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. . . .

‘It’s not debilitating, but it is difficult.’

Jack--

Earthquake hit while I was under concrete. Worst happened it collapsed on my car. I’m alive just my left foot is stuck under the car. Hope they don’t kill me getting me out. I love you lots. Good luck to both of us.

It was, Dorothy Otto said, an informational memo to her husband written as she sat trapped in her car, tons of concrete from the collapsed Cypress Viaduct all around. She wrote the words “I love you lots” only after she smelled smoke from a car that caught fire up ahead.

Otto, 45, is one of the lucky ones pulled to safety. A year later, she sat in the living room of her Marin County home with Jack. A chunk of concrete from the collapsed freeway lay on her coffee table.

“I can truthfully tell you my life will never be the same. But my life is not ruined,” she said. She had once felt she was invincible. “And now I’m not.”

Otto knows exactly where she was at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989: under beam 104-A. The concrete beam seemed to explode. It crashed down on the hood of her 1988 Pontiac Bonneville SSE. The crushed front end pinned her in by her left foot.

Under tons of concrete from the upper deck, the lower deck on which she was driving plunged down 25 feet. She realized she was choking on dust from the rubble and it struck her that she was alive “and that was incredible.”

Back in Marin that evening, Jack turned on the television. When the camera panned to the Cypress, he felt a cold chill. He knew where his wife was. All night, he waited by the phone, not speaking to a niece and nephew who sat with him, not eating, just staring at the television.

From where she sat, Dorothy could see light, and hear the heroic people who ran to help. Her left foot felt like it was ablaze. “I had no idea pain could hurt like this,” she said. She could be saved, she shouted, if only someone could free her foot.

“I tried to tear it free,” she said. “I could not do it.”

Her life did not flash before her eyes, she did not pray. But she did worry her insurance company would not cover the damage to the car. A man, a hero named Tom, arrived. A man named Clyde came, too, crawling to her through a narrow passageway between the decks. They used a crowbar to try to pry her free from the car. It wouldn’t budge. She bit on an old rag to keep from screaming out in pain. She still marvels at Tom and Clyde’s bravery.

Jack sat in front of the television wondering how to let authorities know that Dorothy was missing. She always calls when she is away on business. Sometimes the phone doesn’t ring until 3 a.m. That’s fine with him. The important thing is that he hears from her.

“I’ve got to know she’s OK, or I can’t function. My day is shot if I don’t get a call,” Jack said.

Firefighters from Oakland’s Engine House No. 1 arrived. They spent an hour cutting the car from around her. She knows them all by name, and calls them “my firefighters.”

Finally, at 10:45 p.m., Jack’s phone rang.

“We have your wife here and she would like to talk to you,” the voice from the hospital said.

“I made it,” Dorothy remembers telling him. “Then we kind of whimpered at each other.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, “it was great.”

She broke no bones, but she has not recovered completely. A knee is still bruised, but her left foot is not permanently damaged. A few weeks ago, she watched a television movie about the earthquake, and she got ill.

She is quick-witted and outgoing, traits that make her a good saleswoman. But sometimes on a trip she thinks about dying in a plane crash. That sort of thought never used to cross her mind.

Jack, 47, a Vietnam veteran who survived the 1968 Tet offensive, knows about such fears, and about nightmares. “You’re never going to get over it,” he tells her. “You will learn to deal with it. It will come back in bits and pieces, at the wrong time.”

The Ottos had come to California a year before the quake from New York where she was a national accounts manager for the Weyerhaeuser Co. selling corrugated boxes. She took a step down when she moved West, but she had good reason for doing it. She wanted to help a sister care for a son who has AIDS, and another son who sustained a head injury in a fall.

“That’s why I figure I didn’t get smashed,” she said. “I came here with a pure heart.”

Recently, she changed jobs, and has one comparable to what she left in New York. But as hard as she works, she has a tough time on some Mondays. On those difficult Monday mornings, she goes to her car, then gets ill and has to return to the house until she regains her composure.

“It’s not debilitating,” she said. “But it is difficult to deal with.”