Introduction 1 Barbara Garcia 1 Salud Para La Gente 2 the Immediate

Introduction 1 Barbara Garcia 1 Salud Para La Gente 2 The Immediate Effects of the Quake in Watsonville, California 3 Providing Emergency Health Care and Other Services 6 The Emergency Response from the Red Cross and Other Agencies 8 Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] 17 Community-based Organizations 19 Planning for Future Disasters 25 Quinton Skinner 31 The Heart of the Pacific Garden Mall During the Loma Prieta Earthquake 32 Going Home to Laurel Street 52 The Day After the Quake 63 The Impact on Universes Records and Downtown Business in General 69 Comparing Earthquakes and Tornados 81 Long Term Effects of the Earthquake 86 Mayme Metcalf 90 The Santa Cruz Flood of 1955 91 The Loma Prieta Earthquake 93 The Effects on Older Residents 96 Help from FEMA 98 Aftershocks 99 The City of Santa Cruz’s Response 101 Earthquake Damage to Businesses and Homes 103 Rock and Roll with Mother Earth 109 Ramona Noriega 111 Personal Background 111 The Experience of the Earthquake 113 The Impact on the Residents at Family Student Housing, UCSC 114 Post-Traumatic Stress 119 Earthquake Preparedness 123 Media Coverage 126 Helping People Who are Disabled 128 Steve Garvin 129 The Experience of the Earthquake 130 “It Sounded Like we Were in ‘Nam or Something” 135 Effects on People 139 “After it’s over it’s boring as hell” 140 Rumors of Tidal Waves 141 Long-term Effects 145 News Coverage 150 Earthquake Stories 152 Earthquake Preparedness 153 Michael Murray 159 Personal Background 159 The Experience of the Earthquake 161 Long-Term Effects 167 Telecommunications Challenges 169 Earthquake Stories 171 The Response from the City of Santa Cruz 173 Earthquake Damage 174 Rio Del Mar Fifth Grade Class 178 Chris Louie 180 Kate Gorske 185 Lia Buchanan 189 Ivan Wilson 194 Summer Lindeman 198 Erin McDonald 204 Stephanie Kolka 208 Lindsey Duncan 214 Kelly Rogers 220 Sarah Terribilini 225 Willy Ruddick 230 Anonymous: D 236 The Experience of the Earthquake 237 Being in Recovery from Alcoholism during the Earthquake 249 Helping People Phone Home 252 The Earthquake as a Spiritual Experience 257 The Gifts of Sobriety 260 Anonymous: J 267 The Experience of the Earthquake 268 Beach Flats Right After the Earthquake 272 Serving as a Volunteer at the Shelter at the Civic Auditorium 280 The Red Cross 285 The Civic Center’s Roof Caves In 292 Being in Recovery from Addiction During the Earthquake 294 The Effects on the Beach Flats Neighborhood 299 Anonymous: T. 305 The Experience of the Earthquake 305 Beach Flats 308 Being in Recovery During the Earthquake 310 “Keeping Our Spirits Up” 314 Post-Traumatic Stress 316 Strengthening a Sense of Community 318 The Future of the Beach Flats Neighborhood 321 Aftershocks 326 page 1 Introduction On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas Fault shook the Central Coast of California and lasted for fifteen seconds, although to those on the ground its interval seemed much longer. The epicenter of the quake lay near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about ten miles northeast of the city of Santa Cruz, California, in the redwoods of Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. The focus point was at a depth of ten miles. This earthquake killed sixty-three people and injured 3,757 others, and caused an estimated six billion in property damage. It was the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas fault since the great San Francisco earthquake in April 1906. The quake damaged buildings and roads as far as seventy miles away in San Francisco, Oakland, and the San Francisco Peninsula, particularly in areas subject to liquefaction. The highest concentration of fatalities, forty-two, occurred in the collapse of the Cypress structure on the Nimitz Freeway (Interstate 880), where a double-decker portion of the freeway fell, crushing the cars on the lower deck. One section of the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge also gave way, causing two cars to fall to the deck below, leading to the single fatality on the bridge. Because this quake took place during rush hour, there could have been a large number of cars on the freeways, endangering many hundreds of commuters. Very fortunately, two Major League Baseball teams (the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants) were about to start their third game of the World Series (the game was scheduled to start shortly after 5:30 pm) in Candlestick Park near San Francisco. Many people had left work early or were participating in baseball-watching parties at home. As a consequence, the usually crowded highways only had light traffic at the time. While the national media covered the damage in the San Francisco Bay Area extensively, far less attention was paid to the effects of the earthquake in Santa Cruz County, where the earthquake was actually centered. In the city