October 17, 1989: My wife and I were newlyweds living in a San Francisco apartment with two cats and a bird.
Our wedding took place just eight days earlier in Lake Tahoe.
5 pm: I turned on the TV to watch Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics.
A sports anomaly - both Bay Area baseball teams vying for the championship. What were the odds?
And what were the odds of an earthquake striking at that time?
Our cats felt it moments before we did. They scurried under furniture. We wondered why.
Then the electricity went out and everything began shaking.
My wife and I stood together in our bedroom doorway, a precaution most Californians learned long ago (and probably an old wives tale).
Our apartment building creaked and groaned.
A giant cabinet measuring six feet high, four feet across and two feet deep banged against a wall a few feet away from us. With all of its contents, it must’ve weighed 300 pounds. Bang, bang, bang.
Fifteen seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but for an earthquake that’s an eternity. Neither of us had experienced one as long and powerful as that.
When the quake came to a rolling stop, we assessed our damage. Not much, really. A few glasses fell off a kitchen countertop and smashed, as well as a couple of framed photos on the wall. The cats came out of hiding.
We had received a portable Sony Watchman television as a wedding gift. It looked like a walkie talkie with a tiny screen the size of a matchbook. With the electricity out, the device could operate on batteries.
We saw TV news footage of the Bay Bridge with a car plunging over a broken section to the span below.
They showed the Marina District on fire.
Then I went out into our neighborhood to inspect. I saw almost no damage.
At our neighborhood’s central intersection of 9th and Irving, people were lined up to use the only pay phone, which somehow was still working despite our home phone being dead. Electricity was still out everywhere.
As a result, the Muni train (San Francisco’s above/below ground subway) was inoperable and sitting idle in the intersection. Commuters mistakenly assumed the train had broken down, a fairly common occurrence back then. Some of those passengers weren’t even aware of the earthquake.
Everyone else knew, however. People on the street were orderly. No panic. No crying. No rioting. Not like in the movies or on bad television shows.
I turned on my tiny portable Sony TV unit to show a stranger what was airing on local news. Within seconds, a small crowd had gathered around me to see and hear what was happening - the bridge, the fires. People expressed sighs of sympathy but then went about their business.
After the group dispersed, another stranger approached me and asked, “What’s the score of the game?” He was dead serious.
He didn’t know that Candlestick Park, far across the other side of the city, had to be evacuated and the World Series game was postponed.
We didn’t realize at that time that freeway structures across the bay in Oakland had collapsed atop one another, killing or injuring many motorists.
We later learned that the epicenter was in some South Bay location few of us had ever heard of before - Loma Prieta, a hilly area near Santa Cruz.
But everyone I knew realized that we had experienced the biggest earthquake since 1906. That one had devastated San Francisco.
Many locations throughout Northern California suffered extensive damages and there was unfortunate loss of life.
But by and large the Bay Area survived a 6.9 earthquake better than most places on Earth before or since.
And life went on.
ALSO
The only cultural reference to Loma Prieta I’ve ever found is in a song by the Doobie Brothers called ‘Neal’s Fandango.’
The chorus has these lyrics: “Goin' back, I'm too tired to roam/ Loma Prieta my mountain home/ On the hills above Santa Cruz/ In the place where I spent my youth”
That tune was released on the album Stampede in 1975 - fourteen years before the Loma Prieta earthquake.
What are the odds?
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