by John McPhee
On Summit Road, near the Loma Prieta School, a man goes up in the air like a diver off a board. He lands on his head. Another man is thrown sideways through a picture window. A built-in oven leaves its niche and shoots across a kitchen. A refrigerator walks, bounces off a wall, and returns to its accustomed place. As Pearl Lake’s seven-room house goes off its foundation, she stumbles in her kitchen and falls to the wooden floor. In 1906, the same house went off the same foundation. Her parents had moved in the day before. Lake lives alone and raises prunes. Ryan Moore, in bed under the covers, is still under the covers after his house travels a hundred feet and ends up in ruins around him.
People will come to think of this earthquake as an event that happened in San Francisco. But only from Watsonville to Santa Cruz—here in the region of the restraining bend, at least sixty miles south of the city—will the general intensity prove comparable to 1906. In this region are almost no freeway overpasses, major bridges, or exceptionally tall buildings. Along the narrow highland roads, innumerable houses are suddenly stoop-shouldered, atwist, bestrewn with splinters of wood and glass, even new ones “built to code.” Because the movement on the fault occurs only at great depth, the surface is an enigma of weird random cracks. Few and incongruous, they will not contribute to the geologic record. If earthquakes like Loma Prieta are illegible, how many of them took place through the ages before the arrival of seismographs, and what does that do to geologists’ frequency calculations?
Driveways are breaking like crushed shells. Through woods and fields, a ripping fissure as big as an arroyo crosses Morrill Road. Along Summit Road, a crack three feet wide, seven feet deep, and seventeen hundred feet long runs among houses and misses them all. Roads burst open as if they were being strafed. Humps rise. Double yellow lines are making left-lateral jumps.
Cracks, fissures, fence posts are jumping left as well. What is going on? The San Andreas is the classic right-lateral fault. Is country going south that should be going north? Is plate tectonics going backward? Geologists will figure out an explanation. With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultraverbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything. They will say that while the fault motion far below is absolutely right lateral, blocks of rock overhead are rotating like ball bearings. If you look down on a field of circles that are all turning clockwise, you will see what the geologists mean.
Between one circle and the next, the movement everywhere is left lateral. But the movement of the field as a whole is right lateral. The explanation has legerdemain. Harry Houdini had legerdemain when he got out of his ropes, chains, and handcuffs at the bottom of the Detroit River.
All compression resulting from the bend is highest near the bend, and the compression is called the Santa Cruz Mountains. Loma Prieta, near four thousand feet, is the highest peak. The words mean Hill Dark. This translation will gain in the shaking, and appear in the media as Dark Rolling Mountain.
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, three first-year students from the East Coast sit under redwoods on the forest campus. As the shock waves reach them and the trees whip overhead, the three students leap up and spontaneously dance and shout in a ring. Near the edge of town, a corral disintegrates, horses run onto a highway, a light truck crashes into them and the driver is killed. Bicyclists are falling to the streets and automobiles are bouncing. Santa Cruz has been recovering from severe economic depression, in large part through the success of the Pacific Garden Mall, six blocks of old unreinforced brick buildings lately turned into boutiques. The buildings are contiguous and are of different heights. As the shock waves reach them, the buildings react with differing periods of vibration and knock each other down. Twenty-one buildings collapse. Higher ones fall into lower ones like nesting boxes. Ten people die. The Hotel Metropol, seventy years old, crashes through the ceiling of the department store below it. The Pacific Garden Mall is on very-young-floodplain river silts that amplify the shaking —as the same deposits did in 1906.
Landslides are moving away from the epicenter in synchrony with the car alarms. As if from explosions, brown clouds rise into the air. A hundred and eighty-five acres go in one block slide, dozens of houses included. Hollister’s clock tower falls. Coastal bluffs fall. Mountain cliffs and roadcuts fall.
The shock waves move up the peninsula. Reaching Los Gatos, they give a wrenching spin to houses that cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and have no earthquake insurance. A man is at work in a bicycle shop. In words that Time will print in twenty-four-point type, he will refer to the earthquake as “my best neardeath experience.” (For a number of unpublished fragments here, I am indebted to editors at Time Warner, who shared with me a boxful of their correspondents’ files.)
