From: cjackson@adobe.com (Curtis Jackson)
Subject: Re: San Francisco Earthquake 89
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 17:56:25 GMT

I was at work on the second floor of a 2-story "experimental" building
(more on that later) built on landfill. I was in a cube, and when the
P-waves hit I thought it was a very minor quake's S-waves, and I had
just missed the P-waves. A few seconds later the real jolt hit, and I
remember instantly thinking that this was going to be one mother of
an earthquake if the first stuff was only the P-waves.

I was in a cube at the time, and tried to make the doorway of the area
I was in, but only got as far as the cube opening and stood there
hanging on for dear life and staring up at the ceiling to try to
dodge/deflect anything that fell. My massive 19" Apple two-page
monitor was *bouncing* (not sliding) across the desktop, there were
large waves in the floor, and ceiling tiles were coming down.

After the quake began to subside, I headed for the stairs, but heard
crying from the women's bathroom. I ran in and found a friend who
was changing for an aerobics class when the quake hit; it was dark
in the bathroom and she was pretty shaken. I got her down the stairs
and out, and the ground was still moving noticeably. The stench of the
methane brought up by the liquification was awful (we're right across
from Shoreline, which had lots of methane problems early on from being
built on landfill). You could pick a point in the distance and see
that the entire building site and parking lot were still gently swaying
back and forth; still somewhat liquid.

I ducked back in long enough to call my wife, and she was already back
in her building because it was on bedrock. She said the quake didn't
seem so bad to her up in Belmont.

Our building is a steel frame with the walls hung from the frame like
tapestries by their own weight, and the floors suspended from the walls.
This allows the entire building to sway on the frame. As a result,
the ride is quite the E ticket but the building suffered no structural
damage at all, and none of the 5' x 7' windows even came out or broke.

Given my wife's calm words (she who was quite earthquake-shy), I thought
that perhaps it was just the fact that we were on landfill and in this
particular building that made it so bad, and I headed to my bowling
league. I didn't get far before I turned on KCBS, and they were not on
the air. When they did come back on a few minutes later, a very shaken
announcer started talking about what it was like to be on the 31st floor
in downtown SF during the quake. Again, I figured if they were pretty
much OK things musn't be too bad, and then I heard about the freeway
collapse.

I headed home on surface streets. All the traffic lights were out,
but everyone was courteous and it was no problem at all making it home,
although it was quite slow going at times. There were no traffic jams
or accidents that I saw.

I got home within a minute of my wife (she got to go down 280). The
third-floor apartment was a disaster. The 25" TV had been flung 10'
across the room, the Mac SE had waltzed its way across a glass table
despite its rubber feet and plunged to the floor. The fridge, which
was perpendicular to the direction of motion, had still managed to
walk nearly 2' out from the wall and had obviously opened and closed
several times, spilling out a loaf of bread and a solitary bottle of
beer.

Worst of all, we had 3 cases of red wine on their sides in the top
of a closet with a sliding door (yes, we were stupid). I had feared
that the bottles would shake out one-by-one and break on top of one
another, but here was one place the magnitude of the quake came in
handy -- the entire cases came down as a unit, ripping the closet
door off with them and only breaking 3 bottles total. Of course, those
3 bottles broke violently enough to spray the entire closet and hallway
area with red wine from the floor to 3 feet high....

There was one eerie thing amidst all of this destruction and chaos --
an unopened roll of Rolaids was lying on a small bedside table parallel
to the direction of motion. The heavy electronic alarm clock and everything
else on the table had been flung several feet away, and yet here was
this brave little roll of tablets still lying on its side on the table.

My wife and I decided very quickly that our nerves couldn't take being
in this third-floor apartment (which was also designed to sway), so
we grabbed peanut butter, bread, water, and the best bottle of red
wine still intact and slept in her car on the street until sunrise.
We awakened often that night to the car shaking quite heavily from the
aftershocks.

That's where *I* was. My father had an interesting time. He, a former
CA resident and veteran of quite a few earthquakes, was in Virginia
talking to a friend in LA when the earthquake hit. She noted that the
World Series had apparently gone off the air, and about a minute or
so later she said she thought they were having a small earthquake
because she could feel light shaking and the pool had tiny waves.
Dad put the two events together pretty quickly, and correctly surmised
that there had been one hell of an earthquake in the SF bay area.
He watched the news, uncertain about our fate, for about 8 hours
before I was able to get through to him on the phone -- I didn't want
to tie up phone lines for several hours after the quake -- and I asked
him to phone the rest of the family so I could get off the phone.
-- 
Curtis Jackson	'91 Black Lab "Studley Doright"   '92 Collie/Shepherd "George"
cjackson@mv.us.adobe.com	USPA #A-10080 (lapsed)	DoD #721 '81 Maxim 650
  "They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
   safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1759)
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