"Oh, this is a REAL earthquake."

October 23, 2013 12:13 PM

Roger Craig, Giants manager: I was in my office when the walls started shaking. I heard Don Robinson hollering, "Earthquake! Earthquake!" I told everybody to run out to the parking lot. It was asphalt and it was just rolling. -- Grantland's oral history of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1989 World Series
posted by Chrysostom (39 comments total)

I assume they fact-checked Dennis Eckersley's assertion about Dave Parker.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:21 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

This is great. Thanks for posting. I remember that day clearly. I was on the East Coast and watching to see if my Giants had it in them to come back. The quake was devastating in so many ways, obviously in the death and destruction, also to the Bay Area's spirit, and the interrupted World Series seemed the most obvious of metaphors. I still remember watching an eerie blimp shot over South San Francisco which was the only video feed anyone seemed to have. South San Francisco then looked like a war zone. That wasn't the quake's fault, it had always looked like that. But it made the whole thing much scarier, especially as it was impossible to raise anyone back there on the phone. And then the A's had to go and sweep up the series when it resumed. I'm really glad they made the decision to continue the series; cancelling it would have been much worse, but damn the games could have been better.
posted by chavenet at 12:21 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

Eckersley: You're in the clubhouse. You're underneath all that. It's like iron screeching. Like there's a train coming through the door. You knew. The auxiliary lights hadn't even come on yet and I was yelling, "Earthquake!" Dave Parker shit his pants, man.

[...]

Dave Henderson: We all hated Eckersley because he was basically a dick on the mound. I'd faced the guy for 10 years and he was a dick before. The only reason we let him live was because he was on our team.

Alderson: During that game, I think Eckersley drilled Canseco. He took a free shot at him.

Eckersley: Jose comes up to bat and he's pointing to center like Babe Ruth. The first pitch, I drilled Canseco in the back. I dunno, I guess I just got jacked up and threw as hard as I could. Jose's coming to the mound and he's pissed. Finally, everything cools down. It was a strange moment.

Dennis Eckersley was my first favorite baseball player, from back when he played with the Red Sox in the late 70's, and it is increasingly clear I made a great choice.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:23 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

I was watching the pre-game at the time - it was actually a little scary in that you could hear someone say "earthquake" through the static just before the signal cut completely off, so there was a clue what had happened. (And turning to other channels, news coverage began to trickle in, though I didn't acutally have cable at the time, just local channels, so I didn't get the insta-coverage of CNN.) A few minutes later they came back sound-only, and I remember thinking how calm and cool Al Michaels sounded, given the circumstances. (I just googled and am glad to see Al Michaels is still alive, though ouch I see he recently had a DWI arrest.)

A further surreal part of the memory for me is that I was watching the game with my ex-wife's grandfather, who had stopped in to visit me, inexplicably, despite the fact his granddaughter had recently left me for someone else. He was an odd but kindly (and clueless in many ways) 80-some year old gent whose wife had died a couple years before, so I didn't have the heart to tell him to get lost (he seemed to be on some kind of elderly road trip to visit his family in various places around the country); he stayed one night, took me out for a diner breakfast the next morning, and I never saw him again.
posted by aught at 12:37 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

Eck does color commentary for the Red Sox now, and does a pretty damn good job. I'd much rather listen to him for the next 4-7 games than Tim McCarver.
posted by COD at 12:45 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this. Honestly, the only recollection I have of the earthquake was the Full House reactionary episode, which I still think was a pretty great episode.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:50 PM on October 23, 2013

But, Rock Steady, you left out my favorite part:

Dave Henderson: After it was all over, Canseco comes to me and says, "Hey, Hendu, you think Eckersley hit me on purpose?" I'm like, "You idiot. He's only walked three guys the whole year!"

Dennis Eckersley being kind of an ass but still coming off as cool and Canseco being totally unaware of the world around him so validates my perception of these individuals it isn't funny.

That whole piece is just full of greatness -- though to be honest, just reading about the guy who had climbed the tower when the quake happened made me about shit my pants. That is exactly what 'being afraid of heights' means to me -- not that you are going to fall when you get up there, but that when you get up there, a fucking earthquake is going to happen and you're screwed no matter what.

I can't put how this event feels to me into words exactly. I guess it is based on the time that it happened (I was 14) and the fact that I was watching it live, but this feels like the very first media event that I remember "as a grown up." Like it doesn't feel like I have an elementary-school nostalgia that even tragedies can have but it's more like a real memory.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:53 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

Full House Reviewed on that episode.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:53 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

We were in the warehouse, working on a 60 amp vacuum chamber power supply when the quake hit, and had KNBR on, listening to the game. Leo LaPorte was the announcer. Ah, another era.
posted by emmet at 12:57 PM on October 23, 2013

Having been born in the Bay Area and lived here most of my life, I have grown tired of trading stories about the big quake. But I will say I had the same Hey fun! Oh wait a minutes...shit! reaction.

