Earthquake
By Ed Magnuson
Even for those born long after San Francisco's great 1906 earthquake and fire, it had become a habit to recall the warm, breezy conditions during that cataclysm. Looking out a window from her home in suburban Sunnyvale, Neta Lott remarked to her husband Byron that the Indian-summer evening of Oct. 17 seemed like "darned good earthquake weather." Moments later, the shaking and rolling began. Byron, an electrical engineer, fell to the floor. Neta tried to get up but remained pinned to her chair until she rolled onto the floor. "I sat under the desk and thought I would be buried," she recalled. "I thought, 'This is it. I'm going to die.' "
To the north in Oakland, auto mechanic Richard Reynolds glanced at the traffic on the double-decker I-880 freeway across the street and urged a friend not to drive to night school until after the rush hour. Minutes later, Reynolds felt "a ripple." Then a neighbor screamed a warning. He ran out of his shop to find "the whole goddam ground lifting up." He grabbed a telephone pole as the sidewalk buckled beneath his feet, and looked up at a horrifying sight. A mile-long section of the freeway's upper deck began to heave, then collapsed onto the lower roadway, flattening cars as if they were beer cans. "It just slid. It didn't fall. It just slid," said Reynolds. "You couldn't see nothing but dust. Then people came out of the dust." But not many. Dozens of cars were crushed in the concrete sandwich. Officials hoped, against all odds, that most carried only one person. A mile or so away, engineer Bruce Stephan was driving home on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge. He gripped the steering wheel hard as the car bounced up and down, then plunged toward the water. A 50-ft. piece of roadway had broken off and fallen onto the lower deck, carrying him with it. "Janice, we are going to die!" he shouted to his passenger. But something caught the car, and they were able to crawl out the windows to safety. Don Laviletta, riding his motorcycle on the upper deck, described how the roadway bulged and rippled toward him "like bumper cars -- only you could die in this game." The driver of one car, in fact, was killed in the collapse.
In San Francisco's yuppified Marina district, Emily Hudson was startled by the swinging of a chandelier, which struck the ceiling, then fell to the floor of her apartment. Her three-story building, with 18 apartments, cracked, splintered and toppled forward. "I could hear two women trapped in the apartment below me screaming, then I heard a voice yelling, 'Are you okay?' " the stockbroker's assistant recalled. Shortly after a neighbor pulled her out of a smashed window into air filled with gas fumes, she heard three deafening explosions. Then she saw a "horrible, huge wall of flame." Before the long night was over, most of an adjacent block containing ten buildings was incinerated by gas-fed flames that shot 50 ft. into the sky.
In the resort and university town of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, Heidi Nyburg was enjoying the ocean view as she strolled along West Cliff Drive. When she approached the Dream Inn, where she works as a desk clerk, her serenity vanished. "Cars were bumping up and down. People were falling off their bikes, running everywhere, getting out of their cars. Women were screaming. It was panic." Blocks away, turn-of-the-century houses swayed and crumpled. The entire downtown area, including the Pacific Garden Mall, was devastated. Three people were crushed to death. Outside Santa Cruz, the community closest to the quake's epicenter, a corral collapsed. As six frightened horses ran across a nearby road, a pickup truck plowed into them; the driver was killed.
The Salinas Valley town of Hollister (pop. 11,500) experiences temblors so frequently that some of the townspeople proudly call it the Earthquake Capital of the World. At 5:04 p.m., 19-year-old Albert Valles was working out in a gym when he felt the building begin to shake. He ran into the street as the facade gave way, burying his Jeep under an avalanche of bricks. "I would have been finished," Valles marveled. No one was injured. Yet in nearby Watsonville (pop. 23,550), the Bake-Rite Bakery caved in, fatally smashing a passerby.