of Santa Cruz much of the downtown page 2 Pacific Garden Mall, composed of fifty to one-hundred-year old brick structures located on unconsolidated river sediments, caved in, killing three people and injuring others. Ten miles to the south in Watsonville, a largely Spanish-speaking city, buildings also crumbled and people were killed. In the Santa Cruz Mountains landslides closed many roads including Highway 17, which runs between Santa Cruz and San Jose, and traffic was allowed through only through in escorted convoys. The UCSC campus also sustained damage, although thankfully no lives were lost. On October 22, 1989 Chancellor Robert Stevens sent a letter to President David Gardner reporting a preliminary estimate of eight million dollars in structural damage, three million in property loss or damage, and nearly one million in cleanup and recovery services.1 After the earthquake, the campus reinforced the Natural Sciences II building, and the new supporting exterior beams can still be seen today. In the McHenry Library building, stacks on the third and fourth floors of the library that had not been securely bolted collapsed, spilling thousands of books that were heroically reshelved by library staff in the weeks after the quake. The Regional History Project is part of the University Library, and was founded in 1963 to document the history of the Central Coast of California and the history of UC Santa Cruz. Within days after the quake it became clear to project staff that this historic event cried out for documentation, and plans soon commenced to offer students an opportunity to get involved in this effort. In the spring quarter of 1990 the Regional History Project sponsored a student internship class entitled An Interdisciplinary Oral History of the October 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. Randall Jarrell, who was the project’s director, was the instructor for the class, which was co-sponsored with UCSC faculty members John Dizikes in history and Conn Hallinan in journalism. Five students signed up for the course and completed eleven oral history interviews. The weekly class meetings, as well as individually scheduled meetings with students, included an introduction to oral history interviewing techniques, a broad discussion of primary 1. See On Campus, October 27, 1989. page 3 sources and the strengths and drawbacks of oral history evidence, and instruction in research methods in preparation for conducting interviews. Each student was required to produce a single, indexed, sixty-minute tape-recorded interview with an accompanying introductory essay and a brief biography of the narrator. Class discussion and reading included an introduction to oral history methods, subject research in preparation for interviewing; the ethics of working with narrators and the writing of releases/contracts protecting narrators; and the preparation of a question outline for each interview. A list of prospective narrators was provided by project staff, and student interests were matched with the topics to be documented. (See appendix for several documents related to the independent study course). The resulting oral history tapes were archived in the Regional History office. Due to the time-consuming nature of oral history publication and the staffing constraints in this very small office, nearly seventeen years have passed until this publication of the Loma Prieta earthquake interviews. We are happy to be able to make this archive of compelling documentation of this historic event available. The oral histories illuminate the diverse subjectivity of this historical event in ways that are not captured in news photos and articles, and geological or engineering reports on structural damage. Here are a few examples of this multiplicity of voices: Quinton Skinner, who was an employee at Universes Records on the Pacific Garden Mall described his initial emotional reaction to the quake: I’d never ridden a doorway before. Holding on to this doorway as it . it was like a circus ride. I remember that one of the coherent thoughts that I had was—this is going to go one way or the other at this point. Either it’s going to stop, or it’s going to pursue some course that I have always feared, coming from Ohio . either it’s going to stop, or else the sidewalk is going to cave in, the world’s going to come to an end, and I’m going to be swimming . The funny thing was I was kind of indifferent. Basically my feeling at the time wasn’t one of fear. It was largely indifference. I remember just taking stock of the situation and saying, this is unusual. Hmm. Very unusual. It was so fast. I think fear largely comes from anticipation. Seventy-two year old Mayme Metcalf lived alone in an apartment in the Beach Flats area of Santa Cruz. When the interviewer asked her how she dealt with the earthquake she said: page 4 Well, I got through it, so it didn’t bother me.

Load more