Thirteen seconds north of the epicenter is Los Altos, where Harriet and David Schnur live. They grew up in New York City and have the familiar sense that an IRT train is passing under their home. It is a “million-dollar Cape Cod,” and glass is breaking in every room. This is scarcely their first earthquake.
David: “Why is it taking so long?”
Harriet: “This could be the last one. Thank God we went to shul during the holidays.”
The piano moves. Jars filled with beans shatter. Wine pours from breaking bottles. A grandfather clock, falling—its hands stopping at 5:04—lands on a metronome, which begins to tick.
The shock reaches Stanford University, and sixty buildings receive a hundred and sixty million dollars’ worth of damage. The university does not have earthquake insurance.
The waves move on to San Mateo, where a woman in a sixteenth-floor apartment has poured a cup of coffee and sat down to watch the third game of the World Series. When the shock arrives, the apartment is suddenly like an airplane in a wind shear. The jolt whips her head to one side. A lamp crashes. Books fall. Doors open. Dishes fall. Separately, the coffee and the cup fly across the room.
People are dead in Santa Cruz, Watsonville has rubble on the ground, and San Francisco has yet to feel anything. The waves approach the city directly from the hypocenter and indirectly via the Moho. Waves that begin this deep touch the Moho at so slight an angle that they carom upward, a phenomenon known as critical reflection. As the shaking begins in San Francisco, it is twice as strong as would generally be expected for an earthquake of this magnitude at that distance from the epicenter.
Two men are on a motor scooter on Sixteenth Street. The driver, glancing over his shoulder, says, “Michael, stop bouncing.” A woman walking on Bush Street sees a Cadillac undulating like a water bed. She thinks, What are those people doing in there? Then the windows fall out of a nearby cafe. The sidewalks are moving. Chimneys fall in Haight-Ashbury, landing on cars. In Asbury Heights, a man is watering his patch of grass. He suddenly feels faint, his knees weaken, and his front lawn flutters like water under wind. Inside, his wife is seated at her seven-foot grand. The piano levitates, comes right up off the floor as she plays. She is thinking, I’m good but not this good. A blimp is in the air above. The pilot feels vibration. He feels four distinct bumps.
In Golden Gate Park, high-school girls are practicing field hockey. Their coach sees the playing field move, sees “huge trees … bending like windshield wipers.” She thinks, This is the end, I’m about to fall into the earth, this is the way to go. Her players freeze in place. They are silent. They just look at one another.
In the zoo, the spider monkeys begin to scream. The birdhouse is full of midair collisions. The snow leopards, lazy in the sun with the ground shaking, are evidently unimpressed. In any case, their muscles don’t move. Pachy, the approximately calico cat who lives inside the elephant house, is outside the elephant house. She refused to enter the building all day yesterday and all day today. When someone carried her inside to try to feed her, she ran outside, hungry.
At Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, cupboard doors open and a chef’s personal collection of pickles and preserves crashes. The restaurant, renowned and booked solid, will be half full this ev
ening. Those who come will order exceptionally expensive wine. Meanwhile, early patrons at a restaurant in Oakland suddenly feel as if they were in the dining car of a train that has lurched left. When it is over, they will all get up and shake hands.
In the San Francisco Tennis Club, balls are flying without being hit. Players are falling down. The ceilings and the walls seem to be flowing. Nearby, at Sixth and Bluxome, the walls of a warehouse are falling. Bricks crush a car and decapitate the driver. Four others are killed in this avalanche as well.
In the hundred miles of the San Andreas Fault closest to San Francisco, no energy has been released. The accumulated strain is unrelieved. The U.S. Geological Survey will continue to expect within thirty years an earthquake in San Francisco as much as fifty times as powerful. In the Survey’s offices in Menlo Park, a seismologist will say, “This was not a big earthquake, but we hope it’s the biggest we deal with in our careers.” The Pacific Stock Exchange, too vital to suffer as much as a single day off, will trade by candlelight all day tomorrow.
