The Quake of ’89

Posted on December 24, 2008 in Earthquakes Silicon Valley

I got asked to relate this by a friend on Twitter, so here is the tale.

In late October, 1989, I worked in one of those places that you don’t want to remember. It was a filthy place with equipment that should have been shot and buried in the mid-seventies. At the end of this one day, I got into my car and drove through the streets of East Palo Alto as quickly as I could.

I’ve never feared East Palo Alto like others have. So when the steering wheel on my car began to fight me, I sighed and pulled over to the side. Someone had sprinkled nails on the road, I reasoned. I had a flat tire, that was all. Just a flat tire.

The wobble worsened as I parked, so I concluded that two or three blowouts afflicted me. So I stopped the car at the curb and got out to inspect the damage.

The lengths to which I denied what was happening beneath my feet surprise me now. Three school-age children stood on the sidewalk, bawling. Oh dear, I thought. They think I’m a child molester come to kidnap them.

“I only have a flat tire,” I told them. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Then I heard a truck horn honking. I looked over to see a man with Salvadoran colors on his pickup waving at me and calling to me in Spanish.”

Following his gestures, I looked up. The telephone poles were bending back and forth. For the first time, I noticed that the ground was vibrating something fierce.

Good God! It was an earthquake! For a moment in my life, I acted the part of a parent. I herded the children into the middle of the church parking lot where the guy in the pickup was. The shaking stopped in a few seconds. Everyone looked around. Then I told the kids that they needed to get home to tell their parents that they were all right.

“That does it,” one little boy vowed. “I’m never going over to see my friend again!”

I got in the car and drove straight home. All the traffic lights were either out or blinking red red red. When I got to the apartment complex, the entire courtyard was wet and the pool was half-empty. The landlady told me that as the earthquake hit, she’d instinctlvely run outside to check on her kids. All the water in the pool sloshed out, catching her in a four-foot tall wave.

Lynn came home with her own story which consisted of her being sitting in a bathroom stall — someone, she thought, had to get in.

We took a walk past the stores along Middlefield Road. Cans, boxes, and other product such as books littered the floors. One store sold candles and batteries at the door, but no one was letting anyone in. Strangely, while most of Silicon Valley was without power, our complex was part of a six block island of light. It took until the next morning for word to reach us about the intensity of the quake and the extent of the damage — it had registered 6.9 on the Richter scale.

The next day I returned to work. After the quake, several employees tried to refuse to return into the plant until there was a complete inspection, but were told that they would be fired if they did not immediately resume operations. No one spoke about the cracks in the wall and management thought it was perfectly fine not to check the structual integrity of the building.

The event never faded from our minds. When we traveled outside of California, we could always stop conversation in a room by the mere mention of our experiences.

To this day, I am amazed at the intensity of the tremblor. I had felt it while driving and the telephone poles had bent over. Repeating that helps me get a fix on what I had lived through.