Before
As with most narratives of this nature, my story is personal yet embedded in the larger experience all those in the Bay Area shared on that day.
Late in the afternoon I strode South through the middle of the UC Berkeley campus, nearing the end of my undergraduate years. Although raised mostly in California and then Hawaii, I had already lived in other places as well – France and a family move to Japan a few years earlier. My folks, though, had lived high atop Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley for quite a while when the Loma Prieta quake took place.
Walking out past Sproul plaza in an end-of-academic-day haze, I tried to decide whether to read for a few more hours in an open-aired loosely-beamed two story café across Bancroft from campus, or whether to throw in the towel entirely and play hooky at my folks’ house. I decided upon the latter.
During
I was on the upper floor of my folks’ house, with a view of the Bay and San Francisco when the quake struck. With the first tremors I moved into the threshold between the dining room and open kitchen, hoping that the shifts would, as usual, quickly subside. As the shifting intensified, I realized that this was no “normal” quake. Just to the left of my left shoulder, on the southern wall of the dining room, the huge and heavy armoire began to tilt, and I attempted with my left arm to keep it up against the wall, preventing it from falling. At about this point I shouted something – I fail to remember precisely what – to my mother who was in her lower level office – I knew she was okay – but we were still shaking. Then, turning my gaze toward the Northern end of the living room I could both see and literally feel the earth moving under the house in waves…the entire floor was lifting and falling in a northward wave…just as though I were lying on a surfboard or boogie board…For me, this was the moment that separated the experience of that quake from all the previous ones I have endured. The earth shook, but the earth literally moved in wavelike motions of which one learns in earth science, but rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a building move as though the floor had suddenly been rendered fluid.
Aftermath
Our phone rang. Unlike most other folks who were unable to connect with Bay Area loved ones for many hours, my father in San Diego had just tuned into the World Series, saw the quake, and called my mother in quick succession. In shock, then I watched on the small screen television in the kitchen as the live streaming video began to document and thus almost triage the damage hotspots around the Bay. One of those was the collapse of the freeway in Oakland, with many people and automobiles crushed or held in small air pockets as one layer of freeway had literally collapsed onto the layer directly below. Then, we were shown the damage to the Bay Bridge, which had broken. At this point the Bay Area became a surreal vista as seen from the ridge top house in Berkeley. Fires in the Marina from collapsed apartment buildings were plainly evident from my living room window…making the skyline of San Francisco look more like a war zone than a city. Slowly adjusting to this new reality, I knew that it would be days and years before we could fully comprehend, address, and make the needed repairs and re-structurings to rebuild and then prevent this kind of devastation again. We cannot prevent quakes, but we can do our best to bolt the foundations of older homes, and corporate/institutional structures, and prepare ourselves. Each of us will be called upon, again, to take care of family and of community.
By Allison Addicott
