanging out with friends surveying the damage (school had been cancelled for a few days). I remember going to the Marina and trying to get on the national news reports by walking back and forth behind the live reporters, because thats what teenagers would do, of course.

Everything was exciting – it was probably a great time in my life to experience this – as a teenager, with relatively few concerns, but old enough to realize the magnitude of what happened, and the appreciate that I had lived through something historic, and survived. To this day, I still feel an adrenaline rush every time a truck rolls by and shakes the street… and yet I still slack on the earthquake prep kit. DOH!

Postscript: As a side note, at the time of the quake, I was just getting my driver’s license, and had not gotten a chance to drive across the bay bridge. When the bay bridge was repaired and re-opened about a month after the quake, I ended up driving across the bay bridge for my very first time about 20 minutes after re-opening. I now always feel a special connection with that bridge… but glad they finally replaced it 😉

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UC Berkeley Computer Center

Bob Callaway

I was sitting at the computer desk in my office, working at a Macintosh IIcx.  (Hard to believe now, but the processor speed was only 16 MHz!).  The office was on the second floor of Evans Hall at UC Berkeley, in those days the primary location for campus computer center staff.  Evans Hall is a 10-story concrete monolith.

Mac IIcx 1989

Just after 5:00 pm, the building suddenly jolted sideways.  It was a single, very sharp jolt.  I remained in my chair, hyper-alert for what might follow.  I turned toward my other desk and eyed the safe space below it.  But there was no further shaking. The power remained on.  I thought to myself, “That’s the strongest tremor I’ve ever felt.”  But I resumed work on the task at hand.

A few minutes later, having reached a good stopping point, I got up and went out into the corridor to chat with colleagues about the quake.  Quite a few people were on deck.  Some had heard alarming reports such as “the Bay Bridge fell down.”

Already a couple of colleagues had retrieved a TV set from a programmer’s lair and were setting it up in a corner office.  Soon we were watching the news.

As the scale of the disaster emerged, I knew I couldn’t to go home that night.  I arranged to stay with friends who lived in an Albany high-rise.  I also tried calling a neighbor in San Francisco but couldn’t get through because the phone system was overloaded.

I exchanged email with my niece on the East Coast, letting her know I was OK and asking her to inform my sister and others in the family.  My niece, a techie from an early age, was accustomed to sending Unix email on the Arpanet in the 1980s, as was I.

That night, like so many people, my friends and I sat transfixed in front of the TV set as shocking footage was shown over and over.

The next day I went to work.  The news seemed even worse, with reports of many deaths.   I tried to contact various friends.  I tried again to reach my neighbor, but couldn’t.  I had no idea what had happened to my apartment.  That night I stayed with my friends in Albany again.

Two days after the quake, I drove home to San Francisco via the Richmond and Golden Gate bridges.  As I passed near the Marina, my heart sped up as I remembered the images of collapsed apartments there.  My anxiety was reinforced by a disaster I had experienced in a different apartment building about five years earlier — an arson fire that had made all the tenants homeless one winter morning.

Reaching my building on Pierce St, north of Alamo Square Park, I was hugely relieved to find that it had suffered only minor damage.  In my own apartment, there were small cracks in a couple of walls, and some things had fallen off shelves.  A couple of bookcases had shifted several inches, but hadn’t fallen.  The only lasting damage was a triangular dent in the oak floor where a ceramic teapot had dropped six feet.  The minimal effect was a testament to our location, on bedrock.

Soon I confirmed that none of my friends were harmed either.  It was a bit surreal, that feeling of escape.

The neighbor I’d been trying to reach, who had been at home when the quake hit, gave me her report.  In her usual emphatic manner (blonde Italian from New Jersey), she said the building had vibrated like crazy.  No doubt the effect was amplified by the hundreds of tchotchkes in her apartment.

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Mountain Lake Park

Mayu S.

I was a freshman in high school at George Washington High School. I had left my dad’s house on 14th and California St. to walk my dogs at Mountain Lake Park. I was walking towards park when it hit. I didn’t see any trees swaying or the road buckling. Kind of anti-climactic. I thought “no biggie” so I just kept walking towards the dog run when this lady comes running down the street yelling at me. I don’t remember her exact words but she was hysterical enough to convince me that I should head home pronto.

On the way home all the street lights on Park Presidio Blvd. were out. Uh oh, this might be worse than I thought. When I got home my dad was out on the street talking to our neighbors and handing out candles. When it hit he was tuning into the World Series and got knocked flat on his butt. I helped him pass out candles to our neighbors.

We lived right off of California street so there was always bus and traffic noise but not that night. No school the next day. I rode my Huffy out to the Marina to see the fires and collapsed buildings. Oh that thing about dogs being able to predict earthquakes? Total crap, my dogs didn’t predict it at all.