Passengers on a rapid-transit train in a tube under the bay feel as if they had left the rails and were running over rocks. The Interstate 80 tunnel through Yerba Buena Island moves like a slightly writhing hose. Linda Lamb, in a sailboat below the Bay Bridge, feels as if something had grabbed her keel. Cars on the bridge are sliding. The entire superstructure is moving, first to the west about a foot, and then back east, bending the steel, sending large concentric ripples out from the towers, and shearing through bolts thicker than cucumbers. This is the moment in which a five-hundred-ton road section at one tower comes loose and hinges downward, causing one fatality, and breaking open the lower deck, so that space gapes to the bay. Heading toward Oakland on the lower deck, an Alameda County Transit driver thinks that all his tires have blown, fights the careening bus for control, and stops eight feet from a plunge to the water. Smashed cars vibrate on the edge but do not fall. Simultaneously, the Golden Gate Bridge is undulating, fluctuating, oscillating, pendulating. Daniel Mohn—in his car heading north, commuting home—is halfway across. From the first tremor, he knows what is happening, and his response to his situation is the exact opposite of panic. He feels very lucky. He thinks, as he has often thought before, If I had the choice, this is where I would be. Reporters will seek him later, and he will tell them, “We never close down.” He is the current chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Peggy Iacovini, having crossed the bridge, is a minute ahead of the chief engineer and a few seconds into the Marin Headlands. In her fluent Anglo-Calif she will tell the reporters, “My car jumped over like half a lane. It felt like my tire blew out. Everybody opened their car doors or stuck their heads out their windows to see if it was their tires. There were also a couple of girls holding their chests going oh my God. All the things on the freeway were just blowing up and stuff. It was like when you light dynamite—you know, on the stick—it just goes down and then it blows up. The communication wires were just sparking. I mean my heart was beating. I was like oh my God. But I had no idea of the extent that it had done.”
At Candlestick Park, the poles at the ends of the foul lines throb like fishing rods. The overhead lights are swaying. The upper deck is in sickening motion. The crowd stands as one. Some people are screaming. Steel bolts fall. Chunks of concrete fall. A chunk weighing fifty pounds lands in a seat that a fan just left to get a hot dog. Of sixty thousand people amassed for the World Series, not one will die. Candlestick is anchored in radiolarian chert.
The tall buildings downtown rise out of landfill but are deeply founded in bedrock, and, with their shear walls and moment frames and steel-and-rubber isolation bearings, they sway, shiver, sway again, but do not fall. A woman forty-six floors up feels as if she were swinging through space. A woman twenty-nine floors up, in deafening sound, gets under her desk in fetal position and thinks of the running feet of elephants. Cabinets, vases, computers, and law books are flying. Pictures drop. Pipes bend. Nearly five minutes after five. Elevators full of people are banging in their shafts.
On the high floors of the Hyatt, guests sliding on their bellies think of it as surfing.
A quick-thinking clerk in Saks herds a customer into the safety of a doorjamb and has her sign the sales slip there.
Room service has just brought shrimp, oysters, and a bucket of champagne to Cybill Shepherd, on the seventh floor of the Campton Place Hotel. Foot of Nob Hill. Solid Franciscan sandstone. Earthquakes are not unknown to Shepherd. At her home in Los Angeles, pictures are framed under Plexiglas, windowpanes are safety glass, and the water heater is bolted to a wall. Beside every bed are a flashlight, a radio, and a hard hat. Now, on Nob Hill, Shepherd and company decide to eat the oysters and the shrimp before fleeing, but to leave the champagne. There was a phone message earlier, from her astrologer. Please call. Shepherd didn’t call. Now she is wondering what the astrologer had in mind.
A stairway collapses between the tenth and eleventh floors of an office building in Oakland. Three people are trapped. When they discover that there is no way to shout for help, one of them will dial her daughter in Fairfax County, Virginia. The daughter will dial 911. Fairfax County Police will teletype the Oakland police, who will climb the building, knock down a wall, and make the rescue.
