In 1989 we survived the Loma Prieta earthquake, as I've described. San Francisco is waiting for the next "big one," which might be a lot bigger than the '89 quake. After all, the epicenter in '89 was more than 50 miles south of the city itself, and a lot closer to Sunnyvale, where I was that afternoon. The epicenter of the next big 'quake, they say, is more likely to be San Francisco itself. But these events can't yet be predicted.
When we decided to sell our San Francisco house in 2003, after having signed the papers to buy our house here in Saint-Aignan, I was very nervous that we might have an earthquake back there and lose everything. What a complicated mess that could have been! Living in San Francisco was always a little like living on the very edge of the world, and the shaky edge at that.
I know there have been earthquakes in France and the rest of Europe many times in recorded history. One of the worst was the great Lisbon 'quake of 1755. Actually, since we came here to live four years ago, there have been several small earthquakes in France, both west of us, in the Vendée, and east of us, in Alsace and Champagne. We haven't felt any of them here.
Talking to local people, I've learned that there was a major earthquake in Saint-Aignan around the year 1715. As many as 40 houses were destroyed in Saint-Aignan by that seismic event, I've been told. It was a rebel monk (a story for another day) living at the old priory at Grandmont-Villiers (picture), about 20 miles south of town, who recounted all this last summer. It was news to me.
I haven't yet been able to find any more historical information about an earthquake here, but I will certainly keep looking.
In 2002 when we first saw the house we now live in, I thought we had never been to Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher before. Then we looked at an old map Walt has kept on which he marked out the routes of various driving trips we did in France between 1989 and the late '90s.
It turns out that we drove through Saint-Aignan in 1989, on our way from Poitiers to Chartres and on to Paris. Needless to say, the place didn't really grab our attention back then. Our next stop was Chambord, and we were probably blinded by that prospect.
I do have a memory of a 1989 stop in a little town called Le Blanc, about an hour south of Saint-Aignan. I think we had coffee in a café there. It all seemed very rural then to my eyes and ears, which were full of Paris and San Francisco sights and sounds. C'est vraiment « la France profonde », I thought back then. I guess it still is.
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
10 April 2007
09 April 2007
The aftermath
There I was in my apartment, which I had found just as I left it despite the earthquake. Our building, like many others in San Francisco, was built on bedrock and therefore less susceptible to the kind of shaking I had experienced in my friends' house, located on the valley floor in Sunnyvale.
There was no electricity, no phone service, and no Walt. I didn't know where he was. About midnight, I decided to try to get some sleep. I decided to stretch out on the sofa, which was near my front door. I kept my clothes and shoes on. If there was another quake, I wanted to me about to get up and out of the building as fast as possible, and I didn't want to cut my feet up stepping on broken glass or other debris.
At about midnight, miracle of miracles, the phone rang. It was Cheryl. I told her I was fine, she said she and John had been cleaning up as best they could, and she said Walt had been able to call her. He was fine and was spending the night with friends at somebody's apartment in Berkeley. He and some other people who lived in San Francisco had no easy way to get back across the bay that night. The bridge was closed because of quake damage and no ferries were running. Now I could sleep.
The phone rang again at 4:00 a.m. It was my sister calling from North Carolina. She said she had tried to get through for a while the night before, but no luck. It was 7:00 a.m. on the East Coast and she thought she would try one more time. This one was the charm. She would let my mother and others in N.C. know that I had survived.
I must have slept for a few more hours after that phone call. When I woke up, I didn't have any way to heat water or cook anything, of course. And I didn't go out, at least not right away. What I did have was a battery-powered radio and even a little battery-powered TV set, so I could listen to the news. The authorities were asking people to stay home unless they had a very good reason to go out that day.
I tried my telephone but I couldn't get a dial tone. I wanted to call the UNIX Review offices to see whether I could come to work. It was close enough that I could walk, but too far for me to want to walk all the way there just to find the building closed ... or flattened. I decided I wouldn't try to go to work unless I could get somebody there on the telephone first.
Later in the morning, I talked to my neighbors Frank and Diane, and Frank and I even went out to see if we could find a grocery store that was open. We did. I remember that he bought a six-pack of beer. We went back to the building and Diane had made some sandwiches. We sat out on their balcony in the balmy weather and had a sandwich and a beer. The street we lived on was a major thoroughfare south from the city, and there were a lot of emergency vehicles going by that day.