It was in such terrifying, surrealistic scenes that Northern Californians who chanced to be in the wrong place at 5:04 p.m. last Tuesday were jolted into an awful realization: a major earthquake had struck the Bay Area and its 6 million residents at rush hour. In 15 interminable seconds, an estimated 100 people had been killed and 3,000 injured, making the quake the third most lethal in U.S. history.
Unlike hurricanes, which can be detected as they spawn and tracked until they expire, earthquakes give no timely warning. This one's subterranean birth pangs had persisted for decades, attended only by seismologists helplessly unable to pinpoint when calamity would strike. When its punch was finally delivered, it was measured at 6.9 on the Richter scale, a force not recorded in the U.S. since the 9.2 quake that shook Alaska in 1964.
The tremor was felt far beyond the Bay Area. In Reno, 225 miles northeast of San Francisco, University of Nevada student Laura Mildon saw the clothes in her closet swinging on their hangers. In Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south, high-rise buildings swayed and water sloshed out of swimming pools. Jody Paul, an administrator for a film company working on the 23rd floor of a Century City tower, felt a gentle movement that gave her "a really strange feeling."
In another example of television's ability to create an instant global community as historic events unfold, some 60 million baseball fans in the U.S. and millions more in countries as distant as Japan and Australia got details on the California tragedy long before those who were closest to it. Just 21 minutes before the start of the World Series' third game, the TV pictures from San Francisco's Candlestick Park started to jiggle. ABC sportscaster Al Michaels shouted, "We're having an earth . . .!" Then the screens went black as power was lost. Soon the network switched to a rerun of a sitcom.
The 58,000 high-spirited spectators in Candlestick Park were at first either confused or nonchalant. Both teams had finished batting practice. Then a soft, distant rumble grew louder. "It sounded like rolling thunder," said Peter Rubens, a winery manager seated in the right-field lower deck. The stadium shuddered. Light towers swayed. The foul-line poles in left and right field whipped back and forth. Though expansion joints at the top of the stadium absorbed the blow, chunks of concrete fell off, precisely as planned. One dangerous block crashed into a seat in Section 53. Only a moment before, its occupant had gone to buy a hot dog.
When the noise and shaking reached their peak, the spectators fell silent. After it finally stopped, the relieved and unhurt crowd broke into a cheer. "That's San Francisco," said an admirer of the city. "They cheer an earthquake." A fan scribbled an impromptu sign: THAT WAS NOTHING. WAIT TILL THE GIANTS BAT! After the public address system lost power, police in squad cars used bullhorns to tell the fans that there would be no game and that they should move slowly toward exits. As they left and looked north, they could see a plume of black smoke rising into an otherwise clear sky.
No matter how blase Californians pretend to be about earthquakes, this one shook that faxade. Lisa Sheeran, a public relations manager, picked up a rental car in Colma, just off the San Andreas fault. As she opened one of the doors, the vehicle bounced up and down. "What's wrong with this car?" she asked. The rental agent shrugged and said, "I don't know." Then both watched a wave of undulating earth approach them from a graveyard at the bottom of a hill. It reminded her of the ghostly movie Alien.
When the quake struck, Serina Johnson, 13, and her sister Corina, 11, were alone in their small apartment across from Oakland's city hall. "The food started flying off the refrigerator, dishes started breaking off the wall, the TV started knocking over, and the windows started breaking and cracking," said Serina. "I started screaming, and I tried to get my little sister out of the house. We ran outside. I looked up, and there was big cracks in the walls. And the building was coming down." Said Corina: "It was like being in a blender."
Across the Bay in San Francisco's public library, a chain reaction rippled through the stacks, dumping 250,000 books into piles on the floor. At a meeting of water-pollution-control officials at the Moscone Convention Center, security guard Charles Scott stood with 200 people at an awards ceremony. "Suddenly people were falling off the stage, and the lights went out," he said. "Then everyone panicked and starting running in all directions. I screamed, 'Don't run, don't run!' But people were running over each other, and I was knocked down." Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt.
