August 20, 2005 – Aftermath of Loma Prieta

August 20, 2005 – Aftermath of Loma Prieta

In the aftermath of the 15 second of white-as-a-sheet terror my wife IM and I experienced on Tuesday October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM when the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta Earthquake struck, we walked restlessly about the backyard in a state of shock, venturing into the house occasionally to check if the power had been restored. IM had spoken to our daughter ME at U.C. Irvine and we told ME to call her grandparents in El Paso to let them know we were okay. Our great worry was our second daughter RD, who was at school at U.C. Santa Cruz. Because news reports from our battery powered radio were scant, we had no idea of what damage had befallen other towns in the Bay Area. Somehow, neither IM nor I were experiencing any sense of foreboding or dread over RD. We were just anxious to hear from her to know where she was. By now, the phone was producing a constant busy signal. We could not call out, as all the circuits were jammed.

We had done some of the tasks public service broadcasts had instructed us to do periodically over the years in case of an earthquake. We checked for the smell of gas, but we didn’t shut off the gas coming into the house. Though gas was still available, it did us little good in preparing our dinner—our stove was electric. We were also reluctant to open the refrigerator hoping the power would return before its entire contents had to be tossed. The truth be known was neither of us was very hungry. Fear, surplus adrenalin, and continuing worry for our daughter RD was suppressing any hunger we had. IM and I were both so restless we were unable to sit or stay in one place. After a good hour or so with no further movement of the earth, we felt safe enough to tour the house for damage beyond the fallen framed posters. I cleared away the glass; glad to have something to occupy my mind, while IM inspected the bedrooms upstairs. The den was remarkably undisturbed though the funky shelf resting atop the desk where the computer sat would have to be slid back in place. The paperback and hard cover books stacked in shelves around the tiny closet of the den had ridden the wave without falling.

The mess from the two fallen framed posters was soon cleared away and IM and I resumed our restless wandering. Sometime around 7:00 PM, nearly two hours after the shaking ended, ME managed to get through again. She had spoken with RD’s boyfriend—like ME, a student at U.C. Irvine—who somehow got a call through to RD’s dorm at U.C. Santa Cruz. She was fine. The campus had come through relatively unscathed, but downtown Santa Cruz had suffered major damage. RD would try to call home later when the lines freed up. From ME, we also learned that the highways between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz and Monterey had been closed by rockslides and debris blocking sections on California Highways 17 and 152. We couldn’t drive over to collect RD and she couldn’t drive herself home, though she was actually safer at school.

Just as our phone conversation was winding down, the lights came back on and the television, which we had neglected to turn off, flashed on screen the San Francisco news broadcast running damage reports from various cities in the Bay Area. The recorded video on the screen showed the mid-span of the Oakland Bay Bridge where the one section of roadbed had toppled from the upper deck to the lower deck. In the aftermath of the collapse, a frightened motorist traveling at high speed failed to see the missing section and drove his car to his death; another motorist capturing the tragedy on videotape. The video showed views from the television station’s hovering helicopter as well as from a camera crew on the upper deck of the bridge filming the rescue effort near the edge of the fallen section.

Another scene that was getting plenty of airtime was the fire in the Marina District of San Francisco where the fire crews were frantically working to shut off broken gas mains and to find water to fight the raging fires accelerated by the escaping gas. Many broken water mains in the area of the fire had forced crews to improvise portable hydrants and hose tenders to pump water from the Bay to fight back the blaze. I discovered later that the earthquake had damage the home of a PR lady I dealt with a good deal. She was in Japan at the time of the disaster and watched helplessly Japanese TV and CNN broadcasts showed her neighborhood in flames. Television loves a good fire: color, chaos, conflict, and danger. Elsewhere in the city at Sixth and Bluxome Streets, a wall of bricks collapsed killing six people. The count of the dead attributed to the disaster would reach nearly 70.

The largest number, suffering their fate in a stretch of road just east of the impassable Bay Bridge on the collapsed section of the Cypress Freeway, a 3-mile stretch of the Eastshore Freeway between 18th and 34th streets that brought traffic from California 17 (Interstate 880) into the MacArthur Maze. The Maze is a giant interchange with Interstate 80 going west to San Francisco over the Bay Bridge and in conjunction with Interstate 580 going east to Berkeley, while 580 carries on to Alemeda and northern Contra Costa County, and Interstate 80 ferrying traffic between the East Bay and the San Francisco and Berkeley. The 52-foot wide Cypress Freeway, a two-deck roadway with northbound traffic on the lower deck and southbound traffic above, opened in 1952. Both decks were above ground, the bottom deck resting in the cross member of giant concrete “H” supports, the upper deck lying across the top of the “H”. When the freeway collapsed, the legs of the H broke away at the cross member bringing the upper deck down on top of the lower—the broken legs from the top of the H splayed on either side of the roadway.

The last drama of the disaster would play out in the crushed remains of the Cypress Freeway as ordinary citizens living in the poor neighborhoods that lay in the shadow of the high speed road—now slowed to a stop forever—climbed through the rubble trying to find signs of life emanating from any of the crushed metal coffins buried under tons of concrete and the approaching blackness of night. The rescuers encountered numerous survivors, some carried out, some able to walk out with help, others trapped in the rubble needing help to be extricated. Two of the trapped that were able to escape were six-year old Julio Berumen and his eight-year old sister Cathy, their mother crushed to death in the front seat of their car. And the rescue would go on through the night and the follow day and day after.

By Saturday, the Cypress had become a graveyard with little hope of finding anyone else alive. As structural engineers climbed about the structure beginning at 6:00 AM, one of them saw faint movement in a silver Chevrolet Sprint. Buck Helm, a 57-year old shipping clerk managed to wave his hand faintly and a five hour long rescue ensued after which he was pulled from the rubble to exalted cheering by rescuers’ awed by the man’s escape from death. He had endured 89 hours refusing to give in death. He would survive another 28 days in hospital before succumbing.

IM and I had finally gotten word from RD late Tuesday evening that she was okay and on Saturday, she came home for the weekend, wanting to feel the security of family and the familiarity of her things around her. We all felt that way.