Early in the afternoon my phone rang again. It was Paris calling. A guy I had met the year before at the Grenoble conference, and who lived and worked in Paris, was calling me to see if I was all right and to see if I thought I would be able to come to the conference in Grenoble in a few days. I told him I didn't know yet. He had been helping me by editing the paper I was planning to present. I told him that I wasn't able to make calls out but somehow his call had come through.
Sometime in the afternoon Walt got home. He had been able to get on a ferry in Berkeley or Oakland and then walk the couple of miles to our building through the Financial District and Union Square from the ferry landing. He said it was eerily quiet in the city, even though there were crews out inspecting buildings for damage, which didn't seem to be to heavy.
So that was Wednesday. I was supposed to teach my French class that evening at the Marina School, in the neighborhood that suffered the worst damage from the quake. I heard on the radio that the school had been set up as an emergency shelter for people left homeless in the neighborhood, so I knew better than to go there that night.
I think the electricity came back on about noon on Thursday, and I think the phone did too. Late that day, the hiring manager for the job I had been interviewing for in Silicon Valley called me. She said the company wanted to offer me the position, and I accepted. She also said she had been trying to call me since Wednesday morning, but with no success.
Me in front of the San Francisco building
where UNIX Review had its offices, ca. 1989
I really needed to resign my job at UNIX Review before I left for Paris. I had heard on the radio that flight were starting to take off again from the airport. The runways had not been badly damaged in the earthquake, and neither had the terminals. The company in Silicon Valley needed me to start as soon as possible, which I needed to give notice as soon as possible at UNIX Review.
Friday morning, I again called the UNIX Review number, and this time somebody answered for the first time. The person I talked to said there had been significant damage — the hanging ceiling panels had fallen all around and a lot of computers had been thrown off desks and there was glass on the floors. Clean-up was under way and the building was open to employees, with one caveat: it was strictly "enter at your own risk."
"If you are nervous about the condition of the building, don't come to work," I was told. I asked in the editor and publisher of the magazine were there, and she said both of them had called and were on their way. I decided I'd better go in too.
The two editorial assistants I worked with were there as well when I got there. They had been in the building, working, on Tuesday afternoon when the quake hit. Elizabeth said she had gotten under her desk when the shaking started, and that the noise had been deafening. The ceiling tiles started falling and her computer monitor bounced off her desk, smashing onto the concrete floor. But the worst thing, she said, was that a big crack opened up in the wall behind her as she watched. She thought the whole building might come down on top of her.
I went to see the editor and told him I needed to talk to him and to Don, the publisher. Don told us to come to his office, which had survived pretty much intact. I told the two of them that I needed to tell them something important: I had decided to resign my job and leave the company.
Don, I remember, said, "Now Ken, you don't need to do that. We only rarely have earthquakes of this magnitude. It probably won't ever happen again in our lifetimes." He thought I was quitting and moving back to the East Coast because of the events of the past few days!
I explained that I had been offered a job in Silicon Valley and was giving my notice.
I went back home and finished packing. My plane was scheduled to take off around 6:30 p.m., and I was on it. I don't remember that it was particularly late departing.
When I arrived in France, I felt like a celebrity. I stayed with friends in Rouen for a couple of nights, and the drove on down to Grenoble for the conference. The covers of all the French news magazines and Paris Match splashed photos and big headlines about the San Francisco earthquake across their covers. I was a survivor. With my friends and at the conference, I had a lot of stories to tell.
Then Walt arrived and we left for what seemed like a very peaceful trip out through the French countryside.
There was no electricity, no phone service, and no Walt. I didn't know where he was. About midnight, I decided to try to get some sleep. I decided to stretch out on the sofa, which was near my front door. I kept my clothes and shoes on. If there was another quake, I wanted to me about to get up and out of the building as fast as possible, and I didn't want to cut my feet up stepping on broken glass or other debris.
