San Francisco is My Home

19
Oct

Loma Prieta rocks the house

Author: kris, Category: News

Two of the Chron’s headlines this morning: “Bay Area Home Sales Crash” and “Spate of Stabbing Deaths.” Related, perhaps? I’ll live in an area where an earthquake could flatten me, and that’s fine, but if there’s like a plague of stabbings then I’m less enthused.

Actually, I should address that earthquake issue for the benefit of any non-SF-based readers, because when I go abroad I notice people are pretty astounded that I choose to live somewhere where the earth will periodically rise up and attack you.

The first earthquake I remember was the last big one, the ‘89, and I remember it well because it happened on October 17, which was my tenth birthday. (This already sounds like a story that a grandmother mutters to herself in the corner, doesn’t it? “Eh, the ‘89, that were a humdinger. Get out of my rosebushes, you whippersnappers!”)

My dad was the first one to know it was happening. He happened to be looking out the window and saw the water in the swimming pool rise like a small tidal wave before he felt the floor start to move. The rest of us were standing in the kitchen — my mom and my grandparents and I — and when it started my grandmother looked at me with this fierce panic in her eyes and opened up her arms. This is the thing I remember most strongly: she was so afraid and still felt like she could shelter me from what was happening. Even at the time I was pretty moved by that. But then my dad hollered at us to get in the doorway, so all four of us packed in there while my dog ran back and forth between us and my dad’s doorway. She seemed pretty delighted by the game.

I think if you were on the Bay Bridge when it happened, with the upper span collapsing onto the lower span (miraculously only one person was killed on the bridge; think about that for a minute, because it’s almost impossible to credit) , then you would feel less cavalier about earthquakes. And if you were at Candlestick Park, where our two local baseball teams, the A’s and the Giants, were battling it out in the third game of the World Series, then maybe you also weren’t too happy.

But for me, the earthquake meant my whole family went outside and barbecued (in case the gas was leaking inside) and it was strange and cool and fun. (Because in California you can barbecue in October if you need to.)

After that it’s all been small quakes, over before you realize they’ve happened. And, yes, one day there will probably be another huge quake and all the buildings will fall down, and the new Bay Bridge that they’ve been planning since ‘89 and have only begun constructing will maybe turn out to have a big design flaw, and all kinds of problems will occur. But on the bright side, it’s totally possible that global warming will be in full effect by then and most of the city will be underwater anyway.

Sorry, was this supposed to be a comforting post?