Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[dvandorn]

We're talking the October 17, 1989 World Series quake, correct, Mike?

I thought I heard that the quake lasted about 36 seconds, at least at Candlestick Park (as it was named then). I was safe and sound in Chicago at the time, but I took a keen interest in what happened at Candlestick. I was (and still am, poor me) a Cubs fan, and that year the Cubs had lost the NLCS to the Giants. So, World Series Game One was happening not in my beloved Wrigley Field, but at Candlestick. (And on my 34th birthday, no less.)

I was so immersed in baseball at the time that I made sure I got home in time to watch the game coverage as it began. I was watching while the picture broke up and you heard the announcer call out, rather excitedly, "I think we're having an earthqua..." That sudden cut to the feed, not only mid-word but mid-IMPORTANT-word, was one of the more chilling things I can recall witnessing.

Anyway, over the next couple of days the Commissioner's Office and the Giants hired engineers to determine if Candlestick was safe for the upcoming Series games. They determined that the upper deck had flexed back and forth longitudinally, and that while the supports were still solid and reliable, another 15 to 20 seconds of additional flexing would have brought the upper deck down -- right onto the lower deck. A full minute's worth of shaking would definitely have done it. (At least, that's how I recall the reports at the time.)

There were something like 60,000 people at the stadium right then. I still get a really dense hot thing in the pit of my stomach when I think about *that* possibility...

-the other Doug

[ElkGroveDan]

Yes, you do!!! Give it up, big guy!

My wife and I had just moved into a new rental house in Northridge, California in 1994 right before our first baby was due. She was due Tuesday January 18th, but since she was breach the doctor decided to due a C-section the Wednesday before at the hospital near my wife's work, Glendale/Verdugo just 15 minutes down the 118 Freeway. So they finally kicked us out of the hospital Friday night and I was terrified that this fragile little baby was now our responsibility. I spent the weekend fussing around the two of them until Sunday night Allison finally told me to get lost and get some fresh air. So I went over to the Northridge Mall a few blocks from our home and browsed new baby cribs since we were just borrowing one to get started. I wandered around a department store called Bullocks and at closing time I was the last one out as they locked the doors behind me - in fact it would later turn out that I was the last customer to ever shop in that store. Monday was a holiday for me so I stayed up late with Allison watching TV and trying to get used to this whole idea of being a parent. We went to bed around midnight.

Around 2:00 she woke us up crying and Allison nursed her back to sleep. Then again around 4:00. Shortly after that, (I still remember the clock said 4:26) she woke up crying again. Allison said "She can't be hungry I just fed her. So I said, "well maybe its the diaper. Now is as good a time as any for me to figure this out. You stay in bed". So we were among the very few who had the lights on at that hour. There was nothing wrong with the diaper so I began to discuss with Allison whether or not to put a new one on. As I was standing there (4:31) I felt a really smooth rocking swell cross the house the way a small wave goes under a boat on a calm lake. I can still hear my words to this day. I said out loud "Funny that kind of felt like an earth...." and I never finished the sentence. It felt like a truck hit the house. I saw everything twist and fall and fly through the air and the lights went out as I reached down and scooped up the baby off the bed. As I took three giant steps to the bathroom doorway I could feel my knees hit the floor between bounces. The roar and the noise was deafening as everything in the house that could break broke at once. I held onto the doorway with one arm and the baby with the other as that house rocked back and forth like a martini shaker. I was only five or six feet away from Allison who was screaming "Where's the baby!!?" and the roar was so loud she couldn't hear my shout back that I had her. Allison landed knee first into a picture frame and sliced open her knee. When the first round of shaking stopped I let go of the wall and pulled her up next to me and then the shaking began again.

