From: spcecdt@deeptht.armory.com (John DuBois)
Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes
Subject: Re: San Francisco Earthquake 89
Date: 16 Nov 92 07:21:57 GMT
Organization: The Armory


     I was logged in to a machine at UC Santa Cruz, lying on my bed in my
house just down the hill from UCSC.  Things started to move.  I lay there
and enjoyed it for a moment (always liked quakes).  Things moved more
violently.  Screams emanated from other parts of the house.  It built up to
the point where I decided that, actually, this was on a somewhat different
scale than quakes I had previously experienced.  I finally got up and, for
the first time in my then-25 years in California, headed for the doorway
of my room.  The two housemates who happened to be home at the time came
running up to my room and held on to me for dear life.  
     Things came crashing down.  I watched the heavy steel shelving units
that I had bolted together into an L shape (not as any sort of earthquake
preparedness) flap back and forth violently, trying to tear apart. 
Fortunately they didn't succeed.  Amazingly, my television, perched atop
another shelving unit, didn't budge as far as I could tell.  A cabinet
full of a thousand odd electronic parts, a large fraction of them
semiconductors with types marked only on the drawer, lunged for the floor,
shattering its little plastic drawers and creating a hopeless mess.  I
guess I was lucky, since I had a dozen of the cabinets stacked three high
on my workbench and only one fell.
     After the first quake subsided I let my housemates calm down and then
surveyed the damage.  My monitor had leapt off of its shelf and landed on
the $40 glare screen I had bought a week before, marring it to the extent
that it was more annoyance than help.  The large wood bookshelves were
almost completely vacated, but they stayed upright by virtue of the 3"
screws holding them to studs.  The lid of a large jar of shot broke when
it fell; I still find shot in the carpet (lead, so a magnet doesn't work,
nor does the vaccuum cleaner seem to).  A bottle of glass cleaner fell and
broke and soaked a couple of slides I had out to make prints of because I
really liked them :-(  A few other broken items.  Altogether, though, not
too bad.
     I checked out the house and didn't find any structural damage.  I
began to feel that it hadn't actually been that serious a quake.  But then,
while checking out one of my housemates' rooms I saw a thick black column
of smoke rising not too far away.  I rummaged around and found a battery
radio and listed to reports for a bit.  I began to worry about my
girlfriend, who had moved to California from Wisconsin in August and had
just about shut down with fright in an earlier, barely perceptible tremor.
The phones were inoperative.
     So, I grabbed my camera and hopped in my car, hoping foolishly that I
might be able to get the few miles to where she lived.  My housemates
didn't want to stay in the house by themselves so they came with me.  I got
down to Mission (Highway 1 as it passes through Santa Cruz) and quickly
gave up on that route: it was at a near-standstill, packed with cars.  I
later learned that, in addition to the traffic signals being out, an
overpass had collaped onto the highway.
     Instead, I crossed 1 (which took a while in itself!) and tried going
through downtown Santa Cruz.  I got less than a block before giving up.  I
abandoned my attempt at getting across town.  I parked and we walked
toward the Pacific Garden Mall, which was a few blocks away.  As we
approached I began to see the first real damage.  First, we reached a
point where there was no intact chimney in sight.  Then encountered large
pieces of rock that had rolled out into the road after breaking off of a
bluff. Then buckled sidewalks with water gushing out of them.  
     We passed the source of the smoke I'd seen, a house that had already
almost burned to the ground.  From afar, I had thought it must be a gas
station or such because of the volume and type of smoke it was producing. 
I later learned that a car in the garage had been responsible for much of
that effect.  The damage was interestingly distributed; on this same
street, a house had jumped off its foundation and crumpled, and another
house's entire chimney and fireplace had turned into a heap of bricks,
leaving a hole in the house and unpainted chimney-shadow up to the roof.
The next street over had nothing on this scale.
     The mall was truly a scene of devastation.  Glass from shattered
storefronts was everywhere.  Pieces of buildings lay in the streets.
Cordons had just been set up so we didn't get far down the mall, and
instead paralleled it.  We smelled the remains of a liquor store well
before we reached it.  People were digging through rubble searching for
survivors.  Every once in a while another aftershock rolled through.
     We eventually headed back to the car.  On the lot where the burning
house had stood, all that was left were the concrete front steps leading up
to nothing.
     The most stressful time I had was the few hours on the day after when
I was without film.  Another quake might have come along, and there I'd
have been high and dry!  I had no cash, the banks were closed, and the
power was out so the ATMs were down.  But, I was able to buy film at a
store where the manager let my charge go through without being able to
verify it because I'd worked with him at another store.
     I eventually got rid of the unmarked electronic parts, not wanting to
face testing them all to try to determine what they were.  The marked ones
still await sorting.
     And, look... isn't *this* exciting... the last sysline output saved
by Kermit's session logging that was written to disk before the power went
out...

84 /b/c/spcecdt> rsh b -n -l liz quota -v&
5:02 16.0 +4.3 30u-
[1]    Done                 rsh b -n -l carioca cp /b/c/spcecdt/randst foodity/ranst

	John
-- 
John DuBois	spcecdt@deeptht.armory.com	KC6QKZ
Xref: sparky ca.earthquakes:1359 sci.geo.geology:2413