In the Marina, the Quake’s Damage Is Still Sinking In

In the days just after the Oct. 17 earthquake, Katharine Glenchur thought that with a little cosmetic touch-up, her Marina District flat would be like new.

But the aftershocks kept coming, the ground kept settling, and then the electrical company restored power. When the lights flicked on, she could see deep breaks in the foundation. Now, the back of the building slumps, doors don’t open, and as she walked home one day, she saw that the entire building tilts.

“It’s like the tip of an iceberg,” said Glenchur, 27.

Lately, she has had nightmares about the house, and she has taken a leave from her job so she can oversee the reconstruction. Glenchur, who expects to get her architectural license in 1990, says her training has been a blessing--though it also means she knows the depth of the problem. When an insurance adjuster told her the damage was on the surface only, she knew better.

“I wish it was just cracks in the stucco,” she said, standing in front of her home, which has been propped up on jacks and wooden beams.

With its view of the Golden Gate, its yacht harbor and its sunny weather, the Marina District for decades has been one of this city’s most sought after addresses.

But on Oct. 17, the heart of the district, an area roughly six blocks deep and nine blocks wide built atop a swamp, became a most dramatic example of the damage that comes of liquefaction. In 15 seconds of shaking, underground water combined with sand that underlies the homes, and the shaky soil turned to a thick liquid and bubbled to the surface. Water from broken pipes further saturated the wet soil, and the ground compacted and spread.

Two months later, the extent of the damage is becoming clear. Fissures line sidewalks and streets. Deep cracks scar virtually every building in the area. Many houses sag. As the buildings continue to settle in the still soggy soil, more cracks appear.

Lifelong residents want to stay but wonder how they will pay for repairs that will run into six figures. Landlords have slashed rents by 25% or more. Rent in one apartment house had been $1,350 for a one bedroom. Now it’s $900. Longtime renters who benefited from rent control have left, though it is not clear where in this pricey market they could have again found rents of $600 or $700 a month.

For those who stay, the sounds of jackhammers jar the once quiet enclave. The smell of hot tar has replaced the fresh Pacific air. Joggers still go on their daily runs, only now they must negotiate piles of asphalt and chewed up sidewalks. The harbor remains one of the world’s most picturesque waterfronts. But many of the million-dollar homes facing it are undergoing extensive repair.

The rubble from the nine or 10 fallen or fire-gutted buildings has been hauled away. But crushed and charred cars sit on some vacant lots. Several buildings look as if they could fall at any time, though workers have propped them up with huge steel beams and timbers.

“I’m tired,” said Ezio Rastelli, who lives in the neighborhood and owns E’Angelo, a small Chestnut Street restaurant that caters to locals. “When you live and work here, you see the soil testing, all the work.”

His business is off 5% or 10%. Other merchants are hurting worse. It has convinced Rastelli that it’s time to take a two-week ski trip in his native Italy. “I’m stressed,” he said. “I’m not as productive as I was.”

“Every time one of the trucks drops another load, it’s like another aftershock. It really frazzles you,” said Martha Schluter, who has lived in the district since 1955 but has spent much of the time staying in a Sonoma County home she and her husband own.

Laverne Schiariti’s house fared well. But a neighbor had to replace front stairways and another needed a sledgehammer to open the garage door. On the street, cracks are getting deeper.

“The dust. You can write your name on the furniture,” said Schiariti, a 30-year resident. Like her neighbors, she will weather the reconstruction. “It’s still the Marina,” she said proudly. “A block away is the Green and the water and the view.”

Some normality has returned. People made homeless by the earthquake are gone from Marina Middle School, an emergency shelter, and Principal Alyse Banis said students “seem to have adjusted.” She hopes they will be commissioned to create a plaque for the site across the street where an apartment collapsed, killing three.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. finished replacing 10 miles of gas lines, said spokesman Ron Rutkowski, and the San Francisco Water Department has replaced nearly all the old cast iron waterlines with flexible plastic pipe.

In quake-struck sections of Watsonville and Oakland, activists have decried politicians’ inattention to their plight, while charging that the ritzy Marina has sucked up most of the financial and political assistance.

“I feel for them, I really do,” Steve Martini said, watching as the huge metal claw of a backhoe deposited the remnants of his flat into a truck. “But honestly, this is no better than their situation.”

Martini, 26, a law school graduate, was born in a house across the street. That place, his grandmother’s, ended up in the middle of Beach Street. His building burned in the dramatic fire that engulfed a third of a block.

Shaking from the quake snapped 60-year-old cast iron water mains throughout the Marina. The blaze would have spread farther, but firefighters managed to pump water from the city’s fireboat, the Phoenix, onto the flames.

“I honestly didn’t think we’d see one like this, one that would cause this much destruction, and that I’d have to sit here and watch these guys haul the rubble away,” Martini said.