 

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Pussycat Theater

Rhonda Winter

In October of 1989 I lived behind a razor wire chain link fence in a minuscule and squalid studio apartment right next to the 24 freeway that was also just a block from the old, pink Pussycat movie house at 51st and Telegraph in Oakland. Random seedy men frequently stood around the back alley of the porno theater near my house, furiously masturbating. I had just broken up with alcoholic #1, and was horribly disillusioned with the overpriced art school experience at CCAC; was about to start studying photography at SFSU in January (where I would soon meet my most excellent friend Eliza).

Telegraph_Pussycat_1989

Had just finished my dreary shift working in a one-hour photo shop cubicle on Telegraph Avenue; had just gotten home, was exhausted, lying on my lumpy futon mattress staring at the peeling stucco paint on the dirty ceiling, and feeling utterly depressed.

When the ground started shaking I nonchalantly thought to myself, “Oh, it’s just another earthquake.” Having grown up in California my entire life, these natural events were somewhat common, and not such a big deal. But the shaking continued, and became much more intense; when I tried to get up to go outside, the ground felt like trying to walk on an unstable sea of buckling Jello.

Once outside in the night air, I looked across the rush hour congested tangle of freeways and saw in the distance a massive section of the Bay Bridge just limply hanging down toward the sea, like some kind of horribly flaccid and broken erector set.

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Marina Green

Karl Brecht

I was 4 years old during the 1989 quake. I remember watching the TV shut off suddenly, and while I shouted “Hey!”, the shaking started. I had never remembered the ground shaking before, I remember the fear I felt; I remember hearing the walls crack open and a siren wailing, and my mother screaming at me but I can’t remember what she said.

When the shaking stopped, my mom turned on the radio in our kitchen after she got us together. She found out that all residents of the Marina district were being evacuated to the Marina Green. I remember crying. My mom had an earthquake kit: she grabbed that along with my one-year-old sister and me, and pushed us out to the Marina Green.

I remember my neighborhood being torn up, and more sirens, lots more sirens. I remember waiting a long time, and my mother crying when my dad finally found us out there on the Green. I remember granola bars, and taking showers in trucks.

Eventually life became normal again, but you don’t forget; you can’t.

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Holly Avenue

Jennifer Romo

In 1989 I was not quite 12, and attending Parkside Junior High in San Bruno. On this particular day, my dad had picked me up after school and we were at my grandmother’s house on Holly Avenue, at the top of what felt like a big hill – especially when you were on your bike at the bottom.

When the earthquake hit, I was sitting on the couch watching TV. My dad was on the phone with my mom, and my grandmother and great grandmother were both in the house. Being a well-seasoned earthquake veteran, I was prepared to ride it out. My dad was shouting for me to get outside, and I almost certainly said “Take a chill pill, Dad – it’s just an earthquake.”

I sauntered out while he collected grandmothers, and I could not believe my eyes. My grandmother’s concrete patio was rolling like a wave – I had no idea concrete could move that way without cracking. That is easily the part that stands out to me the most – as it was the moment I realized this wasn’t like other quakes I had been through.

The phone lines had gone down, so my mom was freaking out that she couldn’t get a hold of us, while we watched the impact unfold on the news. I couldn’t believe that something I thought was “just another little earthquake” had caused so much death and destruction.

I still try to remember what the city looked like back when the Embarcadero was covered by an overpass, and super seedy at street level, and I just can’t quite do it.

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Highway 101

Jenifer Wofford

I wasn’t even in town when it happened, ironically enough. Perhaps that’s why I’m so interested in others’ stories.

I had been down in San Luis Obispo for a couple of days, visiting James, Dave and Eric at Cal Poly, and had left there to return north around 4 pm, driving solo–one of my favorite things to do. I remember the road feeling a little strange for a few seconds (tremors were in fact felt pretty far south), but 101’s got plenty of hills and curves, so I didn’t even think anything of it. It had been a weird, emotional stay in SLO, and I spent the drive alone trying to figure some things out: getting a little teary here and there in that adolescent-girl way before triumphantly deciding that everything was going to be OK, and that life was just amazing.

As I approached San Jose around 7 pm, I was surprised at how badly snarled traffic was at that hour. It was pretty dark at that point: I remember puzzling over the endless strings of red tail lights in haphazard patterns. I never listened to the radio in my ’85 VW Golf, so I didn’t even think to turn it on for news or traffic updates: I had way too many awesome cassette mix-tapes to listen to, after all.

As soon as I walked in the front door of my parents’ house in Walnut Creek, I was confronted with the enormity of what I’d just missed. My parents had been panicked since they had no idea where I was when the quake hit, and were relieved to find out that I was fine. I just remember feeling an intense sort of cognitive dissonance, realizing that my self-absorbed teenage crises, musings and revelations on the drive up had absolutely zero connection to the actual disaster that had transpired at the same exact time.