NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/ca/earthqua/1361

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-19 | 8.2 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!unix!maslak
From: [e-mail] (Valerie Maslak)
Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes
Subject: Re: San Francisco Earthquake 89
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 20 Nov 92 00:25:17 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, California
Lines: 130

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Marsha Jo Hannah) writes:
>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.

 I work in that building too. I was on the third floor in my office,
on the phone, when I felt a lurch-rumble. I asked the person on the
other end if he'd felt it, and then the big shakes hit. I could hear
the building creaking, acoustic ceiling tiles started falling,
and I jumped into the doorway as a Sun computer jumped off the desk
in the office next door. People were streaming out into the hallway,
but the shaking kept getting worse, and I knew it was a bad one.
I grabbed onto one of the women who was out in the hall and pulled
her into the doorway. We watched as fire extinguishers jumped off
the wall. I had seen about a 2-inch flex in the junction between the
floor and walls of two wings of the building; I was really, really scared.
When the shaking stopped, which seemed like forever, a whole bunch of
people ran for the elevator. I yelled "Don't use the elevators"
but some folks did anyway. Just then the first big aftershock hit.
Back into the doorway. As soon as the shaking stopped I told my
doorway companion we should get out of the building, partly because
I was still feeling a sick shimmer in the floors that made me
nervous. I grabbed my radio and we went down the stairs. The lights
were out and only one of the emergency lights in the stairway was
working. Just as well: in the light of the working one I could see
huge cracks in the concrete walls of the stairwell. There were
several chucks of concrete next to the door to outside, they'd
evidently cracked off from the portico roof. About 30-40 people
were clustered near the door, and we all agreed we should move back
away from the building. There was a wierd calm. My radio was the
only one, so I turned it on and we listened. We all speculated about
the magnitude of the quake (we were all low, as it turned out).
In  few minutes we started to hear sirens; there was a lot of traffic
on the street in front of the building. My doorway companion
is a train-rider; she decided to get a ride home with someone
(it ended up taking her four hours to get home). I live very close;
suddenly it occurred to me I needed to get home. I had been having
my roof redone. I drove home. Two aftershocks rumbled the car as I
waited at a stop light on Middlefield Road. I wondered whether the
roofers had gone home and my 1904 Victorian was in a heap, or the
roofers had been on the roof and were now flat as pancakes in the
driveway. (With half-basement and attic, the roof of my house is 3
stories above the ground!) As I pulled into the driveway I could see
the roofers sitting on my front steps. They HAD been on the roof,
but had held on tight. They said it had been like a roller coaster,
and one roofer said he didn't know he could get so intimate with
roof sheathing....

  I was worried about what I'd find inside. My burgler alarm was
ringing (signalling no power). Inside I found much less mess than
I'd feared: a stack of tapes tumbled on the floor, two Indian pots I hated
to lose broken because they'd fallen off an open shelf...otherwise
everything OK. I shut off the alarm and went back outside.
(Later when I opened my kitchen cabinets I found that a tall stack
of dishes was leaning over like the Tower of Pisa, in the direction
of the quake motion.)  But in general, the solid heart redwood and
douglas fir of my 1904 house held it together. (Later, I had the
cripple walls reinforced and flex pipe put on the gas lines, I put
in an automatic shutoff on the gas line, and I had the chimney
flue replaced with a solid poiur that also binds in the bricks.)

  No phones. No power. I turned my radio back on and heard them
talking about the bridge and the Cypress. I knew that all
my relatives back east would be worried. I worried about ny dauther
in Berkeley who lived right next to the Hayward Fault near the
stadium. I worried about my significant other who worked in Mountain
View in a tilt-up. But until the phones came on there was nothing to
do. The roofers lived north of San Francisco. They decided to stay
at my house if they could find out their families were OK. We sat
out on my back deck. I went into the house every 15 minutes or so to
try the phone. It was several hours before the phone came back.
The first call I got was from a friend who lives in the Bahamas:
they saw the earthquake coverage on a feed for the World Series!
I could make long-distance calls but not local; I called my aunt and
asked her to call everyone else and let them know I was OK, but was
waiting to hear from my daughter and SO. Daughter called from
berkeley saying she had been in the library and books were flyin;
she got under the table. There was a small fire but she was OK.

SO called to say he had been scared witless and hid under his desk.
He was at his parents house (near his office). Roofers called home,
decided to stay overnight in their truck. We cooked chicken outdoors
in  my Weber grill; I opened a bottle of brandy. I slept that night
on the sofa downstairs; in fact I slept downstairs for about a month
afterwards. My house has now been through *two* big earthquakes.

Roofers took the next day off. I didn't blame them.

Next morning I called in to work. I asked my boss if the building had
been inspected because I was worried about what I'd heard and seen
during the quake.  She said that our saftey guys had looked it over;
I asked if the city building department had looked at it. She said
she'd ask. I said I was a nervous wreck and might be in the next day
but not today.

I did go into work the following day, and the evidence of damage to
the building was extensive. But it took lots of staff complaints and
nearly three weeks before they evacuated the building. The day
before they evacuated, I had been sitting in my office, one of whose
walls is one of the concrete "curtain walls" (what Marsha called
pillars) of the building. I heard a funny noise, like rustling paper,
and looked up to see a crack zipping diagonally from one corner
of the room to the other.  That did it. On top of the broken
floor joints at the junctions of the wings where I'd
seen the walls flex, there were the severe
cracks in the stairwells, and also the fact that the woman in the
office with the bouncing Sun had asked me if my floor "felt funny"
the last few days. I marched down to the assistent director's office
and told him if someone real didn't inspect the building I was going
to call the city building inspector. The next day, civil engineers
told our employer that the building was in imminent failure of
collapse. When they inspected the curtain walls they found that many
of them had cracked clear through. No wonder our floors felt funny.

They epoxied the walls and added I-beams for support. The building
now is "as safe as it was before the quake." Pardon me if I don't
feel reassured. We don't have the money to fix it completely, they
say. That would require a complete exoskeleton like they put on the
USGS buildings just next door.