Meanwhile, at sea off Point Reyes, the U.S. Naval Ship Walter S. Diehl is shaking so violently that the officers think they are running aground. Near Monterey, the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory has been destroyed. A sea cliff has fallen in Big Sur—eighty-one miles south of the epicenter. In another minute, clothes in closets will be swinging on their hangers in Reno. Soon thereafter, water will form confused ripples in San Fernando Valley swimming pools. The skyscrapers of Los Angeles will sway.
After the earthquake on the Hayward Fault in 1868, geologists clearly saw that dangers varied with the geologic map, and they wrote in a State Earthquake Investigation Commission Report, “The portion of the city which suffered most was … on made ground.” In one minute in 1906, made ground in San Francisco sank as much as three feet. Where landfill touched natural terrain, cable-car rails bent down. Maps printed and distributed well before 1989—stippled and cross-hatched where geologists saw the greatest violence to come—singled out not only the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland but also, in San Francisco, the Marina district, the Embarcadero, and the Laocoönic freeways near Second and Stillman. Generally speaking, shaking declines with distance from the hypocenter, but where landfill lies on loose sediment the shaking can amplify, as if it were an explosion set off from afar with a plunger and a wire. If a lot of water is present in the sediment and the fill, they can be changed in an instant into gray quicksand—the effect known as liquefaction. Compared with what happens on bedrock, the damage can be something like a hundredfold, as it was on the lakefill of Mexico City in 1985, even though the hypocenter was far to the west, under the Pacific shore.
In a plane that has just landed at San Francisco International Airport, passengers standing up to remove luggage from the overhead racks have the luggage removed for them by the earthquake. Ceilings fall in the control tower, and windows break. The airport is on landfill, as is Oakland International, across the bay. Sand boils break out all over both airfields. In downtown San Francisco, big cracks appear in the elevated I-280, the Embarcadero Freeway, and U.S. 101, where they rest on bayfill and on filled-in tidal creek and filled-in riparian bog. They do not collapse. Across the bay, but west of the natural shoreline, the Cypress section of the Nimitz Freeway—the double-decked I-880—is vibrating at the same frequency as the landfill mud it sits on. This coincidence produces a shaking amplification near eight hundred per cent. Concrete support columns begin to fail. Reinforcing rods an inch and a half thick spring out of them like wires. The highway is not of recent construction. At the tops of the columns, where they meet the upper deck, the joints have inadequate shear reinforcement. By a large margin, they would not meet present codes. This is well known to state engineers, who have blueprinted the reinfo
rcements, but the work has not been done, for lack of funds.
The under road is northbound, and so is disaster. One after the last, the slabs of the upper roadway are falling. Each weighs six hundred tons. Reinforcing rods connect them, and seem to be helping to pull the highway down. Some drivers on the under road, seeing or sensing what is happening behind them, stop, set their emergency brakes, leave their cars, run toward daylight, and are killed by other cars. Some drivers apparently decide that the very columns that are about to give way are possible locations of safety, like doorjambs. They pull over, hover by the columns, and are crushed. A bank customer-service representative whose 1968 Mustang has just come out of a repair shop feels the jolting roadway and decides that the shop has done a terrible job, that her power steering is about to fail, and that she had better get off this high-speed road as fast as she can. A ramp presents itself. She swerves onto it and off the freeway. She hears a huge sound. In her rearview mirror she sees the upper roadway crash flat upon the lower.
As the immense slabs fall, people in cars below hold up their hands to try to stop them. A man eating peanuts in his white pickup feels what he thinks are two flat tires. A moment later, his pickup is two feet high. Somehow, he survives. In an airport shuttle, everyone dies. A man in another car guns his engine, keeps his foot to the floor, and races the slabs that are successively falling behind him. His wife is yelling, “Get out of here! Get out of here!” Miraculously, he gets out of here. Many race the slabs, but few escape. Through twenty-two hundred yards the slabs fall. They began falling where the highway leaves natural sediments and goes onto a bed of landfill. They stop where the highway leaves landfill and returns to natural sediments.