At about midnight, miracle of miracles, the phone rang. It was Cheryl. I told her I was fine, she said she and John had been cleaning up as best they could, and she said Walt had been able to call her. He was fine and was spending the night with friends at somebody's apartment in Berkeley. He and some other people who lived in San Francisco had no easy way to get back across the bay that night. The bridge was closed because of quake damage and no ferries were running. Now I could sleep.
The phone rang again at 4:00 a.m. It was my sister calling from North Carolina. She said she had tried to get through for a while the night before, but no luck. It was 7:00 a.m. on the East Coast and she thought she would try one more time. This one was the charm. She would let my mother and others in N.C. know that I had survived.
I must have slept for a few more hours after that phone call. When I woke up, I didn't have any way to heat water or cook anything, of course. And I didn't go out, at least not right away. What I did have was a battery-powered radio and even a little battery-powered TV set, so I could listen to the news. The authorities were asking people to stay home unless they had a very good reason to go out that day.
I tried my telephone but I couldn't get a dial tone. I wanted to call the UNIX Review offices to see whether I could come to work. It was close enough that I could walk, but too far for me to want to walk all the way there just to find the building closed ... or flattened. I decided I wouldn't try to go to work unless I could get somebody there on the telephone first.
Later in the morning, I talked to my neighbors Frank and Diane, and Frank and I even went out to see if we could find a grocery store that was open. We did. I remember that he bought a six-pack of beer. We went back to the building and Diane had made some sandwiches. We sat out on their balcony in the balmy weather and had a sandwich and a beer. The street we lived on was a major thoroughfare south from the city, and there were a lot of emergency vehicles going by that day.
Early in the afternoon my phone rang again. It was Paris calling. A guy I had met the year before at the Grenoble conference, and who lived and worked in Paris, was calling me to see if I was all right and to see if I thought I would be able to come to the conference in Grenoble in a few days. I told him I didn't know yet. He had been helping me by editing the paper I was planning to present. I told him that I wasn't able to make calls out but somehow his call had come through.
Sometime in the afternoon Walt got home. He had been able to get on a ferry in Berkeley or Oakland and then walk the couple of miles to our building through the Financial District and Union Square from the ferry landing. He said it was eerily quiet in the city, even though there were crews out inspecting buildings for damage, which didn't seem to be to heavy.
So that was Wednesday. I was supposed to teach my French class that evening at the Marina School, in the neighborhood that suffered the worst damage from the quake. I heard on the radio that the school had been set up as an emergency shelter for people left homeless in the neighborhood, so I knew better than to go there that night.
I think the electricity came back on about noon on Thursday, and I think the phone did too. Late that day, the hiring manager for the job I had been interviewing for in Silicon Valley called me. She said the company wanted to offer me the position, and I accepted. She also said she had been trying to call me since Wednesday morning, but with no success.
Me in front of the San Francisco buildingwhere UNIX Review had its offices, ca. 1989
I really needed to resign my job at UNIX Review before I left for Paris. I had heard on the radio that flight were starting to take off again from the airport. The runways had not been badly damaged in the earthquake, and neither had the terminals. The company in Silicon Valley needed me to start as soon as possible, which I needed to give notice as soon as possible at UNIX Review.
Friday morning, I again called the UNIX Review number, and this time somebody answered for the first time. The person I talked to said there had been significant damage — the hanging ceiling panels had fallen all around and a lot of computers had been thrown off desks and there was glass on the floors. Clean-up was under way and the building was open to employees, with one caveat: it was strictly "enter at your own risk."
"If you are nervous about the condition of the building, don't come to work," I was told. I asked in the editor and publisher of the magazine were there, and she said both of them had called and were on their way. I decided I'd better go in too.
The two editorial assistants I worked with were there as well when I got there. They had been in the building, working, on Tuesday afternoon when the quake hit. Elizabeth said she had gotten under her desk when the shaking started, and that the noise had been deafening. The ceiling tiles started falling and her computer monitor bounced off her desk, smashing onto the concrete floor. But the worst thing, she said, was that a big crack opened up in the wall behind her as she watched. She thought the whole building might come down on top of her.
I went to see the editor and told him I needed to talk to him and to Don, the publisher. Don told us to come to his office, which had survived pretty much intact. I told the two of them that I needed to tell them something important: I had decided to resign my job and leave the company.
