Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

The house where I lived during the '89 quake was about 2 miles from the epicenter (Aptos.) We had minimal damage there and a little bit of water sloshed out of the fish tank. Probably heard 25 monitors fall off desks and pop during that half-minute. It took me a couple of days to get home, since I was still at work at Apple in those days, and many of the "highways" were sort of not there in parts.

That was only the second earthquake that frightened me at all (after the 5.0 foreshock that had happened a month or two before it.) I still wish I hadn't turned on the radio right then: there was just crazy reporting on the "news" radio stations about bridges falling and looting. In truth, a panel had fallen off of the Bay Bridge, which did cause some tragedy, but most of the immediate reports were just made up, and then were picked up by national news services.

We adopted my oldest cat who travels with me that very week. She's 17 now, and still tough as nails.

I missed this week's activity. I was in Oregon visiting my sweety and all the rest of my kitties.

What about that strech of the Nimitz Freeway that collapsed? Was that fictitious, too?

All this just as my band is working up Gram Parsons' "Sin City." Coincidence??

JimK

A stretch of the Nimitz freeway did collapse - definitely not fiction. 40 people died.

We have had two sub-4.0 quakes in the last couple of weeks. I felt neither.

We had just dropped off my daughter at UCSC a few weeks before the '89 quake. When I heard first reports, I thought, "thank God she's in santa Cruz (100 miles S of SF)."

Second report: epicenter was in SC...it was three days before we could get through on the phone from OC. She was OK; had been walking past one of the outdoor pools when it struck. She said it tipped water out of the pool like a bathtub.

Surprisingly, SF suffered more than SC did. More built-up, built on bad substrate, old buildings and lots of load-bearing walls, too.

I was at Candlestick Park on 10/17/89, walking along the 3rd base side, about halfway up, toward my left field seats, (under that Marlboro sign in the outfield). I remember

The unusually warm sunny afternoon. A horrendous sonic 'boom' type sound first, then the shaking like you'd feel on cheap bleachers when kids jump up and down...(only, wait, isn't this supposed to be concrete?) The floor like a fun wavy walk on a carnival ride. Then all the nervous laughter and applause. Then the announcement over the PA system, ("in case of an emergency...") then, no further announcements over the PA system, due to power outage. Then the police car circling the outfield with the megaphone, saying that the game had been rescheduled, that we really should leave. The players families on the field. Then an aftershock which sent one section of upper deck fans heading to exits.

The news reports with sketchy inital info on fans' mini radios and TVs they had brought to the game, the 6 hr slow circuitous trip back to Berkeley, later meeting the fans in the exact same seats when the game resumed 10 days later. Caught up in others' stories more than the game.. A's win. again.

The first earthquake I ever felt was in the mid '80's, back in the Bronx, NY of all places!! It woke me up at about 6:30 one Saturday morning. It seems that the earthquake happened somewhere upstate, NY and it could be felt as far as NYC.

The first time I felt a CA earthquake, I was in my car, stopped for a red light. My car was shaking kind of weird and I'm thinking that my engine is going to stall!! A few minutes later, I hear on the radio that we just had an earthquake and I realize that my engine was not going to stall.

The strongest earthquake I felt was back in 1987 in Illinois (New Madrid Fault), but the second strongest was the 1992 Northridge (IIRC) - I was in San Diego on a job interview at that time, and it woke me up.

'94 for the Northridge 'quake. What you thought was an earthquake in '92 was the riots!

I stand corrected. The event in 1992 was the magnitude 7.3 Landers/Joshua Tree/Big Bear quake on June 28th.

I lived in Sylmar in '71, a couple blocks from Olive view hospital, which collapsed.
I live a few miles from the epicenter of the '92 Northridge quake. I still have cracks in and around my house.
I lived in Hawaii during the '89 SF quake. My co-workers, knowing I was a mainlander, told me about it, I said, "oh, they always have quakes up there". Little did I know at the time it was so severe and tragic.

The only earthquake I went through was back in '64, I believe. I was doing homework that evening, and all of a sudden, the glass lampshade started to rattle, and the floor trembled a little bit. We were living in Oregon, and I had just felt the tremors of an earthquake taking place in Alaska, I found out the next day when I heard the news.

JimK

I remember the Northridge quake very well. I had poured myself a cup of coffee and started to look at the paper while an old espiode of Dragnet was just coming on. Jack Webb's intro "This is the city..." started at the same time the shaking did.