Today is the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, which I remember distinctly because it disrupted a World Series game between the A’s and the Giants.
I was a newly minted college graduate (having been a precocious child who matriculated at age five, obviously) and living far from home — in Boston. I remember the fall and winter of 1989 well because I was experiencing climate shock (i.e., freezing my ass off). Also, to me at least, it seemed like the world was coming unmoored, and in my mind, the earthquake appeared to kick off a series of momentous events. The Berlin Wall fell less than a month later.
A little over a month after that, some friends and I were at Logan Airport waiting for a rental car so we could drive up to a cabin in Maine to spend Christmas there. (The bastards wanted to show me REAL cold! Fuckers!) A young woman in a Hertz uniform was listening to a small transistor radio and quietly sobbing behind the counter.
I asked her what was wrong, and in accented English, she told me she was Romanian and the Ceaușescu regime was being violently overthrown and she was worried about her family and was trying to find a way to get home. I didn’t know what to say. I wished her the best of luck, got into my rented Ford and drove up to Maine to freeze my ass off some more. I never did find out what happened to her.
Life is frequently fraught, sometimes at the same time for a lot of people. I suppose every period of time is momentous for some poor bastard somewhere. But occasionally events seem to happen in a sequence that makes you feel like you live in particularly interesting times. The end of 1989 was like that for me, starting 25 years ago today. Now get the fuck off my lawn.
[H/T: Buzzfeed, for sending me down memory lane]
Scout211
I felt that quake all the way to the Central Valley. I was in my garage, ready to drive my daughter to soccer practice. We ran out of the garage because tools were dropping and things were swinging. It was a huge jolt and I knew right away it was a “big one” somewhere nearby.
NotMax
Been downhill since JFK was assassinated.
Cluttered Mind
Ugh, even back in 1989, Tim McCarver was there to make sure no one could enjoy watching the World Series on TV.
The Moar You Know
I remember it because I was right on top of the freaking epicenter, and got to watch my beautiful town of Santa Cruz turned into fine, floating clouds of pink dust (disintegrated bricks) in 15 seconds. Not kidding when I say it was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I am still sometimes surprised that I’m still here, walking, talking, breathing and, now, typing.
I mean SF no disrespect (moved there in 1995) but they weren’t the center, it wasn’t their earthquake, and most of the city was barely damaged. Not so in Santa Cruz.
Felonius Monk
@NotMax:
You got that right.
Mnemosyne
Fun fact: Loma Prieta was one of the recent earthquakes caused by the San Andreas fault. We’re all waiting around for the next every-150-years big one from that fault, since we’re just about due.
I asked one of my handyman co-workers what stud finder I should buy to figure out how to fasten our bookcases to the wall in our new apartment, and he handed me a strong magnet instead. A nice strong magnet will cling to the screws they used to put the wall together, so that’s where the stud is.
Eric S.
Nothing substantive to really add. I was a freshman in college watching the game from my dorm. I remember it well.
opiejeanne
I had forgotten which year it was, but I was in SoCal, taking an Early Childhood Development class at the JC. My husband was at the dance studio with our youngest, and they had a tv set up in the lobby for parents to watch the WS game. She would have been six.
We knew people who said they felt it in Santa Barbara in a tall building. I don’t remember there being very many buildings that were tall in SB back then.
The Oakland Fire was in 1991, and the following year we moved to the Oakland area and my husband had the job of making sure that Hayward had sufficient backup generators for emergencies such as a fire.
opiejeanne
@The Moar You Know: I remember the damage to Santa Cruz, and I remember that it got very little coverage. It must have been terrifying in either place. When we moved to the bay area we heard about downtown Hayward and all of the plate glass window fronts popping out of stores along the main drag, lamp posts falling over onto cars, etc. Lots of hysteria there, I know.
opiejeanne
@Cluttered Mind: Yes. Ugh. And we have added a few others equally annoying.
Cervantes
The Ceaușescus, Ma and Pa, were shot to death live (if you’ll pardon the expression) on TV, if you happened to be watching the right, or wrong, channel.
No matter how much violent death one has experienced or seen, no matter how close up, no matter how apparently justified, watching more of it always has the potential to nauseate.
