Heave Ho

There was a woman quoted a few times in various papers saying that the 6.5 earthquake we had yesterday was nothing compared to the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck Santa Cruz and The Bay Area in 1989. While it is true that the Loma Prieta was a much larger event, caused more damage, and affected more people, for me personally, the 6.5 yesterday was a much larger event.

At the time of the Loma Prieta I was within a half mile of the epicenter. I was outside though, so I was in no real danger. My home suffered almost no damage, and I didn’t lose a day of work. I’ve spent the morning today cleaning up plaster and right now there are a half dozen PG&E trucks across the street trying to find a broken gas line.

The damage to my house was confined to one corner. It seems like south-east corner of my house heaved up more than the rest. For the most part, the plaster damage is confined to the first floor of this south-east corner of the house. That is the foyer, stairwell, and the front wall of the dining room. Some of the skim coat popped off the walls in the kitchen, but that has more to do with the crappy skim coating job.

The Loma Prieta quake lasted 15 seconds. The one yesterday was more like 25 seconds. The last 10 or 15 seconds were very surreal. For the first 2 or 3 seconds of an earthquake you are coming to terms with the fact that you are in an earthquake. The adrenaline surges and you are acting purely on instinct. It is difficult to be subjective and really be aware of what is going on. You simply try to grab on to something.

Most earthquakes only last a few seconds, so they are over as soon as you realize you are in one. The adrenaline has rushed, the flight response kicks in, and by the time you are at the point of panic it is all over. With an earthquake like the one yesterday, after about 7 or 8 seconds in you realize this is not an average earthquake. That is about the time the major jolt hit and it felt like an airplane dropped on the house.

Yesterday, I was in the kitchen when it happened. When the big jolt hit, I was thrown to the floor and the TV came flying out of the cabinet. I grabbed for it and caught it just as it reached the end of the cable and electrical cord tether. By this time plaster is falling and I hear glass break. I’m in front of the eHutch and even though I know it and the big Frankenstein hutch are bolted to the wall, my instinct is to keep the eHutch from falling over and crashing in to the island. I let go of the TV and let it dangle while I grabbed on to the eHutch.

By this time I’m on my feet and trying to survey the damage and see if anything is about to hit me. Things are still moving a lot. This is when it gets very surreal. Both chandeliers are swaying violently and the walls are torquing and swaying back and forth. Unless you are doing hallucinogenics, large, inanimate objects should not appear to move like this. The walls torquing is what caused the poorly done skim coat to pop off the walls in the kitchen. That went on for what seemed like 10 or 15 seconds, but it could have been shorter.

As soon as everything stopped moving I ran to the garage to get a wrench. If there was a gas leak, I needed to shut off the valves at the meters. There is one shut-off for the house and then 3 for the apartments. After that I checked the water meters to make sure they weren’t spinning wildly. Fortunately, I had no leaks. I then walked around the exterior of the house to try and find out where the glass was that I heard break. I also just wanted to make sure everything was in one piece and still plumb. At least one house slid off its foundation yesterday. The breaking glass sound was faint, so I thought it would be upstairs, but I saw no broken windows. Later I would find that bricks from the dining room chimney had toppled off in the attic and broke a piece of old waving glass that was leaning up against the chimney. I then walked around the apartments to survey for damage there. Fortunately I found nothing there, as well.

Like I said, the real damage is at the front corner of the house. It seems like that part of the house was lifted differently than the rest. The dining room, stairwell and foyer all suffered major damage to the walls, and the chimney in the dining room also took a hit. In the butlers pantry on the outside wall you can see where the paint is cracked at the seams of the beadboard towards the dining room side of the room. It is like the boards slid past each other vertically a little. I also had a piece of trim at the top of that run of beadboard pop off. On the outside, the only odd thing was the garage doors. Of the two that face the street, the one on the left always stuck a bit when you tried to open it. It no longer sticks, but now the door on the right won’t close properly.

When an event like this hits, everyone in the city suddenly has a common bond. Everyone has a story and they want to share it and most want to hear it and share theirs. Today I was outside filling in some dirt along the new sidewalk when a man walks by. I had never seen him before and I’m not even sure if he lives in the neighborhood. Naturally we started to chat about the earthquake. I’m not sure who brought it up first, but we both began to talk about the Loma Prieta earthquake back in 1989. Long story short, not only were we both living in Santa Cruz in 1989, but we were both on the campus of Cabrillo college at the time of that earthquake. He was in the pool playing a game of water polo and I was walking from my car to the main campus. I just looked at a map of the campus and by my estimate, 20 years and 3 months ago, this man and myself were within a hundred yards of each other during the Loma Prieta earthquake and now we are both 400 miles north going through another large earthquake. Now that is surreal.

I wonder if our proximity to each other is what is some how causing the earthquakes.