Long story about the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake! What’s Shaking?
Are you curious about earthquakes in Santa Cruz? Have you, did you know there was an earthquake here? It was about 6.7 on the Richter scale. I mean, it was high. And you know what’s interesting? Right after the earthquake, they told us it was like five on the scale. The scale went up over days and weeks.
As they got better, they received better information. In 1989, on October 17th, I was at home with my kids, and my husband was home. And I had a new baby. He was about three and a half months old. And he was on the counter with me. I was doing the dishes. And so he was right next to me, and my other son was playing next door with a friend. And then the earthquake hit, and it was out of control. I grabbed my son, the baby, just when everything came flying out of the cabinet. Meanwhile, my husband is running out the door, trying to go get our son from next door.
And he’s like literally surfing these sidewalk waves. The sidewalk was going up and down. And he goes and grabs him, comes back. And within that span of time, the earthquake was done by the time he got my son and came back. Then another one came right behind it. We were underneath the table. We had a dining room table that was big enough and we were all underneath that. And then it got really quiet. I remember some sirens. I am trying to remember exactly how many there were. I know that there was a few fire trucks from the fire station that was close to us. Because we were in Midtown Santa Cruz, kind of in the Seabright area. And there weren’t even sirens for a while. It was just so quiet. Then there were aftershocks. And if you ask me, I will say the aftershocks are worse.
We lost quite a few of our buildings that we were sentimentally attached to. One of them was the Santa Cruz roasting company building. It’s right, it was next to the Lulu Carpenter building. It then became an empty lot that was there for almost 25 years afterwards. When you see all the pictures, you’re really going to see a lot of the damage.
Let me tell you a few things first about the earthquake itself. When the earth is shaking underneath you, you kind of get scared. You get really scared because all you have is the ground that you’re on. The ground underneath you that is so reliable is moving! Then you have these intense aftershocks, and I will tell you, they are worse. They groan, they rumble, and they kind of roll. The quakes come in different sizes, shapes and sounds.
We slept underneath our dining room table inside. It was also unseasonably warm. Super warm, maybe not unseasonably. October can be warm, but it was warm. And we were laying underneath the dining room table and there were rolling aftershocks. Those were just kind of where you, you’re kind of like in the water sloshing around. And then there’s the kind of shaky kind of ones. Those are rumbling ones. They kind of jiggle you, as it were. And then there’s the groaning. These are not my favorite. This is a, a noise that you can feel just coming from way down underneath. They’re the worst, they’re scary, they’re loud, they’re unknown because when they come along, the rolling and the rumbling, you don’t know if it’s going to turn into the big one.
And I’ve felt quite a few of them over the years, and I feel them, of course, when I’m lying in bed at night, because that’s when everything’s still and quiet. The minute you are laying down and everything’s quiet, you can feel them. We are on a living planet became, and those little rumbles become more apparent and, you know, a little scary because you never know. And some of them ramp up and you are thinking is this going to be the big one? No, they never are. There was one, about two years ago. It was like in January, and it was a 4.0 and it made me think maybe I should be going outside where there’s nothing over my head. But it was over really quickly. It was fine.
If you’re buying a home, what you would need to know, is make sure you keep your absolute valuables and breakables in cabinets that can be closed securely and not open and, and fall on anything or anyone, anything that you’re really concerned about falling over, that you brace it and hold it down. That’s why water heater strapping is so important is because they can fall over. The other silliest thing that I have talked more about this year than I’ve talked about probably ever, is that you need a gas meter shut off wrench at your gas meter. And I’ll tell you, it is really important. I was there at the moment when there was somebody running through the neighborhood offering to turn everybody’s gas off because just a bit of gas leaking outside of a broken pipe can lead to accidental fires and explosions.
Our neighborhood was shut down quickly, but that person had a wrench in his hand. That’s more than likely where that rule came in. You’ll see it on home inspections where you have to have that wrench. They’re not more than a couple bucks from a hardware store. But super important. And I recommend that you have them on your house as a buyer or a seller. They are something that you need.
Most of the chimneys that I’ve seen now are all braced because the, there’s always a pipe in the middle of the chimney that will really kind of keep it from falling all the way over, but not all of them.
And a lot of those just fell completely over the ones that didn’t have any bracing. If you’re buying a house with a chimney, you want to make sure, even if it’s enclosed in plaster or even enclosed in any you know, surface that you cannot see if there’s bracing, you should have it checked. They can’t see either inside. I took my fireplace that was inside my house out just because I have a small house, and I felt that it was just not safe.
Now the next question you’ll probably say is, Hey Michele, should I get earthquake insurance? I get asked this all the time and I say, well, you know, they say the next one that comes is going to level everything if in fact it ever does. And so insurance may not help you. I don’t know, I, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t really think we’re going to have the big one. The thing is, it was a big one. It could get bigger, but our building standards are so rigorous that I believe everybody will probably still be okay. Really, the only thing you need to think about is when you’re buying a much older home where those building standards weren’t code. I mean, we hadn’t had an earthquake yet, and the bracing and the technology to make some of this stuff really sturdy and safe weren’t around yet.
So that’s my accounting of the earthquake we survived. It was scary. We still move. Things still move. You’ll still find cracks. We are on a living planet, and it is something to think about. In Santa Cruz we have floods, we have tsunamis, what else do we have? Fires? And I’ve been through all of them and for the person kind of closest to it, they have suffered damage. But, you know, knock on wood, we just haven’t had any real problems. I do want to make sure I honor the people that lost their lives downtown in the brick building. I do not want to make light of their tragedy. But overall, you know, we made it through a very large disaster. So that is my experience with an earthquake here in Santa Cruz. We were shaken and stirred!