And I remember vividly the smell of the deli we went to to get milk bread and other necessities, where about 500 bottles of beer had fallen off the shelves and broken.
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:59 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

COD: I'd much rather listen to him for the next 4-7 games than Tim McCarver.

I'd rather listen to a half dozen forks in a garbage disposal for the next 4-7 games than Tim McCarver.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:01 PM on October 23, 2013 [13 favorites]

Wow, just a few days ago, I was looking at the video of ABC's pre-game coverage -- I remembered having tuned in soon after it had happened, wondering what was going on. I look forward to reading this.
posted by not_on_display at 1:08 PM on October 23, 2013

Doonesbury is relevant.¹

The Loma Prieta earthquake interrupted not only the World Series, but also Doonesbury character Andy Lippincott's struggle with late-stage AIDS. Nearly six months later, and only a week before his death, Andy's apartment remained in disorder.

For more on Lippincott, Wikipedia has a substantial, albeit poorly sourced article covering the most prominent storylines in which the character appeared. The article highlights the controversy surrounding the character's death (which some considered inappropriate for the comics page), but does not mention that fourteen years prior, when the character was first introduced, his very existence provoked a similar controversy.

If I may indulge in a self-link, here is a list of all Doonesbury strips featuring or mentioning Andy Lippincott from his introduction in 1976 to 1991².

---

1. Immediate storyline continues for five more strips.
2. As limited by the extent of my dataset, which is currently comprehensive only through '91.

posted by The Confessor at 1:20 PM on October 23, 2013 [7 favorites]

I was little, and my parents were hate-watching the Series because the Cubs had been knocked out, but I remember vividly watching after the news feed came back on. Several players were escorting their wives across the field, and the wives would give a smile and an "I'm okay" wave at the camera when they saw the camera was on them, and they were SUPER OVER-DRESSED, and I was asking my mom why those ladies were so dressed up for a baseball game and she told me those were the players' wives, which didn't make their clothes make sense to me at the time (I get it now), since the players were in baseball clothes and the wives were right off the set of Dynasty and it seemed odd. But that moment is seared in my mind, the ladies in cocktail dresses and high heels with the baseball players in their uniforms down on the field. I didn't really understand what had just happened but I knew it was odd.

Like so. Complete with furs.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:29 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

I was in the elevator when it happened. I thought that the motor powering it had freaked out and was very happy to get off at the next floor. I was dismayed to find that this wasn't much of an improvement.

I didn't actually realize how big a deal it had been until I saw the news later on that day.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:32 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

I don't even remember watching the game on TV because I was going into "duck and cover" mode....then realized that (a) I had no furniture to duck and cover under, and in fact, (b) I was RIGHT UNDER A CEILING FAN.

Fortunately for me, it wasn't the Hayward fault going off, so I survived that bout of emergency stupid.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:34 PM on October 23, 2013

I'd been through many bay area earthquakes at the time, and I was in an office watching the windows bulge and thinking...ok, this one's big, those windows are going to blow out any second now. It stopped before they did, but went home to a huge mess of broken glass and emptied bookshelves.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:39 PM on October 23, 2013

Full House Reviewed

Bless you for reminding me of this website.

bless your family

bless your cow
posted by elizardbits at 1:56 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

Full House Reviewed

Bless you for reminding me of this website.

*fade in sappy plot resolution music*
posted by dry white toast at 2:00 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

Sixty thousand–plus people started chanting, "We will, we will, rock you!"

These were true sports fans.
posted by bukvich at 2:02 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

Excited to read this! My family moved to California just a couple months before the quake. I was twelve, and it surprised me but I figured it’s just how things worked in our new town. I did wonder why I hadn’t heard about these constant shakers on the news before.
posted by migurski at 2:03 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

I remember this quite vividly, largely because the day before or day of the game I made a wisecrack to a group of friends about how the only way team ??? (I can't remember who I thought was a lock) was going to lose the Series was if the earth opened up and swallowed them.

I was rather horrified with myself when the earthquake happened.

And I'm still incredibly impressed with what a great job the two sportscasters who were supposed to be covering the game did in reporting on the situation as a whole.
posted by nubs at 2:08 PM on October 23, 2013

That earthquake destroyed my aunt, my mom's twin sister, my best friend for life.

Her apartment building was destroyed, she was evicted, a horse she loved to ride panicked and impaled itself on a fencepost trying to escape. The small company she worked for never got back on its feet. Depressed and bereft, she moved back to Illinois to live with us, where she was miserable and somehow never managed to get her life back on track. She died of cancer, in agony, in 2006.