+ San Francisco's high-rise buildings, many constructed in the past 20 years, proved to be among the safest havens. Built to strict standards adopted after the 1971 San Fernando tremor, the buildings bent rather than snapped as the quake rippled through the bedrock. Not one of them suffered major damage.
Some of the high-rises, however, swayed in the air, terrifying their occupants. Mark Ragsdale, a loan officer working in 2 Embarcadero Center, "knew it was something big" when he tried to get up from a sofa but was tossed to the floor. "I wobbled all over, trying to get my footing. It was like trying to balance on a moving waterbed." Ragsdale walked down 19 flights of stairs and went home.
Victor Rosen, an Oakland lawyer with a 20th-floor office in the Clorox Building, was in an elevator at 5:04 p.m. As it swung and banged violently, he thought "something had been disconnected." Once the shaking stopped, the adventure was not over for him and six other passengers. Between floors, the elevator doors sprang open. Chunks of concrete flashed past. The cage dropped slowly, then faster, before shuddering to a jarring stop. The occupants found themselves staring at a plaster wall somewhere below the 13th floor. No one screamed, but Rosen conceded that the situation was "very nerve-racking." It took 35 minutes before rescuers hand-cranked the elevator up to the 13th floor and the passengers were able to crawl out.
The situation was far worse in the Marina, a district of Mediterranean-style houses built on landfill in the early part of the century. It was mainly the soft earth that doomed the 60 houses. Still, the Marina devastation would have been worse if fire fighters had not labored through the night to confine the inferno to a single large block. Their problem was a lack of water because so many mains had broken. Using a system of portable hydrants and hose tenders devised by assistant fire chief Frank Blackburn, they drew water from the Bay. The absence of a breeze in an area where 30-m.p.h. winds are common proved a blessing. "With its earthquakes and construction, this city is built to burn," said Blackburn, who was hailed as one of the night's heroes.
As in so many tragedies, there was no clear pattern, no consistent explanation for why some people lost everything, in some cases including their lives, while others were unscathed by the Great Quake of '89. For one family on Russian Hill, the only evidence of the disaster was a broken wineglass. Lacking power and therefore radio or television, they had no idea how extensive the damage was until their worried son-in-law called from Darwin, Australia.
On Front Street, the mortar that binds the terra-cotta tile and brick skin of the Golden Gate Bank disintegrated into powder and the southeast corner of the top floor cascaded into rubble. No one was injured on the street below, but the handsome structure, erected in 1908, will have to be torn down. Chinatown, where relatively frail buildings are densely packed, seemed even more vulnerable to a quake. But Doris Hallanan, a real estate agent whose car was "bucking like a wild bronco" as she drove down Grant Avenue, saw only that the street "looked like a scene from ancient China because it was veiled in dust and smoke." The area sustained little serious damage.
At the corner of Sixth and Bluxome streets, however, the fourth-floor brick wall of a building erected a few years after the 1906 quake tore loose. "Bricks were falling, and dust was everywhere," said Charles Pinkstaff, who ran out of a nearby structure that also rumbled. "Then everything was quiet, except for water dripping somewhere. I saw a car smashed so flat I couldn't tell if anyone had been in it." When he got closer, he saw that the driver had been decapitated. The falling wall had smashed seven cars, killing at least five people. "I've seen people die, but nothing like this," said San Francisco fire battalion chief Jack Bogue.
The most horrifying scene was in West Oakland, where screams and smoke issued from the crumbled concrete of I-880. Beneath the smashed upper deck, some cars had been flattened to a height of 6 in. As survivors yelled for help, citizens long divided by race and class forgot their differences in a rush to assist them. William McElroy, an unemployed boilermaker who had just reached his home from the freeway, returned to the disaster. "We couldn't do a damn thing at first because we didn't have any equipment. We broke into a factory yard and got ladders. Then two kids came with forklifts from another factory. We put pallets on them, lifted them up like stretchers and brought people down." Heedless of aftershocks that continued to rumble, ghetto youths perched atop ladders, peering into 18-in. gaps between the layers of concrete to help mostly white commuters climb to safety. Said McElroy: "In time of disaster, people don't ask your color. They just ask for help."