When the shaking seemed to stop we stood there in the pitch black half naked and in bare feet with devastation all around us. Then all of a sudden BANG! and crash, a window had popped out of its twisted aluminum frame and fallen out into the back yard, then bang, bang bang more windows kept popping out. I told her to stay put while I went to get a flashlight. Three times I started down the hall and three times the shaking resumed and I would go running back to hold them. When I finally did make it to the kitchen to find the flashlight I stepped on broken glass that darn near sliced my toe off. When I finally made it back to Allison we started looking for clothing so we could get outside - it was really cold even for Los Angeles that morning, like the low 40s or so. A neighbor came pounding on our door since by then everyone on the street was outside except for us. I grabbed a dozen or so blankets and we finally went out to the car and I started it up and put on the heater. The rocking back and forth in the car continued until sunup and then for the next several days. I tried to take Allison to the hospital to get her knee stitched (and my toe) later that morning but the place was a zoo and we were worried about having a newborn baby around all those crowds and confusion. So we spent the next night in our Ford Bronco SUV with the dog and the cat. The next morning it took something like three hours to make the normally 20 minute drive to Burbank airport. I put Allison and the baby on a plane to San Francisco where her mother lived and I didn't see them for the next three weeks as I worked to make the house livable again. In hindsight I think of how lucky we were that the baby was delivered when she was. That morning the 118 freeway that I would have taken to the maternity hospital collapsed about 20 feet. Several people drove over the edge in the dark, one was killed. The department store I had been in the night before crumpled completely in half and a custodian was crushed under a parking structure there. An apartment building a half mile down the street from us collapsed and 17 people were killed. I think ultimately 57 people were killed that morning by the Northridge earthquake. Everything we owned that could break, did break with the exception of our wedding china which was still packed in boxes from our recent move.

I can't seem to find any scanned pictures from that week (I have them somewhere but its mostly a memory I try to forget), but here's what the baby and I looked like the day before.

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[dmuller]

Just out of curiosity ... does the JPL have backup mission control centers somewhere in the US?

Otherwise I've been lucky with disasters. Felt a few Earthquakes in Switzerland, typhoons in HK and Taiwan & was in Malaysia during the boxing day tsunami but well away from the coast, and of course still remember the big chemical fire in Basel, Switzerland (not really a natural disaster)

[mchan]

Like Juramike, I was also in school, but in San Franciso, during the 1989 quake. I was in the basement instead of on the upper floors. (Come to think of it, I don't know if one place would be much more survivable than the other if the building collapsed.) It was briefly scary, but nothing like EGD's experience.

I also felt the 1994 quake EGD described, but from San Jose which is about 600 km north. Woke me up with a gentle rocking, and I was prepared to jump out of bed. Then it subsided, and after a few minutes, I said ho-hum (after having gone thru the 1989 quake) and went back to sleep. It was not until much later that morning that I turned on the radio and heard the news.

[nprev]

...Dan, I stand corrected. Earthquakes are indeed scary!!! God, that was one hell of a harrowing experience for you & your family, and you're sure right about the lucky timing of your daughter's birth!

[jasedm]

Glad to hear all ok over there. We're very lucky here in the UK as far as earthquakes go - the biggest one in the last quarter century was a 5.2 Richter shock centered near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire in February this year - enough to knock over a few Victorian chimneys.....The strongest ever officially recorded was 6.1 on the Richter scale, recorded in 1931.
I've lived in the UK all my life and never personally felt any tremors (mind you I do sleep like a log).
Below just for interest is the record of all fatalities (11) attributed to earthquakes in the UK since 1580:

Date Epicentre Magnitude Number of deaths, Place, Cause
6 Apr 1580 Dover Straits >6 2, London, falling masonry
15 Jul 1757 Penzance 4.5 1, Penryn, fell out of window
7 Sep 1801 Comrie 4.5 2, near Edinburgh, falling masonry
18 Sep 1833 Chichester 3 1, Cocking, falling rock
22 Apr 1884 Colchester 4.5 1, Wivenhoe, shock, (uncertain)
1, Manningtree, suicide
1 Feb 1915 Conisbrough <3 1, Conisbrough, Falling rock
7 Jun 1931 North Sea 5.6 1, Hull, Shock?
12 Dec 1940 Porthmadog 4.7 1, Criccieth, Fell downstairs

Of these, five were arguably caused by panic at the tremors, leaving only 6 certifiable deaths due to earthquake damage in the last four centuries.