Fuck the hell out of that earthquake.
posted by mykescipark at 2:32 PM on October 23, 2013 [5 favorites]

I was in my kinda shitty apartment in Belmont, CA, about 15 miles south of the stadium, settling in to watch the Series on TV. The apartment was on the top of three floors in a building that was constructed in the 1950's. When the quake hit the room began to dance, and I was pretty worried the building would collapse. Like Kafkaesque said, after 5 or so seconds it went from, "OK, it's an earthquake." to "Oh, shiiiiit. It's an EARTHQUAKE!" I was dating someone from Santa Cruz at the time, and was somehow able to reach her on the phone about 10 minutes after the quake. She was borderline hysterical, but physically OK. I remember the next few weekends visiting her and just being gobsmacked by the visible devastation in Santa Cruz -- so many houses with collapsed chimneys, blue tarp roofs, fire damage, and red tags from having been shaken off their foundations. Some places were hit very hard by that quake, and the relatively low death toll doesn't really convey how deeply the quake was felt in the entire Bay Area. It was awful.
posted by mosk at 2:44 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: bless your family, bless your cow.

. for mykescipark's aunt
posted by Melismata at 2:45 PM on October 23, 2013

In my second floor office in Marin County with a couple of friends with the game about to come on the radio. Guy in the bathroom is the first to yell, "Earthquake!" and everyone heads for the stairs.

Outside, everyone is standing in the middle of the street, having exploded out of the doors on both sides of it, watching the lampposts quiver. I had gone to the earlier game in Oakland over the exact route that collapsed during the quake.
posted by Repack Rider at 2:47 PM on October 23, 2013

I remember that night vividly.

The TV Room at the student Union that night had two groups of people - the World Series watchers, who sat in front of the TV, and us Dungeons and Dragons players, who sat back in a secluded corner. My seat was the one facing the TV, and mild amusement turned to shock when the picture went to static, and then came back with earthquake footage. By then, no one cared how much XP their half-elf got for beating down the blink dog, and we all collectively watched the events unfold in real time.
posted by spinifex23 at 3:20 PM on October 23, 2013

Related previously. (Self-link FPP.)
posted by trip and a half at 3:55 PM on October 23, 2013

My uncle and his kids were living in Millbrae at the time. They were at a little league game and he described the field as having "waves".
posted by brundlefly at 4:07 PM on October 23, 2013

By then, no one cared how much XP their half-elf got for beating down the blink dog . . .

85 + 4/hp. What? Were you already playing 2nd Ed?
posted by The Bellman at 4:11 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I remember that night vividly as well.

I'd just gotten my first "real" job, and was in an absolutely brutal 13 hour edit that went until like 9pm, and we came out of lockdown in the edit suite and everybody was telling us about this earthquake that we had no idea about.

It was 1989, we certainly weren't important enough to have cell phones, and the land line was permanently on DND.
posted by Sphinx at 4:26 PM on October 23, 2013

No, it was 1st Edition.

I truthfully took the name of the monster out of thin air, but we were definitely playing 1st Edition.
posted by spinifex23 at 4:38 PM on October 23, 2013

A couple of friends of mine from my dorm and I went to early dinner that day, so we could head over to the UC Theater and see Seven Samurai. The dining hall was mostly empty, as lots of people had just grabbed something quick so they could catch the baseball game on tv. The dining hall was an old 1920s building with huge heavy chandeliers and very tall windows. When the quake started, it felt and sounded like a mack truck driving under the floor.

After what seemed like a few minutes but was more like a couple of seconds, someone piped up and said, "Should we get under the tables?" So we all did that while the chandeliers swung in huge arcs and the windows rattled.

When it was over we got up and finished eating, then went down to the common room to watch tv. That's when we realized how big the quake had been. I'd driven on the Nimitz freeway not three hours earlier that day.

About an hour after the quake, another friend joined us. She'd been on the lake, rowing. She hadn't felt a thing except for some slight waves.

I distinctly remember many aftershocks, and not feeling like I was on solid ground for at least a month after.
posted by lovecrafty at 5:58 PM on October 23, 2013

I was 6 when the loma prieta quake hit and distinctly remember watching sesame street with my younger bro, and then feeling the whole house shake like nothing I had felt before. Watching the chandelier sway back and forth until the tv turned to static and our babysitter moved us to sit under a door frame in the hallway. Talking to my mom on the phone and listening to the news on the radio because the tv won't turn on.

That week in my 1st grade class we got a new student for the year because her home in santa cruz had been demolished by the quake. it made quite the impression on my little 6-year-old brain, her description of the chimney collapsing and the bricks flying every which way.