Don, I remember, said, "Now Ken, you don't need to do that. We only rarely have earthquakes of this magnitude. It probably won't ever happen again in our lifetimes." He thought I was quitting and moving back to the East Coast because of the events of the past few days!
I explained that I had been offered a job in Silicon Valley and was giving my notice.
I went back home and finished packing. My plane was scheduled to take off around 6:30 p.m., and I was on it. I don't remember that it was particularly late departing.
When I arrived in France, I felt like a celebrity. I stayed with friends in Rouen for a couple of nights, and the drove on down to Grenoble for the conference. The covers of all the French news magazines and Paris Match splashed photos and big headlines about the San Francisco earthquake across their covers. I was a survivor. With my friends and at the conference, I had a lot of stories to tell.
Then Walt arrived and we left for what seemed like a very peaceful trip out through the French countryside.
08 April 2007
Back in the city
The earthquake happened just after 5:00 p.m. and by 6:00 I was on the road. I felt an irresistible urge to go to our apartment in the city. It was a 45-mile trip, and in normal conditions it would have taken me less than an hour to drive it.
None of the overpasses on the freeway had collapsed, according to the radio station I was listening to in the car. That freeway (highway 101), which takes you out of Silicon Valley, up through Palo Alto, and along the bay past the airport and Candlestick Park into the city, has a lot of them. Another earthquake could happen any second, I thought.
It’s funny to remember that for several years after the ‘89 earthquake, when traffic was heavy (daily, in other words) and there was an overpass to drive under, most cars wouldn’t stop under it in case another earthquake hit. People sitting in rush-hour traffic would wait before the overpasses and then scoot under fast when there was space for their car on the other side. Everybody understood the wisdom of that.
There was traffic on 101 that evening, but it kept moving. It took me about an hour to get up to Candlestick Park. By then the World Series game had been called off and the tens of thousands of baseball fans in the stadium needed to go home. A lot of them lived in San Francisco, of course, and a lot of them lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay in Oakland, Berkeley, or other East Bay towns.
The normal route back home for most of those East Bay residents would have taken them north on the freeway through downtown San Francisco and across the Bay Bridge. But a section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed in the quake. The bridge was closed for the foreseeable future.
So the East Bay baseball fans had to drive south toward Silicon Valley and, if they were brave, turn east at Foster City and drive across the 6-mile-long San Mateo Bridge over the bay toward Oakland. If they weren’t brave, they had to drive another 30 miles to go around the south end of the bay, avoiding all bridges, and then the 50 or so miles north to Oakland/Berkeley. Under dozens of overpasses.
I was going into San Francisco (we lived near Japantown) and figured I would be able to drive right in on the freeway. There was a freeway that would get me to within 8 or 10 blocks of our building. Wrong! Not that night.
Just north of Candlestick a portion of 101, where it joins up with I-280, is elevated. Or was. No, it didn’t collapse, but a similarly constructed double-decker freeway in Oakland had collapsed that afternoon and 60 or so people had been killed. So you can imagine that the double-decked road in San Francisco had been closed for safety reasons. All the cars were being re-routed onto city streets. The double-deck freeways in and around San Francisco were all torn down in the 1990s.
I just kept hoping that Walt hadn’t decided to drive to Berkeley that afternoon and that he hadn’t been on the section of freeway that collapsed when it happened. I knew it was unlikely — he normally took BART, the regional transit system. Still...
Fortunately, I knew my way around the part of the city where they took us off the freeway. We had lived not far from there when we first arrived from Washington DC a few years before. But it was very slow going once I was on streets in the neighborhoods. There was no electricity, so there were no traffic signals.
That meant that every intersection had to be treated as a 4-way stop, and there was a lot of traffic until I got farther away from the freeway. I drove through the neighborhoods south of I-280 over toward Glen Park, where we had lived. From there I knew a “quick” way to get downtown.
At most intersections, there were people out directing traffic. The weather was warm and clear — unusually warm for San Francisco, the kind of weather that is called “earthquake weather” there, aptly enough. And hundreds of people were outside. It was safer to be out on the sidewalk or in your yard (if you had one) rather than in a house or building, because another quake could occur at any minute.
