While our conjoined roots are in San Diego, Saturday marks a significant anniversary for the Che Underground contingent that relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in the mid-’80s: the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake that rocked the region at 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1989.
The 7.1-magnitude quake — which received live national exposure courtesy of the 1989 World Series — killed more than 60 people, tore the region’s infrastructure and knocked some of our internal gyroscopes askew.
It was one of a short list of events I’ve witnessed that seemed to strain the fabric of reality, even if briefly. And the aftershocks (both literal and figurative) were enduring.
Read about our San Francisco exodus …
I’d like to hear your recollections of Loma Prieta 20 years down the line.
OK: I was in the first week of a temp-to-maybe-perm clerical job at an architect’s office in an unreinforced masonry building right here:
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… When everything started bucking like mad, and sections of the ceiling started to fall, and I ran into a doorway on the second floor and just hung on. I said, “That was a big one!” The architect said, “That was the biggest in our lifetimes.” I looked out the window … There was some serious damage to a couple of buildings across the street, and one guy was laid out on the sidewalk where a chunk of cement had apparently hit him. (The nearest fatalities turned out to be a few blocks away, so I hope this guy was not badly injured.)
The rest of the staff and me figured we should be heading home; the architect said I could leave, but only after I delivered a package to the FedEx office next door. (It was the first but not last time I watched someone in nominal authority say something transcendently stupid in a crisis.) I went out with his package and into the empty FedEx office … The staff was nowhere to be found, so I left the envelope on the counter — and in my own moment of transcendent dopiness, went into the darkened parking structure next door to get my car and drive out of downtown! (I also wanted to switch on the radio and figure out wtf.)
I crept through the darkness of the parking structure … I think I used my lighter to find the damn car … Put on the radio, and the first thing I heard was a news announcer reporting that thousands of people were dead and that their helicopters could see bodies floating in the bay.
I drove out to Harrison and straight into crazy gridlock, of course … All the damn traffic lights were out, duh!! I hung in there about three blocks, then ditched the car up on a curb and started walking back to 21st and Mission, where Nancy and I were living, looking for a pay phone on the way. (I forgot that she had one of those electric answering machine phones, so it wasn’t working.) I could see smoke to the north, from the Marina.
OK, this narrative is getting long, and I’m starting to feel a little PTSD-ish. 🙂 I’ll do another installment later.
i remember being in sd and being anxious that michelle, eric, jason, matthew and the rest of the crew were in sf and in harms way. landline phones were largely out and this was long before cell phones were so mainstream, remember. but somehow i managed, through sheer luck , to get through to michelle and eric who, in turn, got in touch with seth and jason who were in touch with mark urton and the rest of our group. thus we all were able to determine that all was well(ish). jason then went and ran to the marina to help put out fires.
my mind was on michelle, since i knew she drove that patch of freeway for work, and when it collapsed i was beside myself. thank maude she answered the damn phone.
>>but somehow i managed, through sheer luck , to get through to michelle and eric
Ava: Yeah, Nancy and I spent the evening with them … They lived about four blocks from us on Valencia. We were contemplating driving down the peninsula, but actually the Mission got power back that night.
BTW, my remark about PTSD was a little self-dramatizing, but it’s funny … Reviewing my personal sequence of events, looking over the Google Maps to visualize the route … My autonomic nervous system really did kick up a couple of notches, to my surprise!
The initial impression from the street view that damage had been catastrophic … The loss of power from the grid maybe a minute later … Going into the dark for the car, then getting the initial, wildly exaggerated radio reports about fatalities … The apprehension that the city could fall into chaos if damage were bad enough … Yeah, shook me up a lot!
After retrieving my car the next day, I did some volunteer stuff at the Red Cross near the Tenderloin. Leaving the lighted Mission for the blacked-out center of town was creepy. And the aftershocks went on for days!
Short version….
Only time in my life that I was sure I was gonna die and knew it. I seriously thought, wow I am actually alive when the world ends.
I lived in Santa Clara at the time working for RasterOps making Video cards for Mac’s. The ceiling came down over my desk, once I got out from there you could see the production parts area that was a solid conctete floor with tons of metal shelving bolted to the floor. The floor and shelves were rollong like waves coming in at the beach. Once outside we found the President of the company clinging to a tree, too funny.