Mike E
@Cluttered Mind: Heh. He’s his own sign of the Apocalypse. The A’s prolly still curse his name!
Va Highlander
@The Moar You Know: My condolences. I had friends there when it happened.
I was in my kitchen, eating an early dinner, in Mountain View. It was an unholy mess, but nothing like Santa Cruz.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: That must have been scary as hell. I’ve never been in an earthquake, and I never want to be. Unlike some natural disasters, there’s really no escape, is there? Unless you happen to be in a helicopter when it starts?
divF
I was in Berkeley, and actually didn’t feel the earthquake. It hit exactly as I was running three flights of stairs to meet Madame, who was picking me up to go watch the WS with friends. I got out of the building and wondered why everyone else was standing around outside, with car alarms going off. We got to our friends’ house, saw on TV the collapsed Cypress structure, and Madame realized she needed to get back to Highland Hospital (the county hospital in Oakland), where she was a just-out-of-med-school intern. She and a couple of other interns were put in charge of the emergency room, while the ER staff physicians headed down to the collapsed freeway.
When WS play resumed, the “first pitch” was actually thrown out by a several representatives of the emergency responders, including Floyd Heun, then Chief of Medicine at Highland. Heun is also the current Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s husband.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: Outside is sometimes a safe place to be; depends on where you are. And you’re right, that one and a couple of others were scary.
Most of them don’t do much damage and the big ones are pretty rare. You deal with storms every year that cause far more damage than the vast majority of earthquakes.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: We were rousted out of bed early in the morning by the 1971 Sylmar Quake, the epicenter was nearly 90 miles away, and stuff was falling off the walls and bookcases in our house. That was the one where the VA hospital pancaked. I wasn’t terrified, no time for that; later we had a lot of excess adrenalin. It lasted a long time, or else time slowed down. I remember picking up our baby, whose crib had danced to the center of his room, and then catching something that jumped off the mantle. All starting from a sound sleep.
I have been in closer quakes that shook us harder but did less damage.
Origuy
I was at work in Santa Clara, in one of those industrial buildings that are called “tilt-ups” because the exterior walls are pre-fabricated and tilted up. It shook pretty badly but no significant damage. I called my sister first. She worked an a public radio station in Evansville, so she would have gotten the information over the news wire. She told me about the Bay Bridge collapse. That was before the Web, and radios didn’t work well inside the building, so we hadn’t heard about it.
Santa Cruz got hit really hard; so did Watsonville, which is the closest town to the epicenter. Whenever a preacher talked about the quake punishing sinful San Francisco, I want to ask them why the church in Watsonville was destroyed.
BGinCHI
Fall ’89 was my first semester of graduate school.
So many memories….
Shared a flat with two German grad students and tried to explain baseball to them. They thought it was stupid and hilarious and then so did I when the Cubs went teets up.
The Moar You Know
@Betty Cracker: You don’t want to be inside. Or under a cliff.
I had friends walking across a field up at UC Santa Cruz who had no idea anything had happened at all.
@opiejeanne: You’re actually dead on right about this. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t worry about earthquakes at all in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I’d prefer to not be in another one that large again.
BGinCHI
Also, Betty and others, if your kids don’t already have Halloween costumes you might want to consider this:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/asda-blood-soaked-american-footballer-costume
kindness
I remember the Loma Preita earthquake. I was blasting along in my car trying to make it home for the game and all of a sudden my car started vibrating and bouncing like it had a flat tire. I pulled over and everyone came poring out of the stores on the street I was on saying there had just been a big earthquake. Got back in and made it home in time to see everyone all out on the field and them eventually calling the game (for almost a month). Damn. Then the stupid A’s swept my beloved Giants. Why couldn’t the A’s lie down and lose to the Giants instead of getting beaten by the Dodgers like they did the very next year?
The FSM is not a Giants fan apparently.