At a meeting last week attended by 250 people, representatives of Mayor Art Agnos, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and Rep. Nancy Pelosi said they were awaiting a Marina soil study by the U.S. Geological Survey, due in February, before deciding what broad remedial steps should be taken.

Study or not, reconstruction is moving ahead at full speed, and residents have commissioned their own soil studies. The results are not good. Teams of privately hired drillers don’t bother digging for bedrock. The Geological Survey already detected it--at roughly 265 feet.

The drillers go down 40 or 50 feet. They find loose sand and even rubble from the 1906 earthquake for several feet. They hit the water table at seven feet or so. Dan Holland and Galen Schmidt, who drilled in Glenchur’s back yard, described the stuff that emerges as “pudding,” blue-green in color.

“Perfect for liquefaction,” geologist James Noble of Herzog Associates, who was part of the team, said as he placed soil samples from varying depths in plastic bags and labeled them.

Most residents say they knew they lived on fill. But as they have learned, knowing that they are on fill is not the same as living through a strong quake and coming to realize they sit on the geological equivalent of Jell-O.

“We knew it was on landfill. We didn’t know we had the so-called ‘liquid faction,’ ” Kenneth Schluter, 74, said, chewing on a cigar, taking a break from sweeping the sidewalk that had been clean just that morning.

Before Oct. 17, scientists assumed that more violent shaking was necessary before liquefaction would occur, said Jack F. Evernden, research geophysicist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. The quake’s epicenter was 50 miles away in the Santa Cruz mountains. In Evernden’s view, the shaking from the earthquake was “trivial” by the time it hit the Marina.

“We never knew of any ground that bad. No one would have predicted that the Loma Prieta quake would have liquefied that ground--no one in the USGS, anyway,” Evernden said.

Although they didn’t know how unstable the ground was, geologists long knew the Marina was subject to liquefaction. The U.S. Geological Survey produced a map in 1975 showing the Marina would experience violent shaking during a strong quake. Parts of the Marina that were developed at the turn of the century suffered some of the worst damage in the quake and fire of 1906. Indeed, the roots of the current problem go back to that great quake.

City fathers aimed to show the world that San Francisco had survived. And in 1912, workers set about dredging the bay and depositing the fill on what was marsh. By 1915, San Francisco had created the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, held both to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, and to show the world that San Francisco had risen.

Where Washerwoman’s Lagoon once meandered and fresh water springs bubbled, California, New York and other states, as well as Japan, France and other countries, built huge ornate halls to display their products. City Archivist Gladys Hansen said the buildings were cleared soon after the fair closed in December, 1915. The 635 acres sat vacant until the 1920s when the land was bought and developments began.

Some officials believe buyers today should know of the risks. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is considering calling on California to pass legislation requiring sellers of property in areas subject to liquefaction to disclose that fact to buyers, said Viki L. Doty of FEMA in San Francisco.

Geologists note that even more damage can be expected when there is a slip either on the San Francisco Peninsula section of the San Andreas Fault or on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay.

“They make quakes bigger than this one and they make quakes closer,” said Thomas C. Hanks, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist, who attributed the damage to both the unstable ground and outdated construction.

Despite warnings about damage from future quakes closer in, city officials say they are confident that the Marina will survive the next big quake.

“It’s not pudding. There are ways to do this (reconstruction),” Public Works Director Dick Evans said, insisting that if people follow building codes, their homes will be secure.

“I don’t have concerns about the Marina,” Evans said. “Your seismic provisions, if they are applied properly in the Marina . . . the buildings should perform fairly well.”

Under an ordinance passed after the quake, residents who make significant repairs must bring their buildings up to the codes in effect in 1962, said Larry Litchfield, superintendent of building inspection. They must bolt their homes to the foundations, nail plywood to walls to provide sheer support, and connect support beams and columns with metal straps.

Despite the soil, residents know the cheapest homes would sell for $500,000 at a minimum. Some are worth far more. Still, people who have invested heavily in recent years are a bit nervous.

Bill McMonigle, a mortgage broker, says he “dodged two bullets” because his buildings--a large home and an 18-unit apartment house--are standing. But the tenant in the house decided to move after workers accidentally plugged a sewer line. McMonigle figures the cost to fix the cracks will reach into six figures.

He walked through the apartment, pointing out all the cracks. Windows and doors don’t shut. On an old building, the heavy wooden doors can run $1,000. It could have been worse, he shrugs. All around his place, apartment houses and homes had to be vacated.

For McMonigle, the problems can’t be fully appreciated until one walks through at night. “See how many dark windows there are,” he said. “It’s a ghost town, kind of scary.”

COPING WITH CATASTROPHE:Psychological trauma researchers are finding new ways to help disaster victims. B2