It’s hard for me to believe, but it’s been twelve years now. It seems like it could have been last week; the memory is indelible. Twelve years since the earth shifted, deep under the Santa Cruz mountains, in a little place called Loma Prieta. The shifting lasted fifteen seconds. In those seconds, sixty people lost their lives. Many more lost their homes and businesses. The solidity of the rock beneath our feet was revealed to be an illusion. Millions of people across the world looked on at the first - and probably still only - live, nationally broadcast, prime-time natural disaster.
People unused to earthquakes often express fear at the thought of living on shaky ground. The idea that you can never know when it will happen, or how strong it will be, is frightening. But I like to think that those of us who grew up with “duck and cover” drills have a special knowledge of and respect for the incredible power of our planet. I don’t think I’d be going too far if I say that we are even proud of the quakes, which have given us our familiar landmarks, both real and imagined.
Me, I was in my living room when the shaking started. I was eleven years old, and felt imaginary aftershocks for years. Haven’t felt a single one since.
I remember this. I was sitting down, ready to watch the 3rd game of the World Series, when all of a sudden, the TV started shaking and the signal died.
I’d gone up to a local bar to see a friend’s band play. I was quite early and they had the Series going on the TV and we saw odd movement and finally figured out, along with those we were watching, what was going on. I watched in awe for a few moments (long enough to catch the first helicopter video of the bridge collapse - really, only a few minutes), then ran to the pay phone in the hallway to call my brother, who lived in S.F. A few minutes later it became impossible to reach S.F. by phone. Bro’ had just made it home and had no power, so I watched the TV (~25 yards away) and filled him in on what he could otherwise not find out about what was going on around him.
He’d been at the gym on an exercise bicycle and he told me when it first hit he just thought he was pedalling too hard. My cousin, who lives in L.A., told me that when the quake they had there within the next couple of years hit she was driving to work and thought she’d lost the steering on her car.
The earth moves under my feet, the sky comes a tumbling down…
I was nine months pregnant with my first child. My boss’s brother lived in SF and we were all worrying about that when I went into labor (on the 18th). My daughter was born on the 19th, and the front page of the paper from that day (in Albuquerque) had a picture of the collapsed freeway and the lead story was about a truck driver who had been found under the first level.
I was sitting on my behind in front of the computer (OH MY GOD I’m doing it again) in my home office. Room shakes, just bouncy at first then quickly much more insistant, accompanied by an incredible sound like God’s own express train. I jump into an interior doorway, hang on for dear life, watching as the computer monitor on my desk (20"!) jumps to the floor and starts dancing around the room at the end of it’s power cord. I’m gonna die die die rumble rumble rumble rumble…
Eventually it ends. Everything is deathly still, no traffic sounds out the window, nothing. Except for the distant bray of thousands and thousands of car alarms all going off at once.
My computer is still running, monitor face down under the desk. Power will soon be off for days. I try to call Mrs Squeegee, phone is dead. Moments later, she calls from her office to see if I’m OK; I reassure her, then ask her to immediately call our family in the midwest & tell them we’re okay before the phones get overwhelmed. She does, and a very good thing, it will be at least a day before anyone can easily get a line out, and from the TV shots our loved ones would fear the worst.
Believe it or not, I felt it in Los Angeles. I was watching my afternoon cartoons (being only 9 at the time), and I felt a subtle shimmy. I panicked for a split second, thinking it was a P-wave foretelling a much larger SoCal jolt – I’m an intense seismophobe, have been since the Whittier quake in '86. Just as I was relaxing, my cartoons were interrupted to say that NorCal had just been smacked around hardcore.