My mom has a crazy story of how she was at work in san ramon and on a conference call with someone in San Jose when the quake hit. San Ramon is probably about 50ish miles north of San Jose. The person in San Jose suddenly said, while on the conference call, "I gotta go there's an earthquake!" and that gave my mom enough time to hang up the phone and get under her desk before the earthquake hit San Ramon.
posted by ruhroh at 7:32 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Why do so many people run out of big buildings in an Earthquake? If you are running out while the quake is still going, even a small part of a brick falling from up high can cause fatal injuries. Maybe running out of an unreinforced building or house may make sense, but any new structure in California has to conform to strict earthquake safety construction techniques and designs. Running outside and a few other wrong actions are covered here.
posted by RuvaBlue at 7:45 PM on October 23, 2013

It is good to put this earthquake in perspective:
Here is the printout of a seismograph that recorded the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (it has been in operation all this time). The 1906 earthquake released 16 times more energy.

For some reason I was having a discussion with my kids about preppers. They actually know a couple of kids whose parents are preppers. I noted that, living in the SF Bay Area, they were actually doing at least one thing right. Earthquakes happen so infrequently that they are mostly out of our consciousness and so we don't prepare for them. We should all have stocked supplies such as food, water, a flashlight, and a radio.

There is at least one rational reason to be preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
posted by eye of newt at 9:27 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you are running out while the quake is still going, even a small part of a brick falling from up high can cause fatal injuries.

Indeed.
posted by dhartung at 1:15 AM on October 24, 2013

Well

Well

Well I tripped on the staircase and spilled my cup of juice.

And that's my story of '89.

I will say that a few years ago I was entertaining some visitors from abroad. And the subject of earthquakes came up. And then--on cue--everything started wobbling. It was a mere magnitude 3 or 4. But I hope it made an impression.
posted by alexei at 1:49 AM on October 24, 2013

I was living in Santa Cruz and working in Scotts Valley in October 1989. When the quake hit I was in a co-worker's car on Highway 17 between Scott's Valley and San Jose to buy my first serious stereo system. We were six to eight miles from the epicenter. At first I thought the car was bouncing around so strangely because the suspension was going out intermittently on all four wheels, then I saw the other cars bouncing around and realized what was happening. The redwoods were thrashing from side to side at extreme angles, raining needles. There were piles of brown redwood needles all over the pavement. I could not believe they could lean that far over and not fall. The road itself (I am not making this up) looked like a ribbon that was being raised and lowered at one end by a giant hand to make it ripple in big waves. I was digging my fingernails into my coworker's arm so hard they left marks.

Once the initial quaking stopped, we proceeded s-l-o-w-l-y down 17, because the roadway was "stepped." Every 20 to 40 feet or so, there'd be a huge crack, with a drop of I dunno, six to eight inches? higher than a very high curb, anyway - to the next flat piece of roadway. We didn't have much of a choice, though, there was at least one huge landslide blocking the southbound lane. We found out later they closed the northbound lane behind us.

We immediately forgot all about the stereo and concentrated on getting back to Santa Cruz before all the roads were closed. We went south on 101 and took 152 (Hecker Pass) back towards the ocean, through Watsonville. They closed that road behind us too. People in Watsonville were just sitting outside on the grass, looking stunned. Buildings were off their foundations, windows were shattered, former brick chimneys were piled and scattered bricks. We took Hwy 1 back up the coast to Santa Cruz, then went north on Hwy 17 again to Scotts Valley to pick up my car at work. All the cars in the parking lot were sitting at crazy angles like a bunch of drunks had parked them. Inside our building everything was in huge piles on the floor.

When I got home - I was living on the second floor of a woodframe apartment building on Western, north of Natural Bridges - I found a few glasses smashed, my TV screen-down on the floor, and some booksehelves toppled, but no major damage. I didn't have phone or water or power for a week. Everybody got out their camping gear and we had cookouts on the lawns. Grocery stores were giving away their meat and other perishables before they spoiled.

The oddest thing was that since we had no power, everybody in the world knew more about the quake and the damage than we did. Once the phones started working again I had relatives I'd never met or heard of (how did they find out I lived in Santa Cruz?) calling me to ask for details and all I could tell them about was the damage in Santa Cruz. Which they already knew.

And then there were the days I don't like to think about, when they tore down the Cooper House and the Pacific Garden Mall died.

One more thing I remember vividly. I woke in the middle of the night a few weeks after the quake, in a panic, certain that there'd been an aftershock and that the bed was still moving. Then I realized the movement was my heartbeat.
posted by caryatid at 7:56 PM on October 24, 2013 [2 favorites]