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