NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/ca/earthqua/1344

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-18 | 7.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!unix!unix.sri.com!hannah
From: [e-mail] (Marsha Jo Hannah)
Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes
Subject: Re: San Francisco Earthquake 89
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 18 Nov 92 19:21:23 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
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Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 123
In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 16 Nov 92 07:21:57 GMT

I managed to "miss" the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  I was driving
home up the "La Honda Grade" section of Hwy 84---a twisting, slightly
bumpy state highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains, approx 30 miles NW of
the epicenter, but within a mile of the San Andreas Fault.  After the
fact, I vaguely recalled a brief period of driving during which I had
detected a little extra bumpiness and had wondered whether the
recently-replaced shocks on my car were wearing out already---that was
apparently a 7.1 earthquake going by!  However, my "shock-absorber
problem" soon disappeared, so I shrugged it off as poorly-maintained
pavement.  When I got up onto Skyline Blvd (Hwy 35), I noticed a few
places where there were head-sized rocks down on the roadway, but we
had had strong east winds in the previous days, and that will
sometimes "loosen" rocks to the point that the next passing semi
causes them to fall.  (I had had the car radio on earlier, but had
turned it off when I stopped at the Post Office for the mail, then
hadn't turned it back on because the World Series game was about to
start at Candlestick park, and I didn't particularly want to listen to
the pre-game hype.)

At home, I drove directly to the barn, to let the fat donkey out of
the "diet corral" onto pasture with the horses.  As I approached the
barn, I noticed all sorts of things knocked over---fence panels that
had been leaning on the barn were now leaning on the horse trailer, 2
ladders that had leaned on a wall were now on the floor, etc.  Again,
my initial reaction was to attribute this to an "everyday" cause---I
figured that I had forgotten to latch a gate somewhere, and the horses
had been loose, "playing" with things.  I rushed into the feed/tack
room to see what they had gotten into there---hmmm, the box of apples
on the counter was untouched (therefore the damage couldn't have been
due to loose equines!), and every drawer in the counter was exactly
half open.  At that point, it finally dawned on me that maybe there
had been a larger-than-usual earthquake that day.  I checked the
donkey, who was rather nervous, displaying an attitude that I would
characterize as "I'm *really* very sorry, Mom; whatever I did to
deserve *that*, I promise never, *ever* to do it again!"  I also
noticed that the old bathtub of water that I had filled for the
equines that morning was now only half full, with large amounts of
water sloshed out onto the ground on either side of the tub.  Yup,
earthquake all right.  I hiked out to check on the horses, who were
grazing quietly; they "inquired" if it was feeding time yet; I told
them I was just checking, and since they were OK, I had a lot of other
things to go check.

I then got back into my car to drive back to our house.  I still
didn't turn on the radio, figuring that since the pre-5:00 news
reports hadn't mentioned any earthquakes, and since I hadn't felt
anything since then, it must have been a very local smallish quake.
Funny how our thought processes work on these things!

Back at the house, I found a variety of minor problems---a few things
had come out of cabinets in the kitchen.  Fortunately, the dish- and
glass-cupboard was in-line with the line from us to the epicenter, so
nothing had come out of that cabinet.  The only permanent damage was a
bottle of aspirin that had "jumped" out of the oven cabinet, oriented
perpendicular to the quake direction; it had broken on the tile floor,
so I swept up the pieces.  Several knicknacks had fallen off of
shelves and off of the walls; I put them back in place, setting the
few broken ones aside for subsequent gluing.  The big stereo cabinet
had rolled out about a foot from the wall.  One bookcase had spilled a
few of its paperbacks in the bedroom.  And, of course, the power was
out, but then that happens at the slightest provocation, out where we
live.  I was on my way to check our 5000-gallon water storage tank
(which just sits on a concrete slab) when a couple of neighbors
drove up to check if we were OK.  Only then did I hear the news of
the Cypress collapse, the Bay Bridge failure, the Marina District
fire, etc!

Shortly after that, a co-worker (whose phone was mysteriously still
working well) called to relay the message that my husband was fine---
he had been on his way to the home of another co-worker for a World
Series party.  He rode out the quake in his car, stopped in traffic at
a railroad crossing, watching the other cars bounce and the overhead
power wires sway.  He realized the seriousness of the quake, and
wanted to go home and check on things, but he was "convoying" a
visiting sponsor of our work up to the game party, and couldn't just
abandon the guy in the middle of unfamiliar neighborhoods.  After
delivering the guy to the party site (and finding the party cancelled
for lack of a game to watch on TV), he headed home to help me pick up
all the knocked over things in various out-buildings, set up the
Coleman camp stove, start the generator so we could watch the TV
coverage, etc.

Structurally, our house (which we built ourselves on what passes for
bedrock on the west side of the fault) was fine.  The only one of our
out-buildings that sustained any damage was the 12x16' woodshed, which
had only been toenailed to its "foundation" pier blocks---it had
shifted about 3", almost coming off of the blocks, and of course, all
of the firewood stacked in it had tumbled into a huge heap.  We just
left it that way until the following summer, i.e. until we had used up
most of the firewood, then we simply winched the building back into
place and *bolted* it to its foundation before filling it with wood,
again.

It was business as usual for a while at work (Menlo Park), until
someone carefully inspected the structure of the office building that
we work in.  It was designed similarly to the collapsed Cypress
structure---concrete floors, held up by widely-spaced concrete
columns, most of which were cracked, some seriously.  Co-workers in
the building at the time said it gave them quite a ride, as the
building is on "geologic fill"---old alluvial plains.  Damage was
mostly confined to the wing perpendicular to the direction to the
epicenter; that wing was evacuated for 3 weeks, while they retrofitted
a steel skeleton to the building, and literally epoxied the many
cracks back together.  My husband worked in a cubicle set up in a
conference room in another wing of the building; I worked at home,
mostly reading manuals, as the smell of the glue they were using gave
me splitting headaches.

Being on the Peninsula after the quake was sort of odd.  We had seen
the news broadcasts of the damage in San Francisco and Oakland to the
north of us and in Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and Watsonville to the
south.  Every day, we listened to broadcasts about the traffic snarls
as CalTrans tried to get the major commute highways functioning again.
Yet here in the middle, it was hard to tell there had been an
earthquake.  Oh, occasionally, we would drive by a house whose brick
privacy fence had fallen over, or some such other minor damage, but it
was almost as if the earthquake had happened in another country.

Did we make any changes to our life after this "warning"?  Well, I
started reading ca.earthquakes regularly....

Marsha Jo Hannah
La Honda, CA