@The Moar You Know: Yea well that’s because all of downtown Santa Cruz was old unreinforced brick buildings.
aimai
@Betty Cracker: I was in an Earthquake in Nepal–already can’t remember the date–sometime between 1986 and 89. What I remember is that the earthquake happened while I was in Kathmandu, not in my village in the Eastern Region (which was hard hit). So after surveying the damage in Kathmandu I just went on about my day until a friend bicycled over to ask me if I’d thought to call my parents and let them know I was ok. With the insouisance of youth this had not occured to me and of course this was before cel phones so I had to go hunt for someone who had a phone. I probably went to the US embassy to call from there. I really only waited a few hours to call but my “fucking grandfather” as one of my friends said admiringly had been johnny on the spot, heard about the earthquake and already called my mother and woken her out of a sound sleep to demand to know if I was ok. If he hadn’t called her in advance to tell her she would only have had a couple of hours of worry before I called in. I remember calling her, innocently, and having her burst into sobs on the phone–she had been in agony for hours thinking I was in my remote village, crushed under the rubble.
Amir Khalid
I was in Taipei in June 2000, on the eve of some Big Ideas conference I was covering, when the shaking of my hotel room woke me up at 2:20 am. It was scary for someone who’d never experienced even the slightest earth tremor before. (The fault line nearest to Peninsular Malaysia is off Sumatra’s west coast.) But the earthquake in the centre of the island killed only two people; the conference went on as normal, and the President of Taiwan showed up for the opening ceremony.
I am certain that ten years ago I felt a mild aftershock from the earthquake that triggered the big tsunami, and that I saw my open wardrobe door vibrate. But no one else I know here remembers feeling anything.
Cervantes
@aimai: That was probably in 1988.
divF
@The Moar You Know:
Downtown Santa Cruz was indeed devastated – brick and mortar is pretty much the worst possible building material from a seismic standpoint. But there was severe damage intermittently up and down the Bay Area – the Cypress viaduct collapsing (where most of the deaths occurred), the Bay Bridge eastern span, rows of houses in the SF Marina district collapsing by 1/2 story (landfill is a bad place to build).
Rosalita
I was in Pasadena for that earthquake, too far away for any effects. The 880 bridge collapse part of it was pretty devastating. Horror stories.
Seanly
I was in the fall of my senior year of college (way, way far away). I was going to watch a little of the game, but a few minutes in the feed gave out. I turned off the TV, did some homework & then went to my buddies house to watch the game & drink some beer. When I got in they asked if I’d been heard about the earthquake. Did I mention that I was a civil engineering student?
I know a lot of folks hate on McCarver, but I think he & Michaels did a great job of reporting that evening.
Anywho… the Loma Prieta EQ was significant in seismic engineering (as was the Northridge EQ 5 years later). I could do a lengthy post about any of the myriad issues surrounding seismic issues – why the Nimitz Freeway collapsed & the change in column design that resulted or why you can never make an EQ-proof structure are just a couple of issues. Another fun issue was one of my professors who thought the engineering community’s focus on large buildings performance in EQ’s was misplaced – he felt that low rise buildings (aka houses) should be the focus since a lot of EQ’s happen when people are still at home and also occur only infrequently in urban downtowns.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
I would disagree that the earthquake “kicked off” that season of momentous events, although it was certainly emblematic of the year. But the Exxon Valdez spill happened in March, followed a few months later that summer by Tienanmin Square, and to my mind, those were things that really started everything going all kerflooey.
Edit: I was forgetting Hurricane Hugo, in September 1989. Quite a year, wasn’t it?
Loneoak
@The Moar You Know:
A friend of mine was in downtown SC working outside the original Lulu Carpenter’s. As soon as it hit, he got under his table as his Californian wife had instructed him. The two people to die in downtown that die were on either side of him when the brick facade collapsed.
Loneoak
@The Moar You Know: Btw, are you still in the area?
the Conster
@divF:
My friend in the Marina lost her house that day. No one could go get anything from inside them for weeks, IIRC.
RAM
Isn’t that the earthquake where the sportscaster announced “There’s been a shake at the Stick!”?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
There was an earthquake when I was in Xi’an last summer, though the epicenter was well away from the city and I don’t think there was any damage in the city (though a few dozen deaths in the next province). I was eating breakfast in the restaurant at the top of the hotel we were staying in and felt the swaying. I thought I was just feeling lightheaded and dizzy while it was happening.