[djellison]

I felt the Market Rasen one - it woke Helen and I up!

Doug

[ilbasso]

I was born during an earthquake on Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. My mom said that the OR room lights were swinging back and forth over her and the doctors were trying to decide whether to lean over her to protect her or finish getting me out! The doctors told her afterward that this was a portent that I was destined to move the world. Obviously that has not happened. Yet. I'm biding my time.

The biggest earthquake I remember was also in Japan, in Okinawa, when I was 10. It was pretty violent. I felt like I was on roller skates and someone was sliding the floor randomly under my feet. My dad, as he had been trained, ran over to and stood in a doorframe. The rest of us kids were just standing there in the living room, thinking "WTF????"

[dvandorn]

I was born and raised in central Illinois, not far from where the New Madrid fault passes through that state. Back when I was in my early teens, there was a fairly minor tremblor (something like 5 or less on the Richter scale). I was on the lower floor of our split-level house, and didn't notice a thing. My parents, upstairs, felt the house move a tiny bit. But I felt nothing.

I've been close to disasters and never had them actually impact me in any way. About a year ago, a major highway bridge over the Mississippi River here in Minneapolis collapsed into the river. It was a stretch of the highway I've driven over hundreds of times, had driven over it the day before. But I was a good 15 miles away when it happened.

I've had tornados pass within five miles of my location, in conditions where nothing beyond a wall of black churning cloud was visible from where I was standing.

The apartment building in which I lived for two years at the end of my college career burned to the ground -- seven months after I graduated and moved out.

I've been driving down the highway at 100 km/hr in an old beater car, pulled off to get gas, and had an entire wheel decide to break off the car... after I had slowed down to a crawl.

Some, I'm sure, would say Providence keeps its hand over me, shielding me from danger. As for myself -- I have a vague sense of always being cheated out of seeing and experiencing really exciting things that seem to happen all around me, but never *to* me.

I ought to be glad, I suppose. But I'm not... the more fool, I.

-the other Doug

[tedstryk]

Scariest natural disaster I have experienced was a tornado a few years ago. We lived on the side of a small hill at the time, and it totally leveled the forest at t e top of the hill. Then, thanks to the topography, it jumped directly over our house (The upper limbs of some of the trees were ripped off but nothing on farther down was damaged, with the exception of the mailbox that got hit by a falling limb). It touched down again about a block away and ripped the roof of several houses.

[TheChemist]

I live in one of the most seismogenic places on Earth, southern Greece, so I can totally relate to the experiences of our Californian friends. My hometown was totally destroyed by a series of earthquakes in the mid 50s and rebuilt from scratch. Luckily (for me), I was not born then
Despite many experiences, I cannot get used to this phenomenon, and every time I get as scared as the first time I felt the earth move violently, which was in 1980. During the last few years we actually have a peak in seismic activity in the region, but what can you do ?

If you look at this graph of regional seismicity since 1963, you can actually trace the European and African tectonic plates as they meet and push each other just south of Crete.

[ilbasso]

Some, I'm sure, would say Providence keeps its hand over me, shielding me from danger. As for myself -- I have a vague sense of always being cheated out of seeing and experiencing really exciting things that seem to happen all around me, but never *to* me.

-the other Doug

One of my coworkers has had to give CPR to three people during meetings, two of whom died in his arms. Another of my coworkers has - on two separate occasions - been in the back seat of a limo when the driver had a heart attack and collapsed while driving down the highway.

I do feel extraordinarily lucky never to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm glad to let other people experience that kind of "character building"!!

[AndyG]

We're very lucky here in the UK as far as earthquakes go

We certainly are. The first of the three I've felt - and the biggest - was on Boxing Day, 1979. It happened in the early hours, and it was an odd experience walking up to something like that - both the novelty of the event and the semi-conscious state I was in made it all feel very unreal.

Andy

[Greg Hullender]

I was on the 14th floor of the Metro Tower in Foster City, CA during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989. I was in an interior hallway, so when the lights went out, I was in darkness. The building was swaying so much that it kept tossing me against either side of the hallway -- while making the kind of noise a subway train does when it comes into a station. I remember thinking "this is what it feels like the moment before you die."

