Month: October 2009

Part one of my account of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake can be found here

The day after the earthquake, I got back to my flat to find my roommate Tracy, her boyfriend, and a couple friends starting the major task of sweeping up. There were giant X cracks on every wall that ran east to west. Everything fell off walls that ran north to south.

I asked “where’s Angela?” and the room went silent. It turned out that Angela, our third roommate, was in the hospital. At this point, we heard it was a car accident.

It wasn’t until the next day that we found out about the collapsed Cypress Street section of the Nimitz freeway — and that Angela had been on it. As the day progressed, the news got worse. Her car was completely pancaked. She broke her back and had a massive head injury. She was extremely lucky to be alive, and it would be months of recuperation in her home town before she healed. There are some other amazing details to her story, but Angela is still around (alive and well) and would not appreciate me invading her privacy too much, I am sure.

We went to see her in the East Bay, a couple days after it all happened. I cried while we were under the Bay on BART, trying not to imagine another aftershock while we were 100+ feet under water. I cried again in the hospital room, seeing Angela’s bloodstained clothes that had been cut off her.

The aftermath becomes murky again. The weeks of family, cleanup, fear, boredom. More aftershocks, calls from newspapers, strained relationships. I came back to work a few days later to find my coworker silently erasing the dry erase board (on which we had snarkily drawn out the World Series Death Toll, hours before the real death toll started) in the classroom whose walls were now spidered with ever-growing cracks.

That part of downtown was a total mess, built on landfill. The nearby on-ramps (to the Embarcadero freeway) were permanently closed. Condemned buildings everywhere; the eeriest thing was peering through the windows of the closed-down restaurant next door, sugar and ketchup and silverware on every table, frozen in time. It was like that for more than a year.

It took our landlord months to get around to patching the walls in our apartment. It took me a couple years to feel comfortable under an overpass. I can still recognize, when driving, the patched part of the collapsed upper deck portion of the Bay Bridge (soon to be gone in the bridge retrofit).

And I can say with confidence that I’ll never not feel terror at every single earth tremor that comes my way.

Related hamblinks:

• From my friend Moya, her account of the experience
• More about my roommate Angela in this NY Times article
• Another blog post of mine about earthquakes: teeth on edge
• And another blog post of mine about earthquakes: rumble twit weep run

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake today. I’m thinking hard about it. I’m grateful to my friends who were my friends then and who are my friends now. We’ve been filling in the details of that crazy night together. Here’s my POV.

I was working downtown at an art school. That day, we were goofing around and put a World Series Death Toll chart on the dry erase board in the classroom. The Giants and A’s were in the middle of the Bay Bridge Series and my fellow teachers and I felt sure that Bay Areans would not be able to behave themselves and some kind of disaster would go down. Har, har.

I came home around 4:45, and discovered a strange cat in my apartment. She had come through a slightly open window and was just sitting in my roommate’s bedroom, meowing incessantly. Thanks, cat — sorry I didn’t realize you were warning us. The little girl from upstairs appeared at my door, crying — the cat, improbably named Fluffy, was hers.

I started changing into workout clothes and got on the phone to reserve a spot in a 5:30 aerobics class at Cole Valley Fitness. That’s when the shaking started.

I had a brief, comical moment of staring at the phone, wondering how the handset triggered that, until my bedroom window broke right next to me and I lurched to a doorway.

You know the sound that the recycling truck makes when it empties a dumpster full of bottles? That’s the massive breaking sound I remember from the quake. Pictures down, walls cracked.

I remember gripping onto a doorknob (I thought I had been standing in a doorway, but really I was standing in the hallway, under a huge glass lighting fixture), feeling annoyed and terrified — I wanted to go downstairs and outside but I knew I wasn’t supposed to. But what if the apartment collapsed? Was the apartment going to collapse?

Then it stopped.

Meanwhile, 370 miles to the south, my mom looked up to see the television fritz out in the middle of the World Series warmup. At the same time, my stepdad yelled up from his boat — he could see the waves from the earthquake in the harbor. Uh oh, she thought. She had two kids and a newborn grandson in San Francisco.

I went outside. The drag queens from the bar a couple doors down were milling around on the sidewalk. Drag queens, at 5pm on a Tuesday? Am I remembering that right? I thought I was calm until I realized my jeans were completely undone. I went back upstairs.

My roommate Tracy got home. We had yet to grasp the enormity of what happened.

We took Polaroids of each other, posing dramatically slumped amongst the wreckage. I still cringe with guilt about that.

As we realized the power was out and as it started getting dark, Tracy fled to her boyfriend’s. I fled across the street to Moya and Rebecca’s.

Things become a little vague here. Aftershocks. The corner store gouging us for beer, snacks and batteries. Some tears. At some point, Lisa showed up, stranded on this side of the bay. We all took turns with the headphones, listening to the radio. Helicopters flew outside, as did the rumors. San Jose was levelled. Thousands killed on the collapsed Golden Gate Bridge. The Embarcadero on fire.

I went to my boyfriend’s, a few blocks away. The only thing that happened to his place was that a can of cooking grease fell off their stove. I went to bed, wondering what the hell just happened.

The aftermath was much, much worse. More tomorrow.