Mike E
@kindness:
Cincinnati in ’90, owned by that
NaziAutobahn lovin’ Marge Schott…Eric Davis famously bruised his kidney whilst winning that series for her team, but she elected to not visit him in the hospital or thank him either for his heroism. He was a Red, but brown also. Too.SectionH
We were homeward bound the evening of the Loma Prieta quake, but had stopped in Cincinnati for dinner. There was a TV in the bar across the room, which I could see but had been ignoring, but suddenly instead of game coverage, there were srsly alarming shots of the Bay Bridge span that collapsed on one end iirc. We ended up at a friend’s house in Cinti for a number of hours watching the coverage and hoping all our Bay Area friends were ok. (They were.)
That was memorable enough, but later in October, we drove from The Hague to Zagreb and back. Had a lot of personally interesting moments, but it was also exceedingly obvious that the Iron Curtain was coming apart big-time. Especially on our return drive on the 30th, the autobahns in Austria and Germany were flooded with Ladas and Trabants full of families and their stuff. People were driving into Austria and then around and north into West Germany.
It was amazing and exciting but not surprising when the Wall came down little more than a week later.
Seanly
Also, while being outside in an EQ is generally safer, if you’re on the sidewalk you need to watch for falling debris…
The brick or stone facades of many older buildings aren’t attached very well. Large chunks of the facade can come off with very little movement. My uncle who lives in Berkeley was almost hit by a chunk off a building during an EQ.
Cacti
My family had just finished moving from the St. Louis area to western North Carolina for my Dad’s work. As I was just entering 8th grade, this move was a seismic event in my childhood (pun intended), and served as the dividing line between my early childhood/tweens, and my teenage years.
I had never lived outside of the St. Louis area before that, and had no extended family or friends waiting for me at the other end of the move. All in all, a tough thing to have go through when you’re just entering your teens.
Betty Cracker
@aimai: Wow, that must have scared the crap out of your mom!
burnspbesq
My first quake experience was a minor little shake sometime in the fall of 1980. I was in class in a basement classroom at USC Law when one of my classmates bolted from the room for no apparent reason. A few seconds later the rectangular room tried to become a parallelogram. Found out later that the guy who bolted was sitting in a classroom at Notre Dame HS in Sherman Oaks when the Sylmar quake hit.
I was sitting in my car at a traffic light in Santa Ana when Northridge hit. My car went straight up in the air about a foot. That was interesting.
Loneoak
If you’ve never driven across the new Bay Bridge at night, you should. It’s a genuinely great bridge.
opiejeanne
@Cacti: we did that to our girls, but the SF area had a job for my husband so we couldn’t stay in Riverside in SoCal. Talk about shock: my kids’ wardrobe consisted of shorts and they were freezing. It was early December and the weather was still mild in SoCal.
aimai
@Cervantes: Yeah. I went back to my village afterwards–very weird experience since the pathways you walked to get there had sometimes vanished and I got back at night and there were no lights as the houses had their shutters drawn closed.
KG
born and bred in Southern California, worst quake I remember was the Northridge quake in 1994. That one was bad, pretty much ruined every insurer who offered earthquake insurance. It was also pretty responsible for changing building codes out here.
Mnemosyne
@Seanly:
I used to go to a place called the Silent Movie Theater in LA when I lived on the Westside and when Northridge happened, the owner told us that there was very little damage, because the building had been built with an archaic earthquake-proofing system of stacked 2×4’s inside the walls that dissipated the force of the earthquake. I think they had a few film cans fall over and that was about it.
ETA: You also have to watch out for overhead power lines if you’re outside during an earthquake.
opiejeanne
@burnspbesq: How was he sitting in a classroom when the Sylmar quake hit? That thing hit very early in the morning (6am) before any of the local schools had started for the day, which saved a lot of lives.
Cervantes
@aimai:
Earthquakes by their very nature are humbling.
As was your grandfather.
opiejeanne
@Loneoak: That’s beautiful. Did they leave the old bridge standing or is that a merge of two photos?
The Moar You Know
@Loneoak: Left in 2000 when the city of San Francisco conspired with all the newly-wealthy dot-bomb businesses to shove out all the poors. Of which I was one at the time.