The shaking stopped. The emergency lights came on. We scrambled down the stairs to the exits, where guards were telling us "run away from the building -- glass may be falling." So we paired up at the exits and sprinted away, like students in some fraternity initiation event. From the middle of a grassy plaza a hundred yards away, I turned and looked back to see the Tower was completely unscathed. It didn't even lose a window.

But the brick walkway around it was jumbled in places. Apparently when the shock wave rippled through, some of the bricks didn't come back down quite where they went up.

It was a long walk home.

--Greg

[elakdawalla]

Wow, Dan, that's a harrowing story. I wasn't here for the Northridge quake, but the stories I've heard from friends and relations all have that common theme of babies. My babysitter and her 6-month-old son were staying at a pregnant friend's apartment in the west valley; her son missed being crushed by a falling piece of furniture by two inches, she said, and after it was over they couldn't get the door to their apartment open -- they had to yell for help to get out a window. My nephew was born on the night of the earthquake, far away in Dallas, but my in-laws, who live in Valenica, didn't find out they were grandparents until two days later, becuase it was impossible to get in touch. They had had a dinner party the night before, and all of their English china had been carefully washed and left on the dining table to dry. No more china. No more chimney, either, but at least my in-laws were themselves unharmed.

Yesterday's quake wasn't a biggie. As long as they're not too big, they're more fascinating than terrifying (though this one did have me running for the closet). I distinctly felt the three different types of earthquake waves -- the first rapid sharp vibration of the P waves, the larger-amplitude rocking and rolling of the S waves, and then the ocean-swell-like Rayleigh waves petering off at the end. Some readers have pointed out that the fact that the shaking lasted so long and that I felt those three different phases should have told me that the quake wasn't very close to me -- if I'd been closer they would have piled on top of each other, but at 50 miles away their different speeds had caused them to spread out in time by the time they got to me.

My babysitter told me that they were watching TV, and Anahita looked up at her at the first shaking, then when it got heavier she stood up and grabbed her blanket and stared at the babysitter as if to say "what the heck is going on?" They were sufficiently far from any topply furniture so the babysitter figured they were safest where they were unless things got really violent.

My tornado story is: throughout the time I lived in Fort Worth, Texas, there were only warnings, no funnels anywhere close. Then, in 2000, I was visiting Fort Worth to scope out a site for my wedding. I'd visited several locations including one downtown. I was in a bar in Dallas with some friends when someone said, "hey, on TV they're saying there was a tornado in Fort Worth." It had ripped right across the west side of downtown -- it just barely missed hitting the museum district, plowed into a 7-story office building (the headquarters of the Cash America pawn shop chain), blasted off all its glass and sucked out all the contents of the offices (it was one of those open-floor-plan office buildings, with offices made with cubicle partitions), which dispersed the funnel just a bit so it leapt over a few more things, then it ran straight into one of the tallest buildings downtown, a 30-story glass-walled skyscraper with a restaurant at the top. It destroyed most of the windows in that too and did a lot of other major damage downtown, but the BankOne building seemed to have robbed it of most of its strength. Amazingly, only two people were killed. The site I had favored for my wedding was half a block away from the BankOne building. I called them the next morning and they said they'd not had any significant damage. I figured if they could survive a tornado they could survive my wedding, so I put the deposit down that day! The BankOne building was condemned for a while, with plywood covering its facade for more than a year, but someone eventually bought it and it's recently been renovated and turned into condos. The Cash America building was also, amazingly, renovated. The funniest news I heard after the tornado was that the FBI had had a local office on one floor of the Cash America building. So the morning after the earthquake there were several city blocks around the Cash America building that were crawling with people wearing "FBI" baseball caps, picking up wet pieces of paper on the ground, examining them to see if they were sensitive material, and either dropping them or putting them into shoulderbags. Here's some pictures.

Here's more pictures and a series of hilarious updates on the slow pace of the renovation of the BankOne building.

--Emily