Quake Changed Lives and Bay Area’s Psyche

Almost a year later, the enormity of last October’s earthquake in the Bay Area is still a difficult concept to pin down.

The ground shuddered for just 15 seconds, about the time needed for three easy breaths. When it stopped, 3,700 people were hurt. Sixty-three of them would die. The homes of 12,000 people were no longer livable. The Bay Bridge was broken. Physical damage of all kinds topped $7 billion--the exact bill is still being counted.

Harm to the psyche of a region that likes to think of itself as idyllic is less easily computed.

From the vantage point of a year’s time, this much is clear. At that moment--5:04 p.m. last Oct. 17--life changed along the 80-mile reach of coast between the Golden Gate Bridge and Monterey Bay.

The Cypress Viaduct of I-880 (the Nimitz Freeway), which collapsed and killed 42, no longer pierces West Oakland. It’s remarkable how much quieter a neighborhood can be when 195,000 cars a day aren’t passing through on a highway stacked two levels high. In its place is a mile-long swath of bare dirt and a street named in honor of African leader Nelson Mandela.

Here in San Francisco, three other double-deck freeways remain closed. Wood struts brace the archways in City Hall. The Geary Theater, home of the American Conservatory Theater, is dark for repairs. Fewer people visit Chinatown, use cabs or travel to the city for dinner. By helping defeat a plan for a new stadium, the quake could also be blamed for San Francisco losing the Giants to Santa Clara, 40 miles down the road.

In Oakland, the St. Francis de Sales Cathedral, a piece of the skyline since 1893, is to be razed. Likewise for Sacred Heart, built in 1897. Mayor Lionel Wilson, who chose not to be as visible after the quake as his San Francisco counterpart, lost his bid for reelection and will soon leave office.

Other aftereffects are more personal. They are evident in purchases of canned food and flashlights, in late-night calls to crisis help lines, in the avoidance of bridges. It reflects a loss of innocence, painful at first, but maybe helpful the next time.

“I changed jobs so that I would not have to drive on the Bay Bridge every day,” said Terri Douglas, who lives in Berkeley. “I put a strap on my water heater. I put latches on my cupboards. I already knew how to turn off the gas. And now I wait.”

The clearest lesson of the quake, scientists and officials of all stripes say, is that there will be a next time. After studying seismic activity, the U.S. Geological Survey says there is a 2 in 3 chance that another big quake will hit sometime in the next 30 years--”including today.”

Last October’s quake, called the Loma Prieta for a prominent peak near the epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains, was anticipated too--it was given 1 in 3 odds of occurring. Twice the state’s Bay Area Regional Earthquake Preparedness Project had issued actual advisories of an impending quake, the last time in August, 1989. The timing was off by two months.

Felt in Oregon, Nevada and Los Angeles, the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta quake was the strongest to ever hit an American metropolitan area as populous as the Bay Area.

It also struck on national TV. The cameras were at Candlestick Park with 62,000 baseball fans waiting for the third game of the World Series between the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants. Shots of uniformed players comforting distraught family members are among the most searing images of that long first night.

Over the next week TV cameras magnified the search through freeway rubble in Oakland and the discovery after four nights of trapped dockworker Buck Helm. He later died of injuries, and his crushed Chevy Sprint is now on display at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum in Buena Park.

The cameras also beamed images of flaming apartment houses in the Marina District of San Francisco, and captured the agonies of the displaced, not just here but in Watsonville and Los Gatos and Santa Cruz.

In the year since, the Loma Prieta quake has been one of the most thoroughly analyzed ever. The epicenter in Forest of Nisene Marks state park was on the San Andreas Fault, a focus of intense interest since the 1906 great quake that leveled San Francisco.

The region is blanketed with seismic sensors. It also is home to a big U.S. Geological Survey station in Menlo Park and platoons of engineers, geologists and social scientists at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Their message is that it could have been far worse and, considering everything, recovery is going pretty well.

In the Marina District, a chain link fence now encircles the vacant lot at Cervantes and Fillmore where 3 1/2-month-old Scott Dickinson suffocated beneath the crumbled ruins of his apartment building. Corner houses like his took the worst hits. They were battered by the vibration of adjoining buildings until they collapsed or jumped their footings, landing in the street.

In the quake’s 15 seconds of terror, the Marina heaved beyond belief and boils of wet sand spurted through asphalt and sidewalks, in some cases carrying tar paper and wood chips from buried construction sites.

The Marina is 60 miles from Loma Prieta but sits on loose sand poured over what used to be Washerwoman’s Lagoon, a shallow on San Francisco Bay. During the shaking the poorly laid fill began to jiggle, amplifying the quake’s original force. Only two blocks away, a brick Pacific Gas & Electric building built in 1893--the type usually vulnerable to quakes--came through unscathed. It was built on solid ground.

Today the pavement on Marina streets is level again. Carpenters and plumbers work on almost every block. It’s common to see three-story houses raised up on heavy timbers, their underpinnings exposed and workers busy underneath. They are owned by the lucky ones, those whose insurance paid off or who quickly negotiated the federal aid bureaucracy.

Across the bay in Oakland, recovery is moving more slowly. The Emporium department store, the leading retail force in the city’s old downtown, reopened this summer after extensive repairs. But many nearby stores on Broadway and Telegraph are boarded up, either unable to survive the bad months when the Emporium was shut, or awaiting federal aid for repairs to their old brick buildings.

The 76-year-old City Hall, its clock tower the most familiar sight downtown, is clothed in scaffolding. Repairs will cost $90 million and take three to four years. A new City Hall would cost only $50 million.

