APTOS, CA November 11, 1997
On October 17, we had an earthquake from which are still feeling affects, and aftershocks.
In the small beach community of Rio del Mar in Aptos, the earthquake came on an unseasonably warm and sunny October afternoon. The initial shock knocked out our power and our senses. We rocked and rolled to continuous and massive aftershocks throughout the night. Next a record windstorm struck, blowing windows. Then torrential rainfall poured onto our damaged roof, raining into the debris in which we slept and triggering more landslides than the quakes. We awaited the locusts.
Just after 5 p.m., night fell shortly after in the initial shocks. Every time I’d try to go back into the house to sift through the breakage and clutter for flashlights and candles to prepare for darkness, an aftershock would chase me out. The children were clingy and frightened and huddled on the front lawn with my neighbor. She had been outside emptying her trash when the roof began to rain down on her. She jumped out of her shoes, running into the house to get her 8-month-old baby. We found her shoes under a pile of red roof tiles.
Our place is trashed, Brent’s out of a job, and the ground is still shaking; regardless, we are feeling lucky and blessed. The epicenter of the “Great Quake of ’89” was right here in Aptos, just a few miles away in the Forest of Nicene Marks. In the three weeks since the “Big One,” there have been thousands of aftershocks, 20 of them over a 4.0 magnitude and many exceeding 5.0 on the Richter scale. Each one sends our kids into a frenzy and gets our adrenaline going as we wonder, “How long will this one last?” and “How bad will it get?”
The kids have had the toughest time. They developed a new portfolio of insecurities, including fear of the dark, fear of being alone, and fear of large trucks going by our house—the roar of loud trucks sounds like approaching earthquakes. Actually, the past couple of days, they seem to finally be getting used to the earth moving them off their feet. Last night, Brittany actually slept through a 4.5 quake that knocked a few things down. But she said she wants to move away “someplace where we can fly to the beach” and asked, “Why does Heavenly Father give us the world and then make it shake?” She seems to understand now that the earth is just trying to get comfortable. Zach, being so young, has a lot of difficulty comprehending all of this. He was 2 years old on Monday.
To help the kids calm down, we’re having to get a grip ourselves. We’re turning it into a game. With each quake, we assume surfer positions to ride out the wave without getting tossed to the ground. We also each guess the magnitude of each quake to see who gets the closest. We are becoming quite accurate. That is, except for those that jolt us from sleep. They always seem worse than they really are.
Fortunately, a couple of days before the quake hit, we had discussed where we should ride it out with the kids during an earthquake. Not under a door—doors have a tendency to swing open and close on those who follow the “conventional wisdom” of earthquake preparedness—but in the entryway.
That brief discussion proved prophetic. Luckily, I had just sent home my last day-care child at 5 o’clock, which was unusually early. Normally, at that time, the kids are in the middle of the living room floor watching Sesame Street while I get dinner ready. We were early and I had just sat them down at the table to eat when the quake began. At first, I thought, “Oh, it’s an earthquake”, interesting, but no big deal. Then came a huge and deafening wave that gave me only enough time to snatch up a kid in each arm as all three of us were thrown to the floor. Bookcases, a heavy armoire, lamps, pictures on the walls, television, VCR, stereo, computer and printer, the entire contents of the refrigerator and of the pantry, and all the plates and glasses crashed to the floor in about 45 seconds of violent upheaval. The floor violently writhed back and forth, up and down, like someone shaking out a rug.
Brittany was really scared and screaming, and all I could yell out was “It’s okay” over and over again. Zach just stared as the door of the closet next to us burst open and rained out all over the floor next to us, but nothing touched us. The TV, stereo, and VCR were thrown out upside down on top of each other right where the children usually sit at that time of day.
Broken glass was everywhere. Everything from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom had fallen onto the sink, and because there were cologne bottles that had broken, it was overpoweringly sweet-smelling in there. The kitchen was the worst. Glasses and jars filled with flour and sugar from the cupboards had shattered all over the floor. The refrigerator had been jarred open, so there was milk and apple juice splashed all over, too.