On the radio they were saying that a lot of houses had collapsed in a neighborhood called the Marina, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, and that a major fire was raging. At the time, I taught French one night a week in a high school in the Marina (I was teaching for SF City College, which held night classes in schools all over the city) so I knew that neighborhood well. My class would normally have been held the next night.
In fact, a woman I worked with at UNIX Review lived in an apartment building across the street from the school, and it was condemned after the quake. It didn’t burn, though, and she was able to get her belongings out before the building was demolished.
I drove slowly through Glen Park and up into the Twin Peaks neighborhoods along Diamond Heights Boulevard, past the Safeway store where we often bought groceries. Again, people were everywhere outside, sitting in folding chairs out on the sidewalks, or on blankets, having a picnic supper and a glass of wine. In some ways, it was a big party.
As it got dark, all the people directing traffic at all the intersections seemed to find flashlights somewhere. They were doing their volunteer work with great efficiency. Cars were moving through, but slowly, especially with so many pedestrians out and the party atmosphere.
San Francisco from Twin Peaks on a calm winter day
After you pass the Diamond Heights Safeway, the boulevard curves off to the left and you have a magnificent view from the hillside of downtown San Francisco and the entire northern half of the city. There, straight north and off in the distance, you could see the flames (or at least the glow and the smoke) in the Marina district. People were out picnicking on blankets and watching the fire. The sound of sirens filled the air. Helicopters hovered in the sky.
I kept driving down into the city, passing through the Castro on Upper Market Street and then turning north toward our neighborhood at Gough and Sutter streets. Still there was no electricity and I had to negotiate hundreds of intersections. Some buildings had suffered significant damage, and there were fire and police vehicles all along the route.
I finally got home at about 8:30 p.m., after 2½ hours in the car. There was the building, standing upright. Of course I couldn’t get into the parking garage, because the electric door opener wasn’t working. But then I didn’t really want to put the car inside, because what if the building collapsed during the night and crushed it flat? Somehow I found parking on the street.
I didn’t have a flashlight so I had to feel my way into the building and climb the four flights of stairs up to our apartment in the dark. When I arrived, I opened my front door and then knocked on the neighbors’ door across the hall. Frank and Diane were there, and they were fine. Frank came out with a flashlight and helped me get into my apartment and find some candles and a flashlight of my own.
Everything in the apartment was fine. Only one or two little knicknacks had fallen over when the earth moved.
None of the overpasses on the freeway had collapsed, according to the radio station I was listening to in the car. That freeway (highway 101), which takes you out of Silicon Valley, up through Palo Alto, and along the bay past the airport and Candlestick Park into the city, has a lot of them. Another earthquake could happen any second, I thought.
It’s funny to remember that for several years after the ‘89 earthquake, when traffic was heavy (daily, in other words) and there was an overpass to drive under, most cars wouldn’t stop under it in case another earthquake hit. People sitting in rush-hour traffic would wait before the overpasses and then scoot under fast when there was space for their car on the other side. Everybody understood the wisdom of that.
There was traffic on 101 that evening, but it kept moving. It took me about an hour to get up to Candlestick Park. By then the World Series game had been called off and the tens of thousands of baseball fans in the stadium needed to go home. A lot of them lived in San Francisco, of course, and a lot of them lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay in Oakland, Berkeley, or other East Bay towns.
The normal route back home for most of those East Bay residents would have taken them north on the freeway through downtown San Francisco and across the Bay Bridge. But a section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed in the quake. The bridge was closed for the foreseeable future.
So the East Bay baseball fans had to drive south toward Silicon Valley and, if they were brave, turn east at Foster City and drive across the 6-mile-long San Mateo Bridge over the bay toward Oakland. If they weren’t brave, they had to drive another 30 miles to go around the south end of the bay, avoiding all bridges, and then the 50 or so miles north to Oakland/Berkeley. Under dozens of overpasses.
I was going into San Francisco (we lived near Japantown) and figured I would be able to drive right in on the freeway. There was a freeway that would get me to within 8 or 10 blocks of our building. Wrong! Not that night.