I was actually supposed to be at the World series with a customer and backed out at the last minute. Probably good seeing it took me 3 hours to get home and it was only 4 miles. Now my condo I was living in was pretty much untouched except for cracks in the ceiling. Next door was completely trashed and our walls were adjoining?
Still to this day I jump or cringe when things move, like in a parking garage and a big car is moving somewhere and the floor kinda moves.
Crap I have the creeps right now thinking of it.
>>Still to this day I jump or cringe when things move, like in a parking garage and a big car is moving somewhere and the floor kinda moves.
Mark: Right in the adrenal glands! Exactly.
Loma Prieta and September 11 were my two big events where reality just seemed to tip sideways.
Secondarily, the two major NY blackouts I can remember had a bit of the same psychic effect, although we got the 411 pretty quickly that damage was limited. (There’s still a vulnerable feeling when the whole grid goes down on a small island crowded with a couple million people.)
If I’d had better mental hygiene in ’89, I’d have talked to somebody about it. 🙂
Yeah, I jump, too. Still.
BTW, when’d you move from that place near PCH in SF, Mark? That was the last time I saw you before last May.
PS: Parking garages, Mark. Egg-freakin’-zactly. The floor starts to rumble … In NJ, yet! … And I just tense up.
Glad it’s not just me!
I was staying in a cheap hotel in L.A., there to collect data from a Youth Authority facility, annoyed there was nothing nicer nearby than this place that bolted everything down. I changed my mind about that when I had to stand in the bathroom doorway and brace myself while everything rocked like a little boat in stormy waters. I was happy management was too worried about customers stealing lamps and TVs to let them sit around loose. I remember thinking we are not wired to accept ground moving. We use firm ground as a metaphor for what we know to be true.
I had several close friends in the Bay Area- couldn’t get hold of any of them for a couple of days. One said her drive home from work that day was the eeriest of her life. She still shudders any time anyone mentions earthquakes. My dad had to work in SF that week and he said it was like being on a SciFi disaster movie set.
I almost had a heart attack just reading this…do you all know what great writers you all are?
>>do you all know what great writers you all are?
Heff: I wouldn’t wish the trauma on Toby, but man — he’d do a good job recalling the scene!
BTW, that was the end of the architecture-office gig … Mayor Willie Brown was telling workers to stay out of downtown until the buildings were inspected, but the boss insisted we come to work anyway two days later — just to straighten up for a few hours, he said.
I’d made a commitment to work for the Red Cross that afternoon, and when he announced the work would continue for the rest of the day, I explained I’d have to leave early to help out with the disaster-relief efforts.
In front of the staff, the guy asked me whether my priority was to his company or to this volunteer stuff. I said, “This week? The volunteer stuff!” and walked out.
I ran into one of the employees much later, and she said I was kind of a folk hero in the office. 🙂 I was better off, of course … And I started at MacWEEK the next month and really got moving on my adult career. So the quake shook me up in positive ways, too, I suppose.
Matt,
You came by the beach house? My memory is bad…..Remind me.
I worked at Jasmine building hard drives when we moved into the beach house. I then started consulting at Apple in Cupertino and driving all the way there and it be 90 degrees, drive home and have it 59 degrees and drizzle on the beach got old. I moved to Sanata Clara and finished the stuff at Apple and then started the RasterOps gig.
FYI
>>You came by the beach house? My memory is bad…..Remind me.
Marky: Yeah, with Dave Fleminger? Pat Works? Some of the Central House crew?
You were already doing the tech thing … I think you were the first person in our olde circle to start a career in consumer technology, and it made an impression on me. Indeed, I have you to thank in part for the set of decisions I made to focus on Mac journalism.
So … Thanks, 20-some years later! 🙂
I remember that beach house…cool pad!!
I just happened to be in Sonoma the day of the Loma Prieta, so I didn’t experience much first hand other than some swaying streetlights.
On the way back home it got much more tense, the first radio reports had both bridges down, so the car got stocked up with supplies in anticipation of camping out in the Marin Headlands. By midnight the Golden Gate was operational, and flashlights at all the intersections waved you back through a strangely quiet San Fran. The next day there was this tangible heat coming up from the ground, it felt like the sun was beneath you.