Patrick Wallace, a worker in a local paper plant, shinnied up a tree to reach the fallen highway. He saw two women dead in a flattened auto. Then he heard "one little whimper" from the backseat. Pinned beneath a slab of concrete and the body of his mother was Julio Berumen, 6. His less seriously injured sister, Cathy, 8, also lay there. For nearly an hour, Wallace struggled to free the boy. Once he felt movement. "But it turned out it was just the clothing sliding from his body."
Arriving fire fighters finally managed to pry Cathy loose. Then doctors who had rushed to the scene from Oakland hospitals made a tough decision. "The mother is in the way, O.K.?" said intern Daniel Allen. "We're going to take a chain saw through the body to get to him." Even after that macabre operation, the boy was still trapped. Only when trauma surgeon James Betts amputated his right leg could Julio be freed. "He was moving and crying out," Betts explained later. "We couldn't just leave him there."
When Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson declared that there could be no more survivors in the fallen freeway, dogged rescue crews ignored him and searched on. For a brief moment on Wednesday, their determination seemed to pay off when a faint voice was heard in the rubble. But it turned out to be from a CB radio.
On Thursday, as the stench of decaying bodies wafted over the debris, officials gave up and called in equipment to lift off the slabs. The next night, engineers attached a cable to a pillar at a particularly fragile point of the wreckage to test the structure's ability to sustain the weight of more workers. The rubble shifted, opening a larger gap. It was a prelude to a miracle.
Shortly after 6 a.m. on Saturday an engineer climbed into the newly exposed space to evaluate the test. He was astonished: something had moved inside a silver Chevrolet Sprint. Excited rescuers crawled cautiously closer. They found a man, alive and semiconscious, still strapped into the front seat. When a paramedic shouted, the man moved his head. Struggling gingerly for five hours, they extricated Buck Helm, 57, a shipping clerk, who managed to wave an arm as he was lifted to a waiting ambulance amid the cheers of exultant searchers. His condition was described as critical but stable. He had survived 90 hours in what for so many others had been a tomb.
By then, early estimates of as many as 250 fatalities had begun to look far too high. Only 34 bodies had been extracted from the rubble as of Saturday, , and officials theorized that the freeway death toll might not exceed 85, still a catastrophic number.
In Santa Cruz concern for a possible survivor touched off a clash between citizens and police at the devastated Pacific Garden Mall. Betty Barnes and other workers at the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Co., a boutique coffee shop, ran out when the walls began to tumble, but one employee remained behind. "I heard a quick scream to my right, where she was," Barnes recalled. "I know she's in there." Friends of the missing woman held hands, weeping and calling out her name, as rescuers probed through the shambles. Finally convinced she could not have survived, they gave up late Tuesday night. That was too soon for the woman's friends, who taunted and pushed the workers, pleading with them to look again. They threatened to dig into the dangerous wreckage themselves. Police arrested five people. Late Wednesday the body of Robin Ortiz was found.
For the most part, however, the predominant mood was a relieved euphoria. For the millions who came through the quake without a scratch, the experience was akin to a roller-coaster ride: a few moments of terror followed by sheer exhilaration. "I've felt all the earthquakes since I've lived here, and this one was the best -- my best near death experience," declared Los Gatos bike- shop employee Ray Blair.
The joy of survival produced unaccustomed cooperation and civility. On the night of the quake, there were only 25 arrests for vandalism in San Francisco, down from the usual 100 or so, though such arrests were a low police priority that evening. Countless residents grabbed flashlights to direct traffic at intersections where signal lights had stopped. In the seedy Mission district of San Francisco, a woman carrying two flashlights, precious as gold under the circumstances, overheard two men discuss stealing one. In a rare spirit of camaraderie, they refrained.