All the plaster on the wall was cracked, and large chunks of plaster were hanging from the ceiling. There are new cracks in our windows, but they all held. We are down to the wood on the walls in a lot of rooms, and we have a crack in our foundation. We can’t use our fireplace this year because of damage to the bricks. A neighbor’s chimney fell on their car. Many homes in our neighborhood are toppled or leaning. We were without power, water, and gas for days. I didn’t get a shower for 5 of them. We bathed in the ocean.
The front yards in our neighborhood were filled with the tents of families who were afraid to enter their houses while the aftershocks still shook their homes. The streets are buckled and cracked. Across the river, there are cracks spider-webbing the streets, some of them 3 and a half feet deep. Our nightly walk now is down to the Aptos Creek to see how much wider and deeper the crevices from faults get each day. The cliffs and pier at our own Seacliff Beach were closed for a week and a half, and the road is still closed while they clean up the landslides and cracks.
A man who was in a small fishing boat between our cement boat and Capitola pier told my neighbor he saw the cliffs fall. Great clouds of dust rose up all along the coast. The thing that really frightened him was when he suddenly found himself in a 35-foot-deep trough in the ocean, wondering if he was going to come up the other side of it.
The wave had traveled east to west, so we didn’t need to worry about a tidal wave. Everyone on the west side of the fault is now 20 inches further south and 20 inches higher than they were before. After doing some bizarre measurements, NASA announced today that the entire Monterey Peninsula has moved 3 inches north.
A friend at church who lives on a hill near here was out in his yard and watched a six-foot underground wave approach. He hurdled it and watched it go under his house. Because of the damage that the wave caused to his house, his family won’t be able to sell and move to Seattle as they’d planned.
It took 2 weeks for the huge bruise on my rear end to clear. The next day, I felt as though I’d been in a car accident, as if all the muscles in my body had been bruised, and I had a terrific headache. It proved to be a common complaint. That, and the loss of sleep for at least a week.
The ground felt as though it was in constant motion for the following week, and it was, making me feel like I’d been at sea for months and still hadn’t developed my land legs. When we felt comfortable returning to the house, we slept in our sweats on the living room floor with our bag packed near the front door. Brittany clutched Brent’s finger all night long every night. Every aftershock woke us.
Immediately after the quake, as we waited for news from neighbors’ car radios, Brittany began saying, “Daddy’s dead.” Since the phones were out, we didn’t know how he was until he walked in around midnight that night, while I was still cleaning the kitchen mess by candlelight. I was listening to the radio and getting more and more worried, hearing about all the road closures due to landslides.
Brent says:
I was in my office, a corner office with an 180-degree view of the Santa Clara Valley from the 10th story of a high-rise building. I was with my company’s Chairman of the Board. He had flown in from Chicago just a few hours before. When the earthquake started, I motioned him toward my window so he could witness the waves of earth moving from a bird’s eye view. Earthquakes from 100 feet up can be impressive to watch.
Then it hit harder, smashing me into a window as the building jolted. Any other state in the Union, any other country in the world, and that building would have collapsed. As it was, the building, as with most of the buildings in the San Francisco Bay area, did the twist. I was impressed, to say the least. When the immensity of the quake became apparent, I yelled at the Chairman to hit the floor, get under my desk. Too late, he followed the conventional wisdom and ran for the door. The door slammed on his arm, then slammed on it again, and again. His arm shattered in multiple places. Bleeding profusely, he screamed, “I should have listened to my sister!" She was a psychic who had warned me that something bad was going to happen. "I should have listened to her.” Then, he passed out, waking up to mutter, “I should have listened to my sister” again.
I spent the next couple of hours administering first aid, evacuating people from the building, prying open locked elevators, and pulling frightened people from under their desks.
There were a couple of fierce aftershocks while I helped people down the stairs. Some mistook my actions as altruistic. I just wanted to have an excuse to go into every office to try and find a phone that worked. I’ve lived through a lot of California Shakes. I knew that people had died in this one. I just wanted to see if my family was OK. I found a phone that worked. No answer. No ring.
All roads home through the Santa Cruz Mountains were blocked by landslides and torn asphalt. It took me three hours to go 1/2 mile toward the mountain pass, but I was determined to get home. No police were out yet, so the only barriers I confronted were massive landslides and huge caverns in the roads.
