Twenty years ago tomorrow, the great Loma Prieta Earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area. Those of us who were here and experienced the earthquake told stories about it to each other for many months. We comforted our worried, far away family members who were horrified when they heard the Bay Bridge had collapsed (early reports were not quite accurate). Some of us were in boats on the Bay, in cars on the highways or sitting in the stands at the warm-up to the 3rd game of the World Series. The quake started at 5:04 pm local time and rumbled on for 15 seconds.
My family's story ended at about 3 am the next morning, with shots of Maker's Mark being shared between myself, my husband, and Dan - his coworker. We had started out the morning in a fairly typical way. I walked our 13 month old son up the street to his babysitter's house and drove my car into San Francisco, where I was working. My husband, an employee of Lotus Development Corporation at the time, was bound for a District off-site meeting. The group was going to enjoy a tremendous day on a boat on the San Francisco Bay and then several of them were going to catch the World Series game at Candlestick. The October weather was perfect - sunny and warm, almost still and quiet. What those of us who experienced Loma Prieta now call "earthquake weather."
I left San Francisco that afternoon at about 3:30 pm and arrived home on the Peninsula around 4:15. When I got home, I received a call from a friend who needed to be picked up from her post operative knee surgery appointment at her physical therapist. After that I walked up the street to retrieve my son from his babysitter. She (Julie) was out shopping and had left her husband (Mike) in charge of the three kids - my son and their two daughters. They were out front in the yard playing when I arrived. I said hello to Mike and picked up my son. It must have been 5:04 pm because just as I said "what a beautiful day" everything started to shake. The street was literally moving up and down. Mike scooped up his little girls and we crowded together with our babies. I can remember Mike asking "what should we do?" as we watched the street undulate. As soon as the quake was over, Mike, who was a sheet metal contractor at the time, knew exactly what to do. He walked from house to house on the street, making sure that we all knew how to turn off our gas and helped us check for leaks. I returned home to find that some things had fallen over in the house, but everything else seemed o.k. Since this was pre internet, the phone lines were immediately overwhelmed. My family members in Kentucky knew more about what was happening 10 miles from me because they were tuned in to the World Series and watched the announcements about fires in the Marina and the collapse of the Bay Bridge. They were incredibly worried about us. Knowing that my husband was at the game, I waited for him to arrive home.
Meanwhile, at Candlestick Park, my husband and his coworkers were watching the warmups. He said that they didn't really know that an earthquake had happened until they saw the players on the field running over to their families. Thousands of fans exiting "the Stick" that night is another story altogether. The 15 minute drive took 6 hours to accomplish. Traffic was diverted through a pretty dangerous section of San Francisco. My husband, a high strung native New Yorker, stuck as a passenger in the back seat of a bright red BMW driven by a laid back Californian, was losing his mind. You'll have to hear the story from him. It's gotten better over the years. Finally, he and Dan made it back home. Our power was off, the baby was asleep and we pulled out the Maker's Mark. Dan wouldn't be able to get a flight home to Seattle until the next day. The early morning was still warm. It was quiet outside. A little bit of Kentucky whiskey was just perfect.
As I think about that day and night again, I wonder about the long lasting effect that earthquake had on many people. At 5:05 pm on October 17, my brother-in-law stepped out of his apartment at one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco and began to direct traffic. A few years later, he was a San Francisco cop. Our friends, Jim and Millie, never returned to their sweet apartment in the Marina. Instead they moved to Oakland and then on to Paris. Did those 15 seconds propel all of them into making life changes?
I vowed that day that my husband and I would try as hard as we could not to work in San Francisco at the same time. I couldn't imagine one of us not being able to get to our kids in the event of another earthquake. It didn't make much sense, but it made me feel better. So did the shot of Maker's.