I was in that big one in San Francisco in '89. I had lived there three years and was planning on leaving to head back to CT (my wife was homesick) the next day. We weren't watching the World Series which was right there at Candlestick park, because we were too busy packing. We had boxes piled up high in the living room of our apartment. We had felt many tremors, they happen a lot, so we started to laugh when the quake started. How funny, we thought, a quake on the night before we were leaving. When the shaking kept going, we got serious and got out of the center of the room, under the doorway between rooms in case the ceiling fell in. Surprisingly, the boxes didn't fall despite the house seemingly rocking back and forth and banging down on each side. It was much more violent than any quake we had felt before.
Later on our landlord passed by our doorway, which we had opened to see what was going on outside, and invited us upstairs, our apartment was part of his house, to drink some wine. He had been in the BART train under San Francisco bay when the quake came and the train stopped. He and the other commuters had to walk home. We sat on his patio behind his house drinking wine and watching the lights of the city come back on. Oddly, an enjoyable moment for us.
The next morning I walked a couple hundred feet or so to the end of our street. We lived on Dolores Street, for those who know San Francisco, on the edge of the mission district. I could see that there was something wrong with the Bay bridge, but I couldn't tell how bad it was. We had planned on leaving across the Bay bridge but because of its collapse we had to take the Golden Gate bridge instead. I had slept well the night of the quake but the next night we stopped over in Reno and some kids were running outside our room on the second floor. I awoke in panic.
But it was only through the news and videos on Youtube, some I looked at recently, that I really understood some of the horrors that had occurred in that event. When the parts of the bridge and the roadway approach to the bridge fell, people we crushed and trapped. It really was amazing that in the end there were only a couple of hundred people who died out of all the millions in the area.
Anyway, that's my earthquake story.
