My roommate was in the shower during the quake. I yelled to him “It’s an earthquake!” and he yelled back “No shit!”
We stood in line at Crown Hardware on Balboa with people to get batteries (power was out and the clerk sold things out of the store doorway), while my roommate told other people in [...]

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Quake of ‘89

I was living in Campbell in an apartment complex called Union Manor. My sister and I had accompanied my mother to the complex’s laundromat when it hit, I was six years old and my sister was two. I remember sitting on the dryer and next thing I knew my mom had pulled me off hurriedly [...]

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It all happens at once

I was in the men’s room at the parking lot across from Light House Point/Steamer’s Lane in Santa Cruz when the shaking began. I heard the roof beam of the cinder-block restroom building give a loud CRACK and I decided I’d better quit urinating and get out. (Most men know that this can [...]

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Menlo Park

I was at work in Menlo Park in ‘89 in a typical 1960s “curtain wall” structure that later was condemned and had to be completely reinforced with a structural steel exoskeleton…. The company at first denied there had been any damage even when cracks showed in the concrete walls. Finally two weeks after the quake [...]

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Earthquake 1989

In October of ‘89
things were going fine;
Then came the seventeenth,
that trapped and killed people beneath,
The cypress while cares were in a line.
The time was 5:04
when fate knocked on the door;
The earth began to move,
as the fault made a grove,
and shook things to the floor.
Shake Rattle and roll,
I ran into a pole;
only [...]

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I had already picked up my daughter at her day care center and had gone in the late afternoon to get my son at his kindergarten class.
My son was the last student to be picked up.  His teacher and my kids and I were the only ones left in the classroom. As I spoke [...]

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Shaking

Seconds ticked on (two, five),
offices no longer safe,
my window bowing like plastic (ten),
I needed shelter (fifteen),
spotted a desk across the hall,
dove underneath, someone already there,
a large woman filling the entire space;
my head by her bottom (twenty),
sprinklerheads falling from the ceiling,
when it ended (twenty-three) we giggled.
Later my little family unhurt,
our house undamaged, just power out.
We [...]

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Cataclysm (Fictional)

It was time. Obediently, Marketing assembled in front of Human Resources and counted noses, then filed out through the vast, slick-floored maroon-and-silver lobby. Job-seekers, huddled like troglodytes in cavernous velour armchairs, glanced up from incomprehensible computer journals as the troupe passed.
“Hasta la Vista!” called out blonde Annabelle Hopf from the reception desk, waving gaily.
Nobody waved [...]

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Trucker on the Cypress Viaduct

Ed McVee, a trucker who was driving a Chevron freight truck on the Cypress Viaduct at just about 5:00, spoke to National Geographic about what it was like to barely escape from the viaduct’s collapse: his truck stopped beneath the only top deck section that didn’t crumble in the earthquake. In Nature’s Fury!, a video [...]

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