There was no power in Northern California. A bit eerie. No radio stations for a time. When a radio station finally got some emergency power, it became apparent how helpless people actually felt throughout the Bay Area. One by one, tragedies were reported. The Marina District in flames, a freeway I drive on every day, collapsed, and a bridge collapsed. Most concerning were reports that no one had been able to connect with Santa Cruz County, so the rumors were going out that the entire coastline had been submerged in a massive tidal wave. Our beach bungalow on the Rio del Mar coastal flats would be the first area submerged.
That long drive home gave me ulcers. Facing insurmountable barriers on every direct road over the mountains, I headed south toward Gilroy. The Gilroy route was also buried in landslides, so I headed south on 101 toward Monterey, being careful to avoid damage to the roads. I almost drove off a broken bridge on a freeway. I carefully backed up, turned around and drove on the wrong side of the road until I found an exit, then navigated around the broken bridge. I ended up taking an 80-mile detour before I found a road that was clear enough to get me through, but that later collapsed, completely sealing Santa Cruz County from the Bay Area.
When I finally got to Highway One through Monterey, I picked up a low-wattage radio station out of Santa Cruz. The station was broadcasting from a bomb shelter, using a generator for power. The first thing I heard was that all the beach communities were being evacuated because of what was thought to be imminent incoming tidal waves. Relieved that it hadn’t happened yet, I stepped on the gas, ignoring that the once smooth roadways had become like a chopped-up motocross track.
I stopped at every phone booth I saw. Rings but no answer. All the roads home were blocked or gone; some of the bridges had collapsed. I had to break numerous police barriers. Plenty of barriers. Eerily, no police. It felt like a scene from Omega Man. I was alone on the roads, only occasionally illuminated by flashing barrier lights.
As I inched through Watsonville, buildings were on the streets. The dark figures of looters with baseball bats darted away from my headlights as I rounded street corners. In the time it took me to get home, I could have driven to Reno. But I made it. The first thing I heard was Brittany screaming, ‘It’s Daddy! He isn’t dead!’
Santa Cruz County was isolated from the world for a few days. No power, no roads in or out, no telephones, and no radio reception from outside the county. It was like being on a remote island. I heard later that news stations outside Northern California were saying that no one could contact anyone in Santa Cruz to determine whether it was still around.
The evening of the earthquake, Sherrie’s store on the corner had a long line. The whole next day was more of the same. People waited for food, water, flashlights, and batteries. Storeowners were taking orders at the door or allowing only 5-10 people in at a time because of the damage and the lack of lights. We drove around. The one gas station that was open was in Capitola. The line was several blocks long, just like in the days of rationing. We were lucky and already had most of what we needed. We found some luxuries—tortillas and powdered milk—at a small market with a short line. The lines at the larger stores were hours long.
The land is still here. However, Santa Cruz will never be the same. Aptos Village, a couple of blocks away, is leveled. Downtown Santa Cruz is leveled. It’s sad because Pacific Garden Mall had so much character. We went to see the damage to the boardwalk. Some were closed up, but they ran the Giant Dipper this weekend. Not with me on it! How it escaped damage is beyond me. It will be interesting to see what happens as far as rebuilding in view of the politics here. Watsonville’s downtown is also gone. There is a huge relief center at the airport there, for the “displaced”. (Lest they be confused with the bow-your-head-when-you-say-it… “homeless”.)
The weekend following the earthquake was to have been our one and only annual weekend away from the children. We had planned for weeks to go to Yosemite, just Brent and me. I had 2 sitters lined up who owed me many hours of babysitting in trade. I even had a third backup sitter. Every rare time we plan to get away, something happens. The kids get sick, or the sitter can’t sit. This time, I wasn’t going to let anything stop us. It had to be a BIG earthquake to do it.
Now, three weeks later, we are still fine. The house is still falling apart, but it has been three days since we felt an aftershock. Northern Californians seem to be feeling invincible—sort of a “we survived a 7.1, we can survive anything” type attitude. As a family, we are better prepared than ever now. I even taught Penny CPR just in case.
Financially, we’re ruined—for now, at least. The company I worked for was dependent on data servers in the East Bay. Those servers are now under rubble. Lesson learned: Redundant backups in different parts of the country. And, that main investor with the psychic sister and the shattered arm? He couldn't get out of it fast enough and won't be coming back to California any time soon. We’ll get over it. We have been extremely fortunate in the face of what could have been an even greater catastrophe.
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badphd & pd