August 19, 2005 – Terror at 5:04 PM, October 17, 1989

August 19, 2005 – Terror at 5:04 PM, October 17, 1989

The morning of Tuesday October 17, 1989 had begun much like any other in Northern California: overnight overcast shrouding the communities hugging the bay was beginning to burn back to the coast. The Sun was taking its time making the fog beat its retreat—daylight savings time would end the weekend after next. I was in my room at the Monterey Sheraton Hotel, having arrived on Sunday afternoon for the Dataquest Semiconductor ’89 Conference, an annual event, featuring the Who’s Who of the industry. Sunday evening us editors had dinner with Pasquale Pistorio, the CEO of SGS Thomson Microelectronics—now known as STMicro. He gave us the essence of what he planned to present during his talk early Monday morning at the Monterey Conference Center. I had sat in on his presentation and found it one of the more interesting ones of the conference. The two-day event featured Dataquest analysts and industry luminaries making presentation on the globalization of the semiconductor industry, which was already well on its way. Besides SGS Thomson, representing Europe the big names in Japanese semiconductors represented the lion’s share of the industry outside the U.S. Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, and others.

Tuesday was the last day of the event and everyone was looking forward to getting back to a normal routine. Rather than stick around to the bitter end at 5:00 PM, I decided to leave at 4:00 PM and make it home before the crowd left Monterey en masse. The drive back was along California Highway 1, Monterey Bay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, still well above the horizon thanks to Daylight Savings Time. From Monterey to Seaside, the bay plays peak a boo hiding behind the developments that dot the bay side of Highway 1. On my left as I pass the Holiday Inn, now the Best Western Beach Resort Monterey, I leave Monterey and enter Seaside and the bay bids me farewell as I start heading inland. The undeveloped open expanse of shifting dunes, locked in battle with the sparse coarse grass covering, that struggles to contain them on either side of Highway 1, probably look much the same as when John Steinbeck wandered the region. Certainly, the landscape of farms growing artichoke and other vegetables that take over from the dunes further north on the scenic road, would look familiar to the author. At Castroville, I leave Highway 1 and head east on Highway 156 and soon reach the 156 interchange with California Highway 101.

When I arrived at home, my wife IM was puttering around the kitchen making dinner and after catching up on our respective days, I dashed upstairs to turn on my computer, a Macintosh Classis with an external hard drive connected to the Mac’s SCSI port—very high tech and fast back then compared to running the computer with the slow built in Mac floppy. The Mac sat on a desk that had a shelf module sitting atop the desk. The module resembled an H that someone had added vertical legs outside each of the original legs and mounted and nailed horizontal shelves between the vertical pairs of legs. Once completed, he had nailed a shelf across the top of all four legs. The hard drive rested in the inside top space between the top shelf and the middle shelf of the H. In the small shelves in the two vertical pairs of legs were books, floppy disks, and a computer modem. The Macintosh sat on the desk in front of the shelf with a SCSI cable running from the back of the computer up to the hard drive.

Just after I had turned on the computer and was waiting for it to boot up, I felt the first movement of the earthquake— it was 5:04 PM—and then in an instant the full force of it began to move the house, like some giant kid playing with a toy. Luckily the earthquake’s movement was trying to push the desk and shelf sideways. If it had been crosswise, I would have been buried under books, a hard drive, and modem, as well as the crazily constructed “H” shelf. I struggled to maintain my balance and tried to leave the room going against the motion of the quake. Once outside the door of my office I was at the top of the staircase to my right. I heard IM screaming my name at the top of her voice and two loud crashes. I stumbled down the stairs two and three at a time—now going in the direction of the quake’s movement—I held on to the handrail to keep from falling headfirst. At the bottom of the stairs I looked left into the kitchen and saw IM hanging on for dear life to the cabinets forming an island in the middle of the kitchen. As soon as I entered the kitchen, the shaking stopped. I saw IM white as a ghost standing rigid as a stone statue.

When I saw nothing had fallen on her, I started laughing hysterically—my expression of relief and as a way to diffuse the terror still on IM’s face. We had just experienced a 6.9 magnitude earthquake and we were still in one piece and the house wasn’t trashed, though once we walked into the living room we found two heavy posters in frames with glass fronts had fallen and the glass had broken. IM was shaking and still scared and I took her outside in the backyard just in case Mother Nature wanted to take another shot as us. The television station that was on the TV when I came in was off the air. We had lost power like much of the rest of the Bay Area. We had a battery-powered radio and I turned it on to hear the announcer stating the obvious—that we had experience a large earthquake. As soon as I got outside the phone rang—the phones back then still worked when the power was out. It was ME our oldest daughter, who was attending U.C. Irvine. She had heard the news and had called to see if we were unhurt. IM spent a good few minutes talking with ME relaying all that we had experienced during the eternity the shaking lasted. It lasted all of fifteen seconds, but terror has a way of stretching time.