Impact of ’89 S.F. Earthquake Lingers, for Good and Bad

It was 10 years ago Sunday that the Loma Prieta earthquake unfolded live on national television, seen by millions of fans who tuned in to watch Game 3 of the World Series and saw the upper decks of Candlestick Park dip and sway when the quake hit.

Neither the passing years nor the $6 billion spent on repairs has erased the memories or even all the physical devastation caused by the quake.

Southern California quickly rebuilt after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, putting freeways back together in record time. But in the Bay Area, repairs have moved slowly, bogged down by political infighting, technical troubles and squabbles over funding that still plague some projects.

The Bay Bridge remains temporarily patched, awaiting replacement. San Francisco voters have yet to decide whether to rebuild or tear down the city’s badly damaged Central Freeway, and will vote again on the issue in November. Oakland’s Cypress Freeway, where 42 of the quake’s 67 victims died, reopened only last year. Stanford University completed reconstruction of damaged buildings just this month.

Certainly, most of the visible scars have healed. Santa Cruz’s funky downtown, reduced to rubble, has been reborn as a hipper, more economically healthy version of itself. San Francisco’s posh Marina District, where apartment buildings crumbled and fires burned for days, is again one of the city’s most desirable addresses.

A Lifetime Memory for Everybody

But Loma Prieta’s impact lingers. The 6.9 temblor not only devastated families that lost loved ones. It sent some survivors packing and others into a frenzy of retrofitting and quake preparedness. It also changed the face of many neighborhoods and how people get around the Bay Area.

“No one who lived through it will ever forget it,” says Mike Smith, who had trouble sleeping for months after his Santa Cruz home was badly damaged.

With local newspapers and TV stations running endless “10 years after” stories, various government agencies and nonprofit organizations are using the attention to hold memorials, conferences and emergency preparedness drills.

“I think government agencies are far better prepared than we were 10 years ago,” said Lucien Canton, director of San Francisco’s Office of Emergency Services. “What worries me is the lack of preparedness in the general public. Is the average citizen really ready for the next one? Is the average business? Overall, no.”

Leslie Williams is an exception. An administrative worker with Bank of America, Williams keeps a pair of sturdy walking shoes in a desk drawer of her downtown office.

She was at the office when the quake hit. It took her more than two hours to walk across town to her home that night, picking through glass and rubble in high-heeled shoes.

Two years later, Williams got involved in the neighborhood emergency program the city launched in the quake’s aftermath. Some 9,000 San Franciscans have been trained in the program.

“When it happens again, and it will,” she said, “I’ll be able to save myself, people I love, neighbors.”

Still, Williams said, she finds it hard to get people interested in taking the Fire Department’s six-week training course. “People either say: It’s too scary; I don’t want to think about it, or they tell you they’re just too busy.”

On Sunday, residents will get a chance to mourn the dead and rejoice at the Bay Area’s rebirth at public and private ceremonies.

San Francisco plans a commemoration on the Marina Green, a swath of emerald lawn fronting the bay that is a favorite recreation spot. Sunday afternoon, chimes will ring and bagpipers will play “Amazing Grace.” The city will honor some of the quake’s heroes and tout the virtues of preparedness.

Maggie McCall plans to go to the Marina event, then head for the same get-together she and her Marina neighbors hold each year.

At the Palace of Fine Arts, the neoclassical dome that is the Marina’s most familiar landmark, 68-year-old McCall and other survivors will “eat and drink and smile,” she said. They’ll swap stories about living off food donated by nearby restaurants and sleeping in the Marina Middle School in the days after the quake, and grumble about the way the neighborhood has changed in the past decade.

McCall said the earthquake hastened the exodus of elderly renters and their replacement with the urban professionals who eagerly snapped up rebuilt apartments that rented for sky-high prices.

“Sometimes we say what we need is another nice, big quake to get rid of these people,” she joked.

That another earthquake will come is inevitable, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency released a study Thursday saying there is a 70% chