BAY AREA QUAKE : There’s Irony Aplenty as Earthquake’s Fickle Fury Is Etched Across Landscape

The swank Marina District of San Francisco is now a jumble of twisted pipes, concrete chunks, splintered roads, charred ruins and broken dreams. Fifty miles to the south, in the rugged Aptos Hills at the epicenter of Tuesday’s powerful earthquake, the temblor did little more than knock apples off the trees.

If nothing else, the disaster proved once again how fickle, how quirky, and how utterly devoid of class conscience or social status nature in its full fury can be.

Many million-dollar homes and townhouses in the Marina, built on soft landfill that magnified the shaking, were knocked off their foundations, slumped to one side or severely cracked or burned. Pavement buckled, opening gaps at least a foot high along Marina Avenue. The sidewalks in some places are now so high that cars can no longer turn into their driveways.

And yet, a few miles away in the tight, tawdry quarters of Chinatown and the Tenderloin District, where buildings are older and presumably more fragile because they are constructed of unreinforced masonry, there was little damage.

Experts were dumbfounded. “We did not anticipate (the Marina) to be a problem,” admitted Carl B. Koon, head of San Francisco’s Emergency Services Department. By contrast, he said, the survivability of buildings in Chinatown and the Tenderloin neighborhoods came as “a complete surprise.”

Often just a matter of a few feet, or a few hundred yards, meant all the difference between safety and serious harm.

On Wednesday, Max Dupont, who manages a two-flat building in the Marina with a sensational view of San Francisco Bay, was in the street picking up huge shards of glass and mounds of brick that fell from the facade of the structure. Across the street, Mario Salvetti said his house escaped relatively undamaged because it was built on rock rather than landfill like most of the rest of the neighborhood.

“You just write off one or two days in your life,” said Dupont, motioning to another nearby home that had totally collapsed. “But then you look at that one and you are happy just to be alive.”

The earthquake left a legacy of such ironies. The Golden Gate, one of the oldest of the Bay Area’s bridges and one that was once briefly closed because engineers feared gale-force winds might damage it, emerged unscathed and remained open to traffic. On the other hand, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as well as the much newer Nimitz Freeway were severely damaged and will be closed indefinitely.

Even as support pylons on the double-decked Nimitz Freeway gave way Tuesday, causing the top level to collapse in several places and crush dozens of vehicles below, piles of structural steel rods in building supply yards adjacent to the freeway remained undisturbed.

San Franciscans had long feared that a major earthquake would send huge sheets of glass showering down from high-rise buildings onto the streets below. And riders of BART, the much maligned Bay Area subway system, had fretted that a big shake could cause major disruptions and even cracks in the tunnel running under the bay. But office towers by and large held onto their windows and BART, unlike the above-ground traffic system, was undisturbed and humming along normally on Wednesday.

However glum the day-after mood in the Bay Area may have seemed, the weather proved a delight. Skies were clear, there was only the hint of a breeze and temperatures hovered in the mid-70s. It was a beautiful day for a ball game, but with electric power still spotty and the extent of structural damage to Candlestick Park still being assessed, the third game of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics was postponed again.

Even the captains of industry were humbled by the earthquake. John Houser, a spokesman for MCI Communications Corp., the long-distance telephone giant, said one of the firm’s top executives found out first-hand the kinds of communications headaches suffered by residents here when the phones in his high-rise hotel were knocked out. To make a call, Houser said, the MCI official has to walk down 12 flights of stairs to use a pay phone in the laundry room.

At the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, officials said fewer than 100 of the 10,000 artifacts on display were damaged. A spokeswoman said those that did fall from their display shelves all tumbled either to the north or south--presumably in the direction that the waves of the quake were moving. However, she said, there seemed to be no explanation for why some pieces fell and others did not.