>>Mayor Willie Brown
D’oh!! Anachronism alert … Art Agnos was mayor then. Sorry ’bout that.
I’m impressed some of you had the wherewithal to volunteer helping people out. I guess I was stuck in my own orbit then. I was walking down Mission St., around 17th, when I saw the Muni lines swaying and saw someone run into the street. I looked up at the windows of the taqueria in front of me and they were vibrating like the surface of a pond disturbed by the wind. I looked down at the sidewalk and it buckled up several inches in front of me and snapped back into place, unscathed.
I lived in a hard little part of the Mission District then, at 18th and Mission. It was an area where the cops pushed all the heroin and cocaine sales and prostitution from other parts of the city. After the earthquake, residents who usually bore a hard exterior were hanging out on the street, discussing what they had just experienced. It was the only time I remember people in general being friendly.
It’ been quite a while since I posted but I couldn’t pass this one up. Forgive me for my grammer and spelling errors as it’s late. I vividly remember that day as I use the story quite regularly in my occupation of Bartending. I was living at the Central house(722) at that time but was in North beach on the second floor of Vesuvio’s, you know that little bar next to City Lights Book Store, I was having a drink with Robin Pact-Francis,(another San Diego expatriot). We’re sitting there at one of those two top tables next to the large pane windows shooting the breeze when the building begins shaking and the window next to us seems to ripple like a sheet in the wind. Both of us looked at each other wide eyed and I calmly stated the obvious,”Robin we’re having an earthquake.” When the building stopped shaking we went downstairs and the bar was empty and it was dark ,outside there was dust clouds billowing here and there and we chit chatted with the bartender and a couple other folks on the curbside.Robin and I decided we should check on her mother.Funny thing though we took about six or seven steps up Columbus St. and we both stopped simultaneously ,not saying a word to each other,turned around and went back in the bar.They already had candles out and the drinks were on the house.Our nerves were more frazzeled than we originally anticipated and three or four drinks of Jagermeister later we felt steady enoughto make the journey to check on her mom who lived on Union St. The buses weren’t running and some one on the street said the Bay Bridge had collapsed.We continued walking up to Union and her mom and their apartment was in good shape, better shape than we were in ,as a small mother daughter tiff ensued and we were soon on are way back to the bar. We arrived to a standing room only crowd and there were still no lights, but lots of candles ,and every one was quite friendly. After a few more Jagermeisters we decided to check on Jason Seibert,who lived on Vallejo and Grant. All was fine at Jason’s and we all went on the roof and watched the Marina burning in the distance. No Power.no phones, and no buses and the aftermath of a natural disaster seemed like a good enough reason to continue to party,mind you I was alot younger then and this behavior was the norm for me .Well we hit the bar again and I eventually made it back to the Western Addition’s Central house early the next evening when the buses begain running again.The next few days after the quake the neighborhood was strangely more mellow, an dare I say more friendly. It eventually reverted back to crackville and though I lived through the Quake I was definately shattered by the incredible Hangover the next day.That was the last time I ever touched Jagermeister and I vehemently warn the young or inexperienced of it’s effects. That was the largest earthquake any of us had ever been in and whenever there was a quake you’d hear various Central roomies shouting out,” 5.1,or 4.8″ trying to see who’d guess the correct number on the Richter scale.I’m sometimes think about those days and it all seemed so normal for those times and those listening to my long rambling stories just shake their heads and tell me I’m weird.Some things I guess you just can’t shake away.Pun intended.
Matt………OK
Some things are like they happened yesterday, like the quake and others are just moved to the back shelves of the skull. I actually remember times when I lived at the central house.
Well, I would of never thought I inspired anyone at that time but I was pretty happy to be working in the wacky fun world of the Macintosh. It certainly changed things for me. Your Welcome
>>Well, I would of never thought I inspired anyone at that time
Mark: It’s a trip to think about how we influenced each other in ways we never imagined … Some little conversation from 1988 turns out to have created ripples that surfaced cool new ideas. The earthquake metaphor is apt, except this kind of seismic shift tends to be positive. 🙂
And bringing this back into closer alignment with the lead topic: I started at MacWEEK the next month. For years until it was torn down, we worked under the ruined hulk of the quake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway at Howard and Beale streets.
