After Shocks

People go about their business. But for almost everyone who lived through the biggest earthquake in California since 1906, life remains different a year after.

The differences can be subtle. People may jump when a truck rolls by, or when the washing machine spins and shakes the house. Many people need more time to gain their composure when a small temblor rumbles through. Some people still won’t cross the Bay Bridge. Some people have moved away. No one who survived the earthquake on that warm evening last Oct. 17 ever wants to experience another one like it. For people who came close to death, whose homes are no more, who saw up close the destruction the quake wrought, the effect will remain forever. Times Staff Writer Dan Morain talked with some of those people. Here are their stories. . . .

‘The world is going to end. Let’s run.’

Ask Eda Fissolo about the past year and she answers quickly: “You know what terrible is?”

Fissolo had lived in a home in the Marina district that her parents bought when they moved from North Beach after World War II. She raised her children there and kept everything she owned there. On Oct. 17, the corner in front of her home became the most devastated part of the hardest hit neighborhood of San Francisco.

When the shaking stopped, a granddaughter who lived a few blocks away came to check on Fissolo. It began to dawn on her how bad things were. The ground had become a thick soup of sand and water in a process geologists call liquefaction. A hole had opened in the sidewalk. Across the street, a building had been forced off its foundation and shoved in the middle of the street.

“Oh my God,” she remembers saying to her granddaughter. “The world is going to end. Let’s run.”

She never got back inside her house. Within an hour, the building caught fire. Firefighters could do little because the water mains snapped. By the time the city’s only fire boat sailed into position and started pumping bay water onto the flames, one-third of a block was ablaze. The next day, Fissolo saw her charred stove atop the cinders. All she could think of was how clean she had kept it.

On a warm afternoon earlier this month, she sat in the back yard of the two-room apartment she rents from a friend. The place is clean, the rent reasonable. But she misses her home and what was destroyed: Pictures of her mother on her 100th birthday, her daughters’ birth certificates, rosary beads that had been in the family for generations.

Because her building burned, fire insurance covered the loss. Many neighbors are not so lucky. If their homes sustained only earthquake damage and they had no earthquake insurance, they were forced to seek payment from governmental agencies. She said the strain shows in older people. Many of her friends don’t smile as readily as they once did.

She has been able to rely on her family. One of her daughters lives a few blocks away. Her grandson, Steven Martini, 27, a law school graduate, has dealt with the contractors. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a measure to speed up the building-permit process for earthquake victims. Still, final approval to rebuild did not come until Aug. 1.

For all the loss, there have been gains. People who have endured the past year have become closer. Streets that buckled have been repaved. Workers replaced brittle water and sewer mains and gas lines with new pipes designed to withstand the next quake.

In the hardest-hit 6-by-9-block area of the Marina, ground water lies only six or eight feet below the surface. But engineers think they have a solution. They are pumping a grout-like substance into the ground. As it hardens, the theory goes, the ground will become more stable. And as they rebuild, construction crews are using more modern foundations, designed to ride atop future seismic waves.

“We’re not dwelling on that one day,” Martini said. “We’re moving forward.” All will turn out well, he believes. That’s what he tells his grandmother.

She looks forward to construction beginning, though out of superstition, she does not want it to start in October. The new floor plan is the same as the old one. Fissolo looks forward to having her grandson and his wife living in the upstairs flat. But, she said, her new house won’t be like her old home. “How could it be the same? You have no more memories.”