Presented below is the third day of the Loma Prieta “Earthquake Collage” written by Robert Sward, a poet and novelist, from his work with students and faculty and staff at Cabrillo College. (Move on to Day 4, or back to Day 2.)
Thursday, October 19, Day 3
Theater director Wilma Marcus says at the moment the quake hit, a student was being video-taped as she sang these lines from the Carole King song, “…I feel the earth move under my feet…”
Later, re-playing the tape, W. saw the singer’s face contort as she was thrown about the room. Young singer clinging to support beam as video camera went dead.
B., another colleague, says all he wants to do is to play the cello.
Dinosaur Hatching Weather
The nights are dark and, apart from the occasional aftershock, siren and house shaking, silent. The days are hot. Blue sky and windblown clouds. Businesses and schools closed. People going around in bathing suits and shorts.
Bright, sunny, 90 degree weather… day after day. Before the Great Earthquake of 1906, there was also a hot spell, says the San Francisco Chronicle… just like now. Seismologists insist there’s no connection.
Indian summer before and after. “Too good to be true weather.” But this is California. Whatever the weather, it’s earthquake weather.
***
“California sits on the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, which are moving with respect to each other at about two inches a year,” says seismologist Kate Hutton.
“…quakes happen because [the two] plates do not move smoothly along a fault line. They catch, like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed against each other, and then suddenly slip…”
***
Confronted with evidence of a 7.1 earthquake, Mother Nature flutters her eyelashes and responds with a look of innocence, “Who, me?”
Normally near our house we see hummingbirds, hawks, robins, blue jays… Why is it that… have all the birds vanished?
***
Outside the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, where Shawn McCormick, 21, and Robin Ortiz, 22, died when a wall fell on them… Police have strung a yellow and black ribbon, “Scene of Crime–Stay Out…” This yellow and black tape, in fact, surrounds the entire downtown area.
An NBC television crew is rumored to be waiting for Vice President Dan Quayle to arrive. The Vice President of Disaster is coming to the scene of a Disaster.
Later, G. and I re-trace our steps thinking that Quayle, if he has in fact arrived, will by now have left. But he hasn’t even appeared. Next we learn that Gov. George Deukmejian will avoid a mob scene and detour to the demolished Warehouse Liquor Store on Soquel for a photo opportunity. A policeman says the Duke will appear for about 90 seconds, make no comment to anyone, and then leave. Dan Quayle or George Bush may or may not come with the Duke. Quayle, Bush and the Duke apparently want to be seen “seeing” the disaster area so they can be seen later in the day on television seeing the disaster area.
Reporters trying to “place” Santa Cruz (California’s favorite seaside resort), attack guidebooks and the “World Almanac:”
• California’s Holy Cross, so named by Father Serra in 1791, one of the padre’s twenty-one missions.
• Situated along the coast off US Highway 1, seventy-four miles south of San Francisco.
• Population 44,100, altitude twenty feet
• Major industries: agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, food processing and high technology
• Largest employer: UCSC with 4,400 employees
• Home to the Joseph M. Long Marine Lab – ‘Visitors are greeted by an eighty-five-foot long skeleton of a blue whale.’
Hard data that will become part of that ‘roll of bad news flung at our doors each morning,’ as Charles Atkinson puts it.
***
TV: Bush, Leon Panetta and Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt tour the mall looking solid and normal. The buildings, on the other hand, look ghostly. I identify with the buildings.
***
***
No, it’s not the San Francisco Earthquake and it’s not the World Series Earthquake, but the Loma Prieta, in honor of a remote peak near the quake’s epicenter.
“…the Loma Prieta event occurred on a deeper fault, a dipping fault deep in the root… of the San Andreas system of faults and it was not the vertical strike-slip faulting that one would have guessed would occur…”
–News Item
It’s a Spanish name. Loma Prieta, the Earthquake of the Dark Hill. “Seismologists continued to argue about how high the quake climbed on the Richter scale. They would finally settle on 7.1. But on Thursday, they agreed on one thing: The quake was one of the five great natural disasters to occur this century in the United States.”
–News Item
San Andreas Fault. Saint Andrew. The saint of lost things. How did Saint Fault get his name?
