A strange thing about the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which struck the Bay Area twenty years ago this Oct. 17 with a 6.9 Richter Scale ferocity: it hit the Marina District particularly hard, compared to other parts of San Francisco. Four died in the Marina. The neighborhood was devastated. Fires broke out. Houses collapsed. Many were permanently driven from their homes. Yet just blocks away, north of Van Ness, in Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights, the glassware was intact. Not a dish was cracked. Odd that the serious damage in this area was contained to the Marina. Later we'd find out about the landfill and the precarious seismic state of the ground where homes were built in the 1920s, where people live today. Many live, it seems, without thinking about the next quake too often or perhaps not at all.
"This is landfill all right," a soil engineer said to me during the days following the quake. "And it's really lousy landfill."
The question will be heard over and over this month: Where we you when the quake hit twenty years ago, if you were here, of course?
It's easy for me to recall where I was at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989. I was on the radio. I'd read the local news updates to the afternoon show, "All Things Considered," on KQED-FM. I remember thinking what a dull story I was reading when the building began to shake violently. It threw my chair against the wall behind me.
I pulled myself back to the microphone, and spoke as calmly as a could, speaking to the engineer behind the glass, "You know, Jerry, I think we're having an earthquake -- a rather severe earthquake."
Jerry Neuman nodded, looking for a way to get out of the studio at 8th & Bryant. You'll recall that area is also built on landfill. The shaking seemed to go on forever, but it was only fifteen seconds. Suddenly we were plunged into darkness, and we were knocked off the air. As I made my way out of the darkened building, there was pandemonium in the hallway. There was no way to get back on the air. As the first temblor subsided, and the aftershocks began, I snapped into action: I went across the street to get a drink. In the saloon, the bartender was rattled. The TV sets that normally rested on high shelves were on the floor, picture tubes shattered. Bottles were there, too, a small sea of broken glass. In the street, high-voltage power lines were down, sputtering and crackling -- shooting sparks across the pavement as a weirdly still dusk settled over The City. Little by little I understood the staggering power of this quake. I walked back to the radio station, which was located under a freeway overpass. Several rivets from the steel roadway frame had popped at at unimaginable speed, like shells from a howitzer, shattering car windshields in the parking lot.
As I looked toward the north, I could see the glow on the horizon from a big fire in the Marina. I assumed the neighborhood -- and my home -- were history. Just like the films I saw of the 1906 quake, I also assumed San Francisco might be swallowed up in flames.
But it time it was clear that The City would survive, and, as I mentioned, most of the town went unscathed. Maybe that's because the epicenter was seventy miles to the south. The 1906 quake's center was a few miles off the Golden Gate. The vulnerable landfill parts of San Francisco provided a map of where the worst would occur next time. A few blocks from the radio station, South-of-Market, an old, brick building on Bluxome St. crashed to the ground, crushing five people to death as they got into their cars. Many escaped injury by leaving work early that day to attend the World Series at Candlestick Park.
When I got back to the Marina, very late that night, I was stunned by the devastation. Buildings had keeled over. The fire that had incinerated scores of apartments was still smoldering. The ominous smell of gas still hovered in the air.
The liquid sand was still pumping out of the cracks in the ruptured sidewalks.
I still remember how still it was that night – not a hint of a breeze off the Bay – and very warm, unusually warm for San Francisco. That made a scary night even spookier. I guess this was what they call “earthquake weather.”
As for being a reporter who lived in the Marina, misery was not hard to find during the days and weeks that followed the quake. There was no running water nor electricity for weeks. The only businesses that were open, it seemed, were the bars. So many people fell off the wagon, it could have been covered as a traffic story. Even Joe DiMaggio had been displaced from his home on Francisco Street. That gives “Joltin’ Joe” new meaning. He joined the legions of homeless at the Marina Middle School, a temporary shelter. In fifteen seconds, the world had been altered dramatically. The Marina, which had been a sleepy village, had been discovered by the outside world, changing the neighborhood forever.
Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham by the Bay, which includes a longer account of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Send your ideas to bruce@northsidesf.com
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