All my co-workers who’d started before October had ridden out the quake in MacWEEK’s 15th-floor offices … A gnarly experience, by all accounts. And there was an extra pall over the place, since two of the editors at our sister pub, MacUser, were among the casualties when a building facade collapsed in SoMa. Strange moment to join the team, but a wonderful opportunity that shaped me in many ways.
OK, one other personal dimension to Loma Prieta I hadn’t thought of: I’m quite sure that day was the last time I ever spoke to my mother’s father.
He and his wife had arrived at my parents’ house in Encinitas just a few hours earlier … And the World Series was on (my dad sometimes watches baseball, but I kind of think it was my grandpa’s choice) … And so of course, they got the full live earthquake action.
My grandfather was a man of fairly low affect, but I do think he was a little freaked as well; and when I did finally manage to call my folks that night, I talked to him briefly, too.
That was his last visit to California, and he died unexpectedly just a couple months later. I am certain that was the last day I heard his voice.
Hmmmm … The stuff you realize, you know?
I went from one extreme to the other…….It was after me but did not get me either time.
I moved from Santa Clara to Ft, Lauderdale and here comes Hurricane Andrew………..3rd largest Hurricane ever. It was very freaky but the quake was worse.
>>I moved from Santa Clara to Ft, Lauderdale and here comes Hurricane Andrew………..
Mark: Ya notice how almost every region in this ginormous country has its own natural disaster and a set of reflexes you’re supposed to develop in response? Quakes in California (run to a doorway, jump under a table), hurricanes down south (head inland) … Maybe Toby or Tom Clarke can talk volcanoes in Hawaii and Washington …
When I lived in Milwaukee, the ecological bogeyman was tornadoes; when the sky turned funky yellow and the warnings started, you prepared to duck into the basement.
If you move around, your signals can get mixed: I was living in the Mission during the Oakland hills fire of October 1991 … And seeing that tornado-yellow sky, my first instinct was to run into the basement of our apartment!
Yep
Hmmm…Chris Turek and I were working a house painting gig with Paul Renna and Mark (erstwhile singer for Shiva Dancing) in the Mission. Chris and I had been laid off the day before, and went by the job site to pick up the money we were owed. We got stiffed.
A week earlier I’d been up on what’s ironically known as a “fall” (no kidding) which is that scaffold on ropes rigged from the roof. We had no safety lines of course, and the thing almost fell.
As I was not going to be paid, I told Chris “let’s go around the corner and see Dirk…his new place is over in the Castro”. So we did. Dirk was on the 4th floor of a typical SF walkup somewhere near 19th up the street from one of the very few 7-11 stores in SF. I was a smoker then and told Chris I was going to stop for smokes. He said “naw…let’s go see Dirk first”. So we went up to his room where he was still asleep. (Long nights running audio in a strip club meant he was a day sleeper at the time).
We literally were shaking him awake as the whole building began to shake. It took him a few seconds to figure out it was not a dream, as it did all of us, and then we began what now seems a comical leap-frog journey from one doorway to another until we’d reached the outside door down a very very long flight of wooden stairs. All this seems kinda funny now as there were about 6 of us trying to fit ourselves into the various doorways, all at the same time. I remember Dave Acampora being there too.
Upon reaching ground level it was clear that this was a major disaster. Three or four things stick in my mind:
1. 7-11 had closed it’s doors. Wow. I didn’t get smokes for 3 days.
2. Muni had pulled all buses over and had them disconnect from the power lines.
3. All the bars in the Castro were PACKED very early for this neighborhood. In the midst of the AIDS badness that was the 80s, these guys were not to be discouraged by a natural disaster…they’d survived worse. It was an excuse for a party. Ice was melting. Beer was losing it’s cool. Candles and lanterns were lit and drinks were poured.
At this point it became clear that giving people something to distract them was a good idea, so I suggested we walk up to Central St. and see if everyone there was OK. Thus began the night’s meandering. Upon reaching Divisadero the picture really clarified; we could see the smoke rising from the Marina District and the gridlock on the side of Divis. that lead away from the flames…and then I saw what for me was the one image I will take to my grave as totally defining that day for me.