Let me tell you something true, when government and business get together on the same page there is nothing they can’t make happen.
roxy
I and two of my sisters were at Candlestick sitting in the center field pull out section when the earthquake hit. I looked up and could see the upper deck swaying and could also hear the creaking. This was my World Series dream the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. Of course I was rooting for the Giants to win.
gogol's wife
@Cervantes:
I didn’t catch it live, but I saw the replay on TV in Moscow (although what they showed was the bodies immediately after the execution). It was sickening indeed, no matter what horrible criminals they were. There was no rejoicing in the household I was staying in.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
If I’m not mistaken, there’s a skyscraper in Taipei with a huge metal ball inside it, suspended by cables.It’s a pendulum to absorb the momentum from the top of the building shaking in an earthquake. So far, the building has not fallen down.
gogol's wife
@Amir Khalid:
Yes and I want one of those stuffed replica toys they sell of it. You probably don’t know what I’m talking about so I’ll try to find a link.
TooManyJens
I remember that because my dad was in the hospital at the time, recovering from quadruple bypass surgery. (At age 48. We’re cardiac overachievers in our family.) He was trying to watch the game, then, earthquake.
TG Chicago
Best Newsmax headline evar?
Dick Morris: GOP Senate Can Curb Ebola
Cervantes
@opiejeanne:
You’re right.
There were aftershocks for quite a while afterwards, some quite substantial.
The Dangerman
@Loneoak:
Seconded; I’m not an architecture freak but that is a beautiful structure (I did it in daytime; I may have to go back for a look at night).
I don’t want to be anywhere in Greater LA when The Big One hits (and, instead, choose to live around the proverbial corner from Diablo Canyon, which could be either safe or a disaster waiting to happen in a big quake).
TEL
I remember that earthquake well. I was in college in Oregon and my roommate was from Oakland. We spent the next several hours waiting for her parents to call – they were fine, fortunately.
Apparently I learned nothing from that experience as I now live in Oakland on the edge of the Hayward fault (in the foothills, for any locals)!
gogol's wife
@Amir Khalid:
It’s called a “tuned mass damper.” Scroll down on this page to see a “damper baby,” the cute toys they’ve made out of it to brand the skyscraper, Taipei 101:
http://blog.quickbooksusers.com/quickbooks/like-a-660-ton-steel-ball-for-quickbooks/
Ruckus
Loma Prieta for you, Northridge for me. It was 20 yrs ago Jan this yr and it has been a whole lot of downhill ever since. Two businesses lost, two relationships ended, one president impeached for something not illegal, the chenny presidency, two wars for absolutely nothing(other than profit), the largest economic recession.
And on top of that getting old.
Now I’d like to blame it all on that earthquake but most of that stuff had known other causes and the perpetrators of those disasters shouldn’t be let off the hook.
gogol's wife
@Amir Khalid:
It’s called a “tuned mass damper.” For some reason when I put the link here I can’t comment. If you google “Taipei 101” you’ll probably find a picture of the “damper babies,” these toys they made to brand the skyscraper.
Mnemosyne
@TEL:
I mentioned in another thread that I got to hear Dr.
Kate HuttonLucy Jones speak a couple of months ago and one of the questions from the audience was where she lived to be safe from earthquakes. She said, “Pasadena,” because there’s really nowhere to live in California that’s safe from earthquakes. You’re within a few miles of a fault pretty much anywhere in the state.Her two main pieces of advice were to not buy a house that has a fault line running through the property and have the house professionally inspected for earthquake safety before you buy it. Oh, and don’t live in a building with a soft first story.
ETA: D’oh! Sorry, I keep getting Dr. Kate and Dr. Lucy mixed up. It was Dr. Lucy Jones whose speech I saw. I think Dr. Kate is in semi-retirement now since she’s getting into her 70s.
Loneoak
@opiejeanne:
They’re in the process of disassembling the old one, altho apparently nesting birds are slowing down the process.
burnspbesq
The State filed its response to the plaintiffs’ application for relief from the stay pending appeal in the Texas voter-ID case yesterday. It’s full of lies about what is an isn’t in the record, but they are the kind of lies that Scalia (the Circuit Justice responsible for hearing emergency matters from the Fifth Circuit) might use two straws to slurp up.