Many hotels allowed the newly homeless, or those too frightened to stay in their insecure buildings, to camp out in their lobbies. At the darkened Stanford Court, complimentary caviar and smoked salmon were served by candlelight. The motive was not mere generosity: the comestibles would have spoiled without refrigeration. At the Mandarin Oriental, a manager explained, "We're doing our best to give our guests first-class comfort, even while bedding them down in the lobby." The expense-account Seven Hills of San Francisco Restaurant served a free sidewalk lunch to anyone who passed by. ) Bankers in three-piece suits munched chicken wings beside bearded homeless men.
Everywhere people yearned for news of what had happened around them. On downtown California Street, a crowd gathered around a woman equipped with a tiny battery-operated TV. Playing anchorwoman, she relayed the news to those who could not see her screen. When truncated copies of the San Francisco Chronicle appeared at 7 a.m. Wednesday, people threw quarters at the sellers and shoved one another to grab a copy.
On the morning after, some of the giddiness lingered. Entrepreneurs appeared on the streets, hawking $20 T shirts with the slogan I SURVIVED THE QUAKE OF '89, and shops announced half-price earthquake sales. But the mood turned to grimness as the extent of the destruction became clear. Officials estimated that property damage could mount to $10 billion or more, probably surpassing the losses from Hurricane Hugo. Throughout the quake zone, residents awoke to a crazy quilt of destruction in which some buildings were leveled while neighboring structures survived intact. In San Juan Bautista the 125-year-old home of restaurant consultant Becky McGovern is situated only 100 ft. from the San Andreas fault. Although it bounced "from one side to the other," the house did not fall down. At Mariposa House Restaurant in the same town, owner Barbara Kuhl said her building "did the Shimmy, Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop, but we didn't lose a thing." Her porch, however, had "gone out to meet two little old ladies" arriving for dinner.
Others were not so fortunate. Their frustration boiled into anger in the Marina district, where residents who tried to inspect their ruined houses were barred by police. After a shouting match with Mayor Art Agnos, a compromise allowed residents with escorts to enter their homes briefly to collect whatever they could before the buildings were torn down. "Our poor little lives are right here on the sidewalk," said Patrice Gehrke, loading a pickup with furniture and ferns. Diane Whitacre hoisted a drawing board on her shoulder so she could get on with her free-lance work. "The most important thing to me was the stuff I need to make a living," she observed. "Life does go on."
By Wednesday most of San Francisco had returned to near normal. The BART mass-transit system, which suffered only minor damage to its tunnel beneath the Bay, resumed normal service, and airports in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose were operating again. The surest sign that the crisis was over: baseball commissioner Fay Vincent announced that the World Series would resume Tuesday night if local officials decide it could be done safely.
Now comes the long work of reconstruction. Engineers say it may take four weeks to repair the Bay Bridge and up to 2 1/2 years to replace the wreck of I-880. Until the repairs are completed, 343,000 commuters will face a traffic nightmare as they are forced to use alternative routes. But the rebuilt structures are likely to be stronger than those they replace -- strong enough, it is hoped, to survive the dreaded Big One.
It is sure to come, someday. Knowing that, Californians have a choice: either to move to an area less prone to quakes, which few are likely to do, or to make the best preparations they can to deal with them. In that sense, there was something miraculous about the Great Quake of '89. Except for the catastrophe on I-880, the loss of life was remarkably small considering the area's population and the power of the tremor. If last week's quake was a dress rehearsal for police, rescue workers, support services and citizens, they performed admirably. And they learned enough to be even better prepared for that long-dreaded day when the earth trembles again.
With reporting by Lee Griggs and Dennis Wyss/San Francisco, Edwin M. Reingold/Santa Cruz and James Willwerth/Oakland