Just north of Candlestick a portion of 101, where it joins up with I-280, is elevated. Or was. No, it didn’t collapse, but a similarly constructed double-decker freeway in Oakland had collapsed that afternoon and 60 or so people had been killed. So you can imagine that the double-decked road in San Francisco had been closed for safety reasons. All the cars were being re-routed onto city streets. The double-deck freeways in and around San Francisco were all torn down in the 1990s.
I just kept hoping that Walt hadn’t decided to drive to Berkeley that afternoon and that he hadn’t been on the section of freeway that collapsed when it happened. I knew it was unlikely — he normally took BART, the regional transit system. Still...
Fortunately, I knew my way around the part of the city where they took us off the freeway. We had lived not far from there when we first arrived from Washington DC a few years before. But it was very slow going once I was on streets in the neighborhoods. There was no electricity, so there were no traffic signals.
That meant that every intersection had to be treated as a 4-way stop, and there was a lot of traffic until I got farther away from the freeway. I drove through the neighborhoods south of I-280 over toward Glen Park, where we had lived. From there I knew a “quick” way to get downtown.
At most intersections, there were people out directing traffic. The weather was warm and clear — unusually warm for San Francisco, the kind of weather that is called “earthquake weather” there, aptly enough. And hundreds of people were outside. It was safer to be out on the sidewalk or in your yard (if you had one) rather than in a house or building, because another quake could occur at any minute.
On the radio they were saying that a lot of houses had collapsed in a neighborhood called the Marina, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, and that a major fire was raging. At the time, I taught French one night a week in a high school in the Marina (I was teaching for SF City College, which held night classes in schools all over the city) so I knew that neighborhood well. My class would normally have been held the next night.
In fact, a woman I worked with at UNIX Review lived in an apartment building across the street from the school, and it was condemned after the quake. It didn’t burn, though, and she was able to get her belongings out before the building was demolished.
I drove slowly through Glen Park and up into the Twin Peaks neighborhoods along Diamond Heights Boulevard, past the Safeway store where we often bought groceries. Again, people were everywhere outside, sitting in folding chairs out on the sidewalks, or on blankets, having a picnic supper and a glass of wine. In some ways, it was a big party.
As it got dark, all the people directing traffic at all the intersections seemed to find flashlights somewhere. They were doing their volunteer work with great efficiency. Cars were moving through, but slowly, especially with so many pedestrians out and the party atmosphere.
San Francisco from Twin Peaks on a calm winter dayAfter you pass the Diamond Heights Safeway, the boulevard curves off to the left and you have a magnificent view from the hillside of downtown San Francisco and the entire northern half of the city. There, straight north and off in the distance, you could see the flames (or at least the glow and the smoke) in the Marina district. People were out picnicking on blankets and watching the fire. The sound of sirens filled the air. Helicopters hovered in the sky.
I kept driving down into the city, passing through the Castro on Upper Market Street and then turning north toward our neighborhood at Gough and Sutter streets. Still there was no electricity and I had to negotiate hundreds of intersections. Some buildings had suffered significant damage, and there were fire and police vehicles all along the route.
I finally got home at about 8:30 p.m., after 2½ hours in the car. There was the building, standing upright. Of course I couldn’t get into the parking garage, because the electric door opener wasn’t working. But then I didn’t really want to put the car inside, because what if the building collapsed during the night and crushed it flat? Somehow I found parking on the street.
I didn’t have a flashlight so I had to feel my way into the building and climb the four flights of stairs up to our apartment in the dark. When I arrived, I opened my front door and then knocked on the neighbors’ door across the hall. Frank and Diane were there, and they were fine. Frank came out with a flashlight and helped me get into my apartment and find some candles and a flashlight of my own.
Everything in the apartment was fine. Only one or two little knicknacks had fallen over when the earth moved.
07 April 2007
Earthquake!
Nearly a year had gone by since our 1988 trip to France. The people in Grenoble asked me to come back for the second year of their UNIX conference, and I knew the drill this time. Walt and I were talking about the road trip we would take.
Then Tuesday afternoon, October 17, 1989, came around. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Oakland Athletics in the baseball World Series, and the game that afternoon was supposed to start at 5:00 in San Francisco.