The private plaintiffs filed a reply last night, and in it, they did something I think was pretty smart. The quoted the language from the Shelby County opinion about the full range of relief under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act continuing to be available, and basically said “if this case wasn’t what you had in mind when you said that, then what case did you have in mind.”
http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/10/texas-sees-no-emergency-on-voter-id-law/
Gonna be interesting. Does Scalia the Republican win out over Scalia the Scholar, or vice versa?
Loneoak
@Mnemosyne: I’m surprised she didn’t mention soil composition. There are parts of the Santa Cruz mountains that are on top of granite and they had zero damage from the quake that tore apart many buildings on sandy soil just down the road. Sand actually amplifies shaking, but a good layer of rock will not.
opiejeanne
@TEL: We lived in Castro Valley for 9 years, 92-2001. The fault line runs underneath many municipal buildings in the bay area including city halls and police stations. It’s been a few years since I knew the number, but the old Hayward City Hall was built right on top of it, and you could see by the curbs and sidewalks exactly where it ran. They built the new new city hall a couple of blocks away. It’s a tinkertoy building, huge I-beams running diagonally up the inside. It wasn’t what anyone wanted except the city council, which just wanted it finished quickly.
Mnemosyne
@Loneoak:
We’re in So Cal, so that was her primary focus during the talk. I don’t think our soil is very sandy down here (our primary ranges are the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains) — most people complain about it being rocky and hard-packed if they need to do any kind of building.
lurker dean
@Amir Khalid: wow, never heard of that building. looks interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_101
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
When I moved to OH many people asked me how could I live in CA with all the earthquakes. I pointed out that one of the largest quakes in US history was outside of Dayton, OH. Now they don’t have them as often and when one hits farmland there isn’t as much damage but really there aren’t many places on earth where you are immune from some type of natural disaster. Here we have earthquakes and fire, a good part of the country gets tornadoes, then you have ice storms, hurricanes, lightning storms…..
Violet
Earthquakes are scary because the ground isn’t supposed to move. Storms are scary but stuff happens in the sky (birds fly, clouds move, wind blows) and stuff falls from the sky (rain, hail, snow, balls get thrown and come down) all the time. The earth is supposed to be stable. We build things on it. When it’s not, it really messes with the sense of how things are supposed to be.
Mike J
I don’t think I’ve ever been in anything bigger than a 4.5, and I’m ok with that.
opiejeanne
@Loneoak: We used to live in a 1910 Arts and Crafts bungalow in downtown Riverside. It was a big two-storey wood-frame house and had only a couple of cracks in the plaster when we bought it in 1984. We had a couple of pretty good shakes while we lived there, and there was one that scared the dickens out of my son early one morning when he was the only one home. Must have been 1991 or 92. But there were no new cracks in the old plaster that appeared.
We had a foreign exchange student visiting for 3 weeks before she went home to Norway, and a mild earthquake struck in the middle of the night. Everyone upstairs piled out of bed and was standing in the stairwell, and she stumbled out of her room and said, “What in the world was that???” She had spent the entire year in SF and had not experienced a single tremor, and she’s ready to go home and is scared out of her socks. We were secretly pleased that she had finally gotten the entire California experience, short of mudslides and firestorms which we considered optional.
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
I grew up with tornadoes, floods, and blizzards in Illinois. I did not enjoy Northridge, but it didn’t freak me out enough to make me willing to go back to dealing with ice and snow six months out of the year.
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: The soil in SoCal tends to be either clay or decomposed granite.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
When I was contemplating my next move in life while working in OH I sat down with a map to decide where to move. South of the Mason Dixon – out. Anyplace it snows – out. Rains all the time – out(well HI maybe). That didn’t actually leave a lot of places and notice that earthquakes were not a deciding factor.
opiejeanne
@Ruckus: Give me earthquakes instead of tornadoes.
We were just in Florence, Italy about a month ago and there was a tornado. In freaking Florence.