“Absolutely, if it didn’t have the historic significance there’s no question we would demolish it,” said Henry R. Renteria, Oakland’s emergency services manager.

In West Oakland, the city’s poorest neighborhood, the tragedy at the Cypress Viaduct healed an open sore. When the freeway was standing, grime penetrated every nearby window. The noise was relentless.

“All the time you heard traffic, 24 hours a day. The fumes were so bad,” said Annetta Anderson, 41, outside her home a block from where the Cypress had stood since the 1950s.

With the towering edifice gone, residents can finally see downtown. Officials are now complaining that the freeway ever was there, and pressure is great to build its replacement elsewhere.

“Goddamn it,” Mayor Wilson said, as if addressing Caltrans, “you’re not going to put that freeway through this neighborhood. Maybe it is going to cost you a little bit more. Maybe it is going to take you a little more time. But there has to be a better way.”

With the Cypress stretch of Interstate 880 gone and three San Francisco freeways closed, traffic in the region has slowed perceptibly. Commute patterns have shifted. Ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit trains has risen by 31,000. Bay Bridge crossings have dropped 13,000.

All over the Bay Area, the tourism that evaporated after the quake has slowly revived, but not to last year’s levels.

At Fisherman’s Wharf, a sunny afternoon found few tourists riding the cable cars and plenty of open tables at the Buena Vista Cafe, usually a favorite stop for visitors.

“I thought the city would be more busy, more frantic,” said Gisela Thurman, a German vacationer, sipping on the cafe’s landmark Irish coffee. “People should not be so afraid of earthquakes.”

At the Cannery, a shopping and tourist attraction at Fisherman’s Wharf, the quake spoiled a record October for business. Some shops have folded in the ensuing year.

“There were no casualties to visitors (but) they were rattled, “ said Chris Martin, owner-manager. “People left this city as if it were the plague.”

In a bid to lure more local patrons, to try to replace the lost tourists, the Cannery has added restaurants, a San Francisco history museum and a repertory theater. But the quake seems to have altered the habits of Bay Area suburbanites. Rather than come into the city for dinner or shopping, more are staying home in Concord and Palo Alto.

It may take years for tourism to recover fully, Martin says, but someday the Oct. 17 quake could become part of San Francisco lore.

“At some point it will be a novelty (and) eventually get tied in with the romance of the city,” Martin said.

In the big picture of the Bay Area economy, the quake has exacerbated the local effects of the nationwide slump. But there is an up side.

“What the earthquake did was make a bad situation worse,” Wells Fargo Bank economist Joe Wahed said. On the other hand, “Contractors are busy. Seismic engineers are busy.”

San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos regards the warnings of another earthquake as a threat to the region’s recovery.

“We don’t need any more general pronouncements from geologists,” Agnos said. “If they can develop their science to the point where they can tell me that an earthquake is coming in five days, terrific, tell me as soon as you know. Otherwise, shut up.”

But other officials say the warning is worth repeating. About 2.5 million colorful 24-page pamphlets explaining the threat and advising people how to prepare were distributed in 40 Sunday newspapers in September. The U.S. Geological Survey, one of the sponsors, has received thousands of requests for more copies.

The future quake is most likely to be centered closer to San Francisco and Oakland, geologists say, and casualties will be far higher than with Loma Prieta.

Also, most quakes of 7.0 magnitude take longer than 15 seconds to spend their energy. The Bay Area was lucky last October, according to the final report on Loma Prieta by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

“If it had lasted for another 10 to 20 seconds, the damage . . . would have increased enormously,” concluded the report, which was backed by the National Science Foundation.

In a quake centered closer to the bay, there could also be more damage from liquefaction, the phenomenon that turned the ground beneath the Marina District into slurry. The effect ruptured runways at Oakland Airport and Alameda Naval Air Station, undermined the east entrance to the Bay Bridge and raised sand boils in the middle of farm fields in the Watsonville area.

“The next time we could have massive liquefaction,” said Richard Eisner, director of the Bay Area Regional Earthquake Preparedness Project.

Although many cities have dusted off plans to strengthen their old masonry buildings, nothing has been done about brittle, non-ductile concrete structures. It was a common construction method in the 1950s and ‘60s for public buildings, hotels and motels.

Those concrete buildings “may . . . represent the greatest threat to life in this country,” the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute study said.

On the anniversary Wednesday, the moment will be marked in different ways. Actor Danny Glover will join the San Francisco Symphony at the city’s official ceremony at the waterfront Ferry Building. At 5:04, a flag will be raised for the first time since the quake broke the building’s landmark flagpole.

A few blocks away, Chung Lung Lau plans to conduct a Buddhist ceremony outside a building in the South of Market area. Bricks falling from the building crushed his wife, Yuk Lin Lau, in her car, leaving Lau to raise three teen-age daughters.

Most hope the one-year anniversary passes more smoothly than the half-year did. The morning after the six-month anniversary, a cluster of quakes rumbled beneath the Bay Area for three hours. Damage was limited to power outages and minor landslides, but the episode reopened psychic wounds.

Motorists refused to stop beneath freeway bridges. Crisis phone lines were jammed. “We got hundreds of phone calls,” said Madeline Mindek, director of the Family Service Agency on Gough Street in San Francisco.

As the anniversary approaches, emotions held in check for a year are rising to the surface. People are calling the hot lines again. Publicity isn’t helping them forget, but then maybe forgetting is not the best way.

“I don’t want to always live in fear of the next earthquake,” said Terri Douglas, the Berkeley woman. “But I do want to be ready, physically and emotionally. I think you have to be aware or else you go nuts.”

Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this article. QUAKE CLUES:Temblor taught scientists more about San Andreas Fault. B3