Loma Prieta

The Internet reminds me that today is the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which the country saw live when it interrupted a World Series game between the Giants and the A's. I don't think I've ever written about that day, but it was memorable.

My town of Santa Rosa was about 120 miles north of the magnitude 6.9 temblor's epicenter but it sure walloped us. I was working as a chemist at the time. The quake hit at the end of the day, 5:04 p.m., and at first I thought I was feeling faint, as if the room were spinning. A second later I realized it really was. 

When you grow up in earthquake country, you learn to immediately drop and get under something heavy, like a desk. Running out of a building is a good way to get hit by chunks of falling building. But I looked at my coworkers and realized we all had the same simultaneous thought: our lab was inside a concrete tilt-up structure that, if it collapsed, would pancake like a house of cards. Also, we were surrounded by dangerous acids, solvents, gases and chemicals that, if they mixed together, would be a poisonous, caustic, flammable brew. Anywhere else would be safer. Everyone exited expeditiously.

I got to the front parking lot and saw something I will never forget: the blacktop rippling in waves, with cars and trees bobbing up and down like boats on a stormy sea.

When things calmed down, a small crew, including me, put on gear and respirators and checked out the lab. We had some cleanup to do but nothing dangerous, and got everything buttoned up within an hour or so.

After securing the lab, I rushed to our baby daughters' daycare provider, only to be told that Karen had gotten there first and everyone was fine. Robin and Laura had been sitting inside a laundry basket when the quake hit, and rode it out as if it were a kiddie roller coaster. They had great fun!

I chose this photo of a broken section of the Bay Bridge because it reminds of something that happens in a crisis: information is in short supply and any scrap of news can get exaggerated and twisted. 

In the minutes after the quake, we heard radio reports that the Bay Bridge had collapsed. Everyone went ashen; that bridge is a major artery, and if the whole thing had gone down during rush hour the death toll could have been in the thousands. In fact, just one small section of the bridge fell, causing one unfortunate death, so although the Bay Bridge was out of commission for a while it was basically OK. It wasn't until quite a bit later that we learned the collapse of the Cypress Structure, a double-decker freeway, had killed 42. 

I was surprised to find that people far away, such as relatives living in other parts of the country, knew a lot more about what was happening than those of us living it. I experienced that disconnect again later.