I was at my friends’ house in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to watch the beginning of the game. I was scheduled to leave for Paris on Friday the 20th. Cheryl and I were talking about the upcoming trip — she lived in Paris for a year in the 1970s — as we watched the pre-game show on TV and waited for her husband John to get home from work.
That’s when everything started shaking. Well, bouncing up and down, actually. I was confused. I remember getting out of my chair, standing up and saying “What in the hell is going on?” The electricity went off, so there went the TV. The aluminum-framed windows were rattling violently, and glass things were falling and breaking on the kitchen floor, 15 feet away.
Cheryl answered my question — calmly, I thought: “Well, I think it’s a really big one.” Earthquake, she meant, and I think I understood. I sat back down. We had had several small earthquakes over the previous year or two, but nothing like this.
A big bookshelf fell over face-first in the living room right then, dumping not just books and knick-knacks on the floor, but also a couple of big potted plants that Cheryl had just watered. Mud spread across the beige carpet. We saw it fall but we weren't in its way.
The clatter was deafening. “What are we going to do?” I shouted. “Just sit here, I guess,” Cheryl said. We held hands and just waited for the shaking to stop. I kept wishing it would.
Right outside the family room door was the swimming pool. The sliding glass door out to the patio was open about a foot. As we sat there bouncing up and down, I noticed that the water was swirling and sloshing around. I think I heard it making slurping, gurgling noises.
The earthquake came in three big surges, I believe. The first two pushed water up from the deep end toward the shallow end of the pool — toward where we were siting. I could actually see “waves” passing through the ground itself, raising up the surface of the concrete patio around the pool as if it were liquid.
On the third surge, a large amount of water rose up from the deep end of the pool. It turned into a wave as it got to the shallow end, and then the water was pushed out of the pool with great force. The wave crashed into a wall that projected it back toward the house and the sliding glass door. In my mind, I still see it as a breaker on the ocean. It broke on the patio, and the water came splashing in through the open door and soaked the carpet between us and the dark TV set.
Then it stopped. It had lasted 15 seconds, according to the experts. It had seemed like 15 minutes. If I hadn’t seen that wave come up out of the swimming pool, I would never have understood the force of nature that an earthquake represents.
John drove into the driveway a few minutes after the shaking ended. With him, we walked around outside to see if the chimneys were still standing, and to see if the patio or pool concrete had cracked. It hadn’t. I couldn’t believe it. Everything outside looked fine.
Inside was a mess. The TV hadn’t fallen over, but that bookcase had. And the quake had thrown open the kitchen cabinets, tossed their contents onto the counters and floor below, and then slammed the doors shut again. There was a lot of broken glass and spilled food on the floor, but the cabinet doors were closed neatly.
While the three of us were inside surveying the damage, the shaking started again. We ran outdoors, remarking on how dumb it had been to sit there next to that big plate glass door during the worst of the quake. Then the electricity came back on. The aftershocks were tapering off, we thought.
What was I doing in Sunnyvale anyway? Why wasn’t I at work in San Francisco? Well, that afternoon I had had an interview for a new job. It was with the software company that Cheryl worked for — she had recommended me. It looked like a good bet, and I was planning to resign my job at UNIX Review later that week, before heading off to Paris and Grenoble.
With the electricity the TV came back on. The TV and radio traffic helicopters were up in the air, surveying not traffic but the damage on this day. Candlestick Park, with the thousands of fans inside it, had not collapsed, though the baseball fans were in shock like everybody else. There was a big fire raging in San Francisco, about a mile from where Walt and I lived.
Walt was in Berkeley, I assumed. There was not way to contact him. Besides, the phones were dead.
On TV, a traffic helicopter flew over our apartment building in downtown San Francisco. I saw it, and it was still standing. I told Cheryl and John that I needed to go home. We talked about whether I’d be able to make it. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to stay there.
But I had visions of looters stealing everything Walt and I owned. I had to get back to the city and see what condition our apartment was in. “If the overpasses have collapsed onto the freeway,” I told Cheryl and John, “I’ll just turn around and come back.”
At that point, it didn’t seem likely that I was going to be able to fly off to Paris later in the week.
Then Tuesday afternoon, October 17, 1989, came around. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Oakland Athletics in the baseball World Series, and the game that afternoon was supposed to start at 5:00 in San Francisco.