Up the street across from Mike Sherman’s house on Fulton was a little outpost of the Sisters of Charity…Mother Theresa’s order. Just as we turned the corner of Divis and Fulton we saw a carload of the sisters in white, loaded to the roof with water bottles and first aid supplies, burning rubber TOWARD the flames and smoke. The whole city was trying to escape and the sisters were diving into the fray just as fast as they could. I believe it was the only car on that side of the road.
I gave them a cheer.
Then I went up the street to my old apartment and got my WWII civil defense helmet on. I felt better and looked stylish as hell.
As the night wore on I discovered a couple of things that stick with me…in a disaster anything you can buy with a dollar you can buy with an AA battery. I believe the exchange rate still holds…and lots of people become either amorous or aggressive due to the stress. It’s really really interesting who’s who on that one.
I took a walk the next day with my old girlfriend Karen, and posed her on a pile of broken glass on Van Ness. I believe Dirk got involved in an embarrassing self-serving media project with the Red Cross that became a sort of back-story to a major fundraising scandal arising from Loma Prieta. I managed to find my mom after a couple of days, as her building had been evacuated for a day due to uncertainties about gas lines.
A day later the city was pretty well back to normal except for those trapped on the freeway. We should never forget them. There’s a story about them at http://www.sfgate.com today.
Patrick Works
and yeah…if I’d have been up on that ‘fall’ during the quake I’d be dead.
No I never got paid. Paul Renna still owes me $210
Welshman. What are you gonna do?
Patrick Works
No longer a painter
I was living in the Castro (across the street from the Castro muni stop) with Jeff Lucas as a roommate. I was being lazy about driving across the Bay Bridge to see my boyfriend and had just told the boyfriend that I’d leave within a half hour (so GLAD I was lazy that day).
I saw the plants tremble a little about a minute before it hit, and being the dutiful good kid, I immediately got up and stood in the doorway. I was calmly standing there when the walls started to shake. Jeff came to his doorway which was at a right angle and right next to mine. Once all hell broke loose, we quickly realized that we were more stable than the walls and ended up holding on to each other’s arms instead of the walls.
After it stopped, we took stock of our surroundings. The rooms were a mess. Stuff that had been 8 ft across the room on top of a bookcase was on my bed where I had been sitting moments before. Jeff had a snake and the aquarium it lived in had cracked so we had to put it in a bag of some sort. We were confused as to what to do. We had the idea we should get outside and away from buildings (which is impossible to do in central San Francisco). But living on Castro, we had the electrical buses with overhead lines running down the middle of the street so staying out there seemed unsafe too.
Events after that are slightly hazy. I had a radio we listened to and I remember having a crowd of about 20 people listening to it with me outside our building for awhile. After a bit we took off to walk miles to where Dave F. and Andy G. lived in the Haight. I’m not sure who else was with us, maybe Miranda, Jeff’s girlfriend -- or it’s possible she was the reason we went to the Haight because I believe she worked for a clothing store there. I just remember walking around for hours after dark with the lights off everywhere and thinking how spooky the city was. I don’t actually remember getting to the Haight or what we did there. To get back home, we walked past bars open and lit with candles but we sort of stayed to ourselves for safety. We finally got back home midnight-ish and it was just as the lights were coming back on that I remembered uselessly that I had a portable TV that I had bartered with Kristen T. for. It was strange living through it all and then watching it on the TV many hours after the rest of the country saw it.
I’m sure others can remember our travels that night better than me and who all we ended up with.
The weather was lovely. All my epic disasters occur on nice days.
The current Bay Bridge shutdown is evocative. The commute sounds hellish!
A peninsula is a strange place to be when things malfunction. An island is even weirder.
Everybody OK after today’s 7.2??
7.2? Where? I’m in UK, after a stint in Raleigh…
It was first reported to be a 6.9, 20 miles south of the US/Mex border just south of Brawley. It was a long one :45-60 seconds or so. Normal Heights swayed: and we picked up the baby and stood in the doorway; hoping our claptrap of a 1930’s house still had the strength to hold itself up after one last long shake.