We missed the exciting parts, the wind and whatnot, because we were across the Arno in the kitchen of a restaurant off of a very narrow and long alley between very tall buildings. We saw the hail and the torrential downpour that followed, but had no idea that there had been this huge windstorm that swept through town. The Pitti Palace, Town Hall, the Uffizi, and just about every other public building was closed for at least a few hours afterwards, some for a couple of days, to assess and repair damage. The big tree in the courtyard behind our room had been reduced to splinters or thrust through the windows of the building across the courtyard, and our room had to be mopped out because the windows had blown open. Some of the rooms had their windows ripped out of the frames.
kdaug
+/- 1 year, Betty. I remember it well.
Mnemosyne
@opiejeanne:
As I understand it, older homes that have made it this long are usually pretty earthquake-safe, either because they were built well or because they had upgrades added afterwards. The new apartment we’re moving into was built in 1990, so at least we know it made it through Northridge.
@Ruckus:
Marc Maron (who does the WTF? podcast) had an interview with Chicago native Bob Newhart who said that the first time he came to California, his reaction was, Why did no one tell me that weather like this existed? I looked it up one time and the period when I grew up in Chicago had something like 8 of the 15 coldest winter days on record. I’m willing to put up with a little ground shaking in exchange for No Goddamned Winter.
PsiFighter37
I felt an earthquake 2 years ago (I think) that was determined to be caused by fracking in Eric Cantor’s district. In NYC, there was some mild freaking out, but it wasn’t that bad at all. My wife was in an elevator and missed the whole thing.
I did feel the ’94 earthquake in SoCal, but it’s so long ago (and I lived in the desert) that I barely remember it.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
If I was ever of a mind to get a tattoo that would be in the running as the one and only.
PsiFighter37
@efgoldman: Geno Smith über älles, dontcha know
PF37 +2 and stuck on a bus going to Long Island
the Conster
@PsiFighter37:
That quake was on my birthday – 8/23. I was on the 52nd flr of the Hancock tower in Boston. Wheeee!
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: I have relatives in Ohio who I really don’t want coming out here between November and March because they’ll probably spend most of their time sobbing over what could have been.
I went there for the first time last November. Ha. FUCK THAT. I’d rather live under a bridge here than a mansion there.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
I went back to Chicago to visit my in-laws in February of 2011, right after Snowpocalypse hit the city. My husband has now banned me from visiting Chicago in the winter except in a dire emergency because I was so miserable and took the weather so personally. I had forgotten that you’re pretty much completely trapped indoors during the winter and drove both of us insane.
scav
@opiejeanne: Yup. 5th floor, UCSB, tiny little sway. “O. Cool. Tiny earthquake.” Keep grading. Someone with radio yells down the hall “That was in San Francisco!” revaluation.
Betty Cracker
@efgoldman: I would have wept with gratitude in the face of such hospitality. I was mostly living on free happy hour hors d’oeuvres at the time.
Ruckus
@scav:
I was about 4-5 miles as the crow flies from the Northridge epicenter in 94. As quakes go it was unusual in that most of the movement was vertical. Things that weighed over 3 tons were raised in the air 8-12 inches. It was pretty impressive actually.
scav
@Ruckus: That would have been, interesting. As I grew up on solid granite, I had gotten used the sharp jolts or rattles, so my first unconsolidated extended rolling jiggler was distinctly odd.
JCT
@opiejeanne: I remember that one – was about 9 and living in a rented house in Brentwood, siblings and I were sleeping in the living room. Remember my the entire room lurching up at an angle sending my brother’s bed (on wheels) flying into mine and my father appearing in the doorway to grab all of us while my mother huddled in a doorway. Was like being in a rocking ship – terrifying. I can still picture this.
Was watching that WS in NYC when the Loma Prieta quake hit – my late aunt was a legal secretary and was working late in one of the higher floors of the TransAmerica building. She said the swaying (that went on for a long time) was so violent that things flew around the office and some of her colleagues vomited from the motion. Crazy.
One of my great aunts had her wedding interrupted by the Long Beach quake (1934?). Apparently that one was scary as hell.
Mnemosyne
@JCT:
Another interesting factoid from Dr. Lucy: they’ve done studies and it turns out that “earthquake weather” is whatever weather there was the last time there was a really big earthquake. So after that Long Beach earthquake in the 1930s, “earthquake weather” was damp and foggy, but after the Sylmar quake, “earthquake weather” was hot and dry. It appears to be a pretty solid and traceable phenomenon across different cultures.
