Quake of '89

I had a last class on Small Business at the community center that day, so a friend was coming to babysit. I went out to get a big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken for the kids. I was putting the key into the front door when the shaking started. I managed to open the door and stood underneath it. I heard my kids in the house somewhere.

When the shaking stopped, I went to look for my kids in the family room. (I had three kids then) .I looked out and saw that the pool was almost empty! The shaking had emptied most of the water out into our neighbors' yard and flowing down the street. My china cabinet had opened and there were glass everywhere. The crystal glasses lovingly carried from England were all in shatters. I went upstairs and my pier cabinets and mirror against my bed had fallen onto the bed. It was a good job no one was on the bed!

Our oldest daughter was sobbing with relief because her baby brother, Alex, (who is a Junior at UCSC today) was safe. She told me that a few minutes before the quake they were playing outside by the pool and Alex was in his stroller. She left him to go get something inside the house but then she decided she had better bring the baby in, so she went back outside and wheeled him in. Her action saved my baby boy!!! If he was still outside, the shaking and splashing of the pool water would have swept him into the pool. I was shaking with relief.

My husband was interviewing people for the company he was working for in Oakland. He would have been on the freeway that collapsed (Embacadero?) had it not been for this person who called and begged him for a late interview.

The house was still shaking off and on, so the kids and I went and sat in our van on the driveway. We had no cell phones then so I had no idea where my husband was. We watched the tv in the van and we were terrified at the sights of the collapsed bridges and the horrible news of deaths and injuries. I feared for my husband's safety but it was three or so hours later before he came home.

That night we ate the kentucky fried chicken and slept in the living room. Needless to say, I missed my last class on Small Business.

I was on the sixth floor of the then Apple building known as De Anza 3 in Cupertino. Many people were planning to have a party and watch the World Series game in a big meeting room on the eighth floor.

As the first shock wave cracked through the building a very pregnant colleague came running out of her office in a panic. As we held each other big CRT monitors pitched off the computers they were sitting on. One cube neighbor had a pyramid of six empty 3.5" floppy disk boxes stacked on top of his cube wall. (Remember those?) I watched those boxes sail off the wall as if an invisible dismissive hand had swept them away.

The building was a large metal skeleton with a skin of darkly tinted glass. My mind, searching for something to suppress the fear that the building would collapse, decided that if the exterior's tinted glass didn't break, the building would remain intact, and we would survive. They didn't break. I can't imagine how I would have coped if the glass had started popping out.

The rolling subsided, the fire alarm went off, and I grabbed my bike and joined the throngs descending the staircases. Later, after telling this story, I was asked if the bike seemed heavier than usual to carry. To the contrary, it was never lighter. I was lucky to have ridden my bike to work that day. I made it home far faster than the poor masses who had to fight through intersections with no traffic lights.

When I got home I discovered that my sister-in-law had been bathing my nine-month-old son in the bathtub when the earthquake struck. Their ride was much more fun.

Just a few months earlier I graduated from Cowell. I was a student at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology near Stanford and worked nights leading classes at NutriSystem. That late afternoon I was leading a class with NutriSystem clients at an office off of Stevens Creek Blvd near Los Gatos. Right after my 5 p. m. class began as I was at the front of the meeting room, a giant jolt made me fall to my knees. I looked out the window and saw the ground rolling and cars being pushed up against each other. My first immediate thought was that an airplane must have crashed landed nearby. After a few minutes we realized it was an earthquake. It took me 3 hours to drive a few miles home to San Jose. Two days later, we still had no power, so, my family and I drove down to Disneyland to escape the sadness of all the death and destruction the earthquake had caused. While at Disney, an all-park intercom address wanted visitors to know that it was the largest group in attendance from the Bay Area they had ever had!! To this day, whenever I hear of an earthquake, I think of the Loma Prieta destruction.

Where was I during the '89 quake? I was a Freshman, chatting with my roommate in our dorm room at Merrill College when it hit. Having lived in Tokyo for many years, a little quake wasn't going to bother me. Of course, it took almost no time to figure out that perhaps this wasn't a little quake. My roommate, having never experienced an earthquake before, was under her bed in a flash screaming at me to take cover. Smart girl. I got under my desk and waited the violent waves out. When the earthquake subsided, everything was deathly quiet before the alarms, students yelling and running down the hallway, and a general cacophony of noise hit us. We ran outside and gathered around a mailbox where a small group of students were listening to the baseball broadcaster at Candlestick describe the scene unfolding before him. The rest of that day was pretty surreal as was the rest of that week until most of the student body returned to school.