It was 20 years ago today…

(photos from SF Gate, except where noted)

That I stopped enjoying earthquakes. Before October 17, 1989, I thought earthquakes were mostly fun. The surprise of it all. The wondering if it might get worse, which it never did, so there’s that danger that’s not really dangerous feeling in your stomach. The feeling that for at least one brief moment, everyone in the area is thinking the same thing at the same time. Turn on the radio, and suddenly instead of baseball or politics or celebrity gossip, everyone is talking about the earthquake, trying to figure out how big it was, etc. It’s kinda cool.

(San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge)

But that one was different, obviously. Instead of stopping and allowing people to go one their merry ways, it intensified, got worse. I was living in a flat on the second floor of an old building in San Francisco, near the bottom of a hill. Ted and I were getting ready to go to dinner at the Elite Cafe, one of our favorite restaurants at the time. Then the earthquake hit, and I remember looking from down the hall at him, and thinking that below the part of the building where he was standing was just the garage, and thinking that it was going to collapse, he was going to die. Scary as hell. Even more scary was the news…we lost power, so we couldn’t see what was going on on TV. We went to a neighbor’s house (actually, Ted’s aunt’s sister’s house…she lived in the same apartment building as Ted, about 5 blocks from my flat), and she fed us cold cheese sandwiches and we listened to the radio. The Marina District (built on landfill after the 1915 Pan Pacific expedition, which was the City’s way of showing the world that we were back after the great earthquake and fire of 1906) was on fire. The Bay Bridge had collapsed. U.C. Berkeley was on fire. So many rumors, and so hard to tell fact from fiction.

(Building in the Marina District, San Francisco)

In fact, the Marina District was the hardest hit neighborhood in the city, but it wasn’t all on fire. The Bridge hadn’t collapsed, just one section. U.C. Berkeley wasn’t on fire at all. But the truth was bad enough. Worst was the collapse of the Cypress Structure.  The upper deck collapsed onto the freeway underneath, trapping and killing scores of people. The stories that came out of that collapse were chilling. And of course, while San Francisco, and to a lesser extent, Oakland, got the press, the Santa Cruz area was the hardest hit, closest to the epicenter, right above the Loma Prieta fault line.   60% of the businesses in downtown Santa Cruz were destroyed in just a few seconds (including a place called Cooper House, housed in an historic brick building, which was known by me and my friends for a particularly dangerous rum drink called “Dance or Die”).  Remarkably, very little loss of life.

(Santa Cruz Mountains.  Photo found here)

At the time, I was working for a large hotel near Union Square, and I dutifully went into work the next day. The hotel had been full of people, partially because of the “Battle of the Bay” World Series, between the Oakland As and the San Francisco Giants, and partially because San Francisco in October is often nothing less than stunning. But you’d better believe that everyone was getting the hell out of dodge that morning. With the only power in that part of the city being generator power, we couldn’t check people out of the hotel properly. Just take their keys and tell them we would send them a receipt as soon as we could. I don’t think they cared. They were exhausted from sleeping in the hotel lobby, from the fear of thousands of (mostly small, but still) aftershocks throughout the night, being fed cold sandwiches and whatever else the hotel could come up with without being able to use their appliances. They just wanted to go home. Who could blame them?

(Cypress Structure)

Our fair city came together that day, and there were so many stories of kind and generous people helping one another. People working intersections to help cars get through, self appointed traffic cops. People feeding neighbors who didn’t have anything to eat. People helping each other out of high rises with no elevator service. People taking in those whose houses were suddenly condemned, or at least too dangerous to enter. Looting? Didn’t happen. Vandalism? Didn’t happen. Just a feeling of, we’ll get through this together.

I was proud of my city (my area, really…Oakland and Santa Cruz had similar tales of good deeds and no problems) and how its people performed. I was relieved that the damage, while real and horrible, wasn’t worse, wasn’t more extensive. That the early estimates of loss of life turned out to be too high. That this was not going to be a repeat of the great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. But really, I’ve never enjoyed an earthquake since. Even a small one takes me back to that scary day, and reminds me that we’re living on a major fault line, and you never know when the big one might hit.