JoyfulA
@PsiFighter37: We in south-central Pennsylvania felt the Virginia quake, too, Or rather my husband did. I kept saying it couldn’t be an earthquake because it didn’t feel like the one from Delaware I felt in Philly sometime in the early 1970s—in the middle of the night on the second floor, I bounced out of bed.
JCT
@Mnemosyne: That’s cool – never heard that one!
PhoenixRising
October 17, 1989: The day I finally talked one extremely fine young lady from a culture in which female sexuality is tightly controlled up to my dorm room in Oakland.
About 5pm.
It’s not really a good memory, although the first few minutes had a LOT of potential. (That was an energy joke, for the engineers & physicists out there.)
She never agreed to the 4th date, and I feel that it wasn’t anything I said.
True story.
Tehanu
@Betty Cracker:
People who don’t live in earthquake country always say things like this. But you’re a Floridian, Betty; you must have been through hurricanes, no? A friend of mine was in Miami during one of the big ones (Camille? Charles? something like that) and I asked him what it was like. He said, “Well, you remember the Northridge quake, right, the big one in 1994? It lasted 45 seconds. The hurricane was exactly like that, except it went on for 12 hours.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Driving home on 880, thinking that is a strange gust of wind and then ALL the radios going dead. Then getting home and on the TV stations still on showing the Cyprus structure burning.
Net home damage from Loma Prita – one book knocked over.
Tehanu
@Loneoak:
When the Northridge quake hit we were living on a hillside that had been scraped away to flatten it for our street. Our house was on the bedrock side and all we lost was a few glasses that fell out of a kitchen cabinet. The house directly across the street from us, which was built on the fill that had been scraped away, literally broke in two — the back half broke off and slid down the hill.
My favorite story about that quake is that, because it happened at 4:00 a.m. and knocked out most of the lights in L.A., people started calling 911 to report a mysterious silver cloud in the sky. It was the stars.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker:
Loma Prita lasted 8 seconds.
Linnaeus
The only earthquake I ever experienced directly was the Nisqually earthquake up here in Washington in 2001. When I felt it, I thought that maybe a big truck was rolling by, and then someone in the room said that we were having an earthquake. So I took cover for a little while and then went outside where everyone was gathering. We waited about half an hour, went back inside, and continued doing what we were doing before the earthquake.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne:
Eh, I can deal with winter. We can’t all live in California, and you can’t drink sunshine anyway.
Ruckus
@Linnaeus:
There is always a downside. We may learn to regret our choice due to the one we currently have. But we’ve decided that water in solid form and falling out of the sky on our heads every year is not one we can live with.
YMMV.
Linnaeus
@Ruckus:
Hey, I get it. It’s cool.
As some of us say here in the Northwest, it’s not rain, it’s liquid sunshine.
trollhattan
I was at home in Sactown with the teebee on to the game when the house started rocking and rolling. Looked at the pool through the kitchen window: the water gathered in the middle in a big mound that collapsed and sloshed over the edges then regathered in the center. Literally rinse and repeat. Had enough time to call the GF and discuss the quake as it was happening–seemed to take forever to end but probably less than a minute and a half.
When they cut from the game to aerial footage I picked out the collapsed Oakland freeway immediately, but it took a couple hours for them to address it. The Marina District and Bay Bridge got all the attention.
We’ve never experienced the big one. My FIL’s mother lived through the great SF quake and lord help us when we get one of that strength.
trollhattan
@efgoldman:
Weird, weird, weird. They basically give up on Harvin for dryer lint and a box of Junior Mints. Wonder what the untold story might be?
Bill D.
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The Cypress structure fell down but didn’t burn because it’s concrete. The burning you saw was probably collapsed buildings in the Marina District in SF.
trollhattan
@Bill D.:
You’re right but flattened cars on the Cypress were burning, which also showed on video.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: Harvin has a history of health issues going back to his Gator days. Maybe it’s something like that.
Bill D.
@trollhattan: Just opened yesterday’s paper, which I had not gotten to until now, and found out that you’re right. I’d forgotten about that part, but seeing the photo reminds me now.