I was at my friends’ house in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to watch the beginning of the game. I was scheduled to leave for Paris on Friday the 20th. Cheryl and I were talking about the upcoming trip — she lived in Paris for a year in the 1970s — as we watched the pre-game show on TV and waited for her husband John to get home from work.
That’s when everything started shaking. Well, bouncing up and down, actually. I was confused. I remember getting out of my chair, standing up and saying “What in the hell is going on?” The electricity went off, so there went the TV. The aluminum-framed windows were rattling violently, and glass things were falling and breaking on the kitchen floor, 15 feet away.
Cheryl answered my question — calmly, I thought: “Well, I think it’s a really big one.” Earthquake, she meant, and I think I understood. I sat back down. We had had several small earthquakes over the previous year or two, but nothing like this.
A big bookshelf fell over face-first in the living room right then, dumping not just books and knick-knacks on the floor, but also a couple of big potted plants that Cheryl had just watered. Mud spread across the beige carpet. We saw it fall but we weren't in its way.
The clatter was deafening. “What are we going to do?” I shouted. “Just sit here, I guess,” Cheryl said. We held hands and just waited for the shaking to stop. I kept wishing it would.
Right outside the family room door was the swimming pool. The sliding glass door out to the patio was open about a foot. As we sat there bouncing up and down, I noticed that the water was swirling and sloshing around. I think I heard it making slurping, gurgling noises.
The earthquake came in three big surges, I believe. The first two pushed water up from the deep end toward the shallow end of the pool — toward where we were siting. I could actually see “waves” passing through the ground itself, raising up the surface of the concrete patio around the pool as if it were liquid.
On the third surge, a large amount of water rose up from the deep end of the pool. It turned into a wave as it got to the shallow end, and then the water was pushed out of the pool with great force. The wave crashed into a wall that projected it back toward the house and the sliding glass door. In my mind, I still see it as a breaker on the ocean. It broke on the patio, and the water came splashing in through the open door and soaked the carpet between us and the dark TV set.
Then it stopped. It had lasted 15 seconds, according to the experts. It had seemed like 15 minutes. If I hadn’t seen that wave come up out of the swimming pool, I would never have understood the force of nature that an earthquake represents.
John drove into the driveway a few minutes after the shaking ended. With him, we walked around outside to see if the chimneys were still standing, and to see if the patio or pool concrete had cracked. It hadn’t. I couldn’t believe it. Everything outside looked fine.
Inside was a mess. The TV hadn’t fallen over, but that bookcase had. And the quake had thrown open the kitchen cabinets, tossed their contents onto the counters and floor below, and then slammed the doors shut again. There was a lot of broken glass and spilled food on the floor, but the cabinet doors were closed neatly.
While the three of us were inside surveying the damage, the shaking started again. We ran outdoors, remarking on how dumb it had been to sit there next to that big plate glass door during the worst of the quake. Then the electricity came back on. The aftershocks were tapering off, we thought.
What was I doing in Sunnyvale anyway? Why wasn’t I at work in San Francisco? Well, that afternoon I had had an interview for a new job. It was with the software company that Cheryl worked for — she had recommended me. It looked like a good bet, and I was planning to resign my job at UNIX Review later that week, before heading off to Paris and Grenoble.
With the electricity the TV came back on. The TV and radio traffic helicopters were up in the air, surveying not traffic but the damage on this day. Candlestick Park, with the thousands of fans inside it, had not collapsed, though the baseball fans were in shock like everybody else. There was a big fire raging in San Francisco, about a mile from where Walt and I lived.
Walt was in Berkeley, I assumed. There was not way to contact him. Besides, the phones were dead.
On TV, a traffic helicopter flew over our apartment building in downtown San Francisco. I saw it, and it was still standing. I told Cheryl and John that I needed to go home. We talked about whether I’d be able to make it. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to stay there.
But I had visions of looters stealing everything Walt and I owned. I had to get back to the city and see what condition our apartment was in. “If the overpasses have collapsed onto the freeway,” I told Cheryl and John, “I’ll just turn around and come back.”
At that point, it didn’t seem likely that I was going to be able to fly off to Paris later in the week.
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