Living on the Faultline, by Nicholas

          Late that pleasant afternoon, after I’d finished classes, I walked across campus to do some work in the library. On the third floor I found the book I needed and was about to sit down at a table when things began to rumble. It was Oct. 17, 1989 and San Francisco was about to get a shaking like it hadn’t felt in decades. Floors and walls trembled in the familiar motion of a California earthquake. Fixtures rattled a little and swayed. Then the real shaking began. Ceiling lights knocked around and flickered and then went out. Books were flung off their shelves. Filing cabinets toppled over. People dove under tables and I quickly placed my brief case over my head to protect against falling debris. I had been through many earthquakes in San Francisco—felt the building sway, heard the rattling, been waken up in a rippling bed, felt the floor jumping around beneath my feet—but this time, for the first time, I was afraid. “God, I could die here,” I thought.

          Then, it stopped. Fifteen seconds that felt like 15 years. The lights were out but being 5 o’clock in the afternoon, there was enough light for us to thread our dazed way down three flights of stairs and out of the building. There was no panic as hundreds of students climbed over piles of books and papers and dust to leave. Outside, people milled about the campus. I was in probably the worst building in the worst spot for an earthquake. The San Francisco State University campus sits almost exactly atop the San Andreas fault and the soil is mostly sand which tends to magnify the waves of an earthquake. The building I was in was built of concrete slabs, the kind that respond to shock waves by simply collapsing. It’s called “pancaking” in which the floors just slide down onto each other, crushing anything in between. I was glad to be outside.

          Since all power in the city was out, no traffic lights worked, cars just stopped on the street, dazed drivers wondering what to do next. No streetcars could run either. The city just stopped.

          The first reaction to a major earthquake is confusion. Buildings and the ground they’re built on aren’t supposed to move like that. Disorientation is the first shock.

          The campus is in the southwest corner of the city and with traffic totally snarled and no public transit operating, I figured I might as well start walking home which was close to the city center, probably 4-5 miles away. I started walking, heading toward clouds of billowing black smoke. I hoped it wasn’t our house burning down.

          The streets were crowded with walkers and some people had transistor radios to get some news. Remember, this was way before Internet, Facebook, cell phones. No such thing as instant communication.

          One lady stood in front of her house and announced to passersby that “That quake ran right in front of my house.” Had the tremor run right in front in your house, I thought, you wouldn’t be standing here now. The actual shift in tectonic plates was probably miles deep in the earth.

          Somebody said the Bay Bridge collapsed—a part of it, in fact, had. A freeway in Oakland had collapsed, killing 60 people. The Marina District, built on landfill by the bay, took the worst damage and was burning. All highways, bridges and trains were unusable. If you couldn’t walk to where you needed to be, people were told to just stay where they were. I kept walking, stepping around the occasional pile of bricks and stucco that had fallen off buildings.

          Finally, I got home. Everything was OK. We lived on a hill overlooking Golden Gate Park, the most solid geology you could find in San Francisco (the hill, not the park which is sand). Walls cracked and books had wobbled to the edges of shelves, but nothing toppled or collapsed.

          Jamie got home soon after I did. He’d been in a highrise office building downtown and had to walk down ten flights of stairs but managed to drive home taking a circuitous route through neighborhoods to avoid traffic jams. Some of the office towers had actually banged against one another at the height of the shaking—or so we heard.

          Shortly after we arrived home, two friends showed up. They both worked in SF but lived in Oakland and couldn’t get home so they hiked to our place and stayed with us. There was no power in the house, so we built a fire outside in a little hibachi grill and heated up some leftovers. The city was dark except for the glow to the northeast where the Marina District kept burning. We felt oddly safe on our bedrock hillside.

          We did actually perform one rescue that dangerous night. The woman who lived in the flat below ours was stranded in East Bay which meant her cat Darwin needed feeding. He sat mewling at our back door until we invited him in and gave him some food. Next day Darwin repaid the favor by leaving us a dead bird on our doorstep.

          In the days that followed, the city slowly got back to a new normal. Mail delivery was cancelled for three days and many shops remained closed. The World Series between SF and Oakland resumed. Buildings and freeways were inspected and some condemned. BART resumed running trains the next day but the Bay Bridge was to stay closed for at least a month until the collapsed section could be repaired. Ferry boats started running across the bay—actually a nicer way to commute. We walked through the Marina District over the rippled pavement and past the leaning or burnt out flats. Everywhere you went you calculated how safe it was or wasn’t until you realized there was no place safe but you went on anyway. Living on the faultline. 

© 19 April 2015 

About the Author 

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.