35 Years Ago: The Loma Prieta Earthquake

Sometimes you're surprised at how long it has been since a major event that occurred, in this case the Loma Prieta earthquake.  Thirty-five years (!) ago, October 17, 1989, the ground shook in the San Francisco Bay area.  That's more than half my life ago!

I had only been living in Berkeley for three weeks and barely knew my way around.  I was a housekeeper-cook-nanny for a couple with a toddler.  I was the only person at home when everything started shaking.  I had been in two big earthquakes previously in my life (1971 Sylmar and 1987 Whittier Narrows), so I recognized what was going on.

I was living in an old Victorian house that had never been seismically upgraded, plus it had a soft first story, so it shook a lot.  My cat, Tamara (Miss Fuzzy Butt), immediately dove under the bed.  I just braced myself and the small bookcase I had in my room until the shaking stopped.

At that point I walked out of the bedroom to check the rest of the house.  The small living room in front, which I had been told originally was a reception area for the doctor who owned the house, used to have four tall bookcases standing in it.  Now three of them had tipped over, dumping all their books onto the floor.  The fourth had somehow managed to stay upright, but its books were also on the floor.  A good thing that toddler wasn't home!

I tried calling someone on the phone and discovered that there was no dial tone.  But shortly after I hung up the phone, it rang.  Aha!  We were still receiving phone calls!  It was Tom, the husband of the family, wanting to know if I had heard whether his daughter, Sarah, was okay at her daycare.  We decided I would go pick her up from daycare and then get Tom at work.

The first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that my motorcycle had tipped over.  I was lucky that someone was walking down the street at that moment, because I couldn't pick it up by myself.  After setting it upright and putting it back on its side stand, I left in the car to pick up Sarah.

The teachers at the daycare had done a marvelous job with the kids, none of whom acted stressed at all about the earthquake.  It was just another day!  So I collected Sarah, and we went to get her father, who was overjoyed to see her.  Then back to the house we went.

Once there, we discovered that we had since lost power, but at least we had candles, so there was light.  Soon after we returned, Sarah's mother, Sue, got home from work, and she was also fine.  And since we still had working gas, and now a hungry 2 1/2-year-old, I started making dinner.

I think it was while I was in the middle of cooking that the phone rang and then Tom came into the kitchen with a confused look on his face.  "I think it's for you?  Someone who is hysterical?"

My mother had heard about the earthquake and after trying for several hours had finally gotten through on the phone (which, of course, is why they tell people not to call into disaster areas, because the phone lines get jammed and then first responders can't make their needed calls).  And yes, she was hysterical.  Because if she hadn't been able to talk to me on the phone, then I must have died in the earthquake.

I finally convinced her that I was okay.  I then asked her to make a few calls for me, because we still couldn't call out, and went back to making dinner.

Not long after that, Rafael, a friend of Tom and Sue's, came by.  His wife, Stacy, worked in San Francisco and usually came home by BART.  But BART had been shut down as a safety precaution because of the earthquake.  BART between San Francisco and Oakland goes under San Francisco Bay, and they wanted to make sure nothing had happened to the tunnel that could cause any problems.  So Stacy was stuck in San Francisco.

Normally Rafael would have driven over the Bay Bridge to pick her up, but that was impossible, because a section of the top level of the bridge had collapsed during the quake, and the bridge was closed.  Rafael eventually went the long way around the bay — over the Richmond Bridge, through Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and into downtown San Francisco to pick up Stacy, and then all the way back around to bring her home to Berkeley.

Over the next few days we learned that the upper deck of the Cypress Freeway, a two-level structure in the East Bay, had collapsed, trapping and killing many people in their cars.  The Marina District in San Francisco had suffered from liquefaction and many houses had collapsed (amazingly, the same way they had done during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but people had rebuilt in the same place).  The worst damage was actually in Santa Cruz, which was very close to the earthquake's epicenter.  But all you heard about on TV was San Francisco and the fact that the quake interrupted the World Series game that evening.

Bay Bridge collapse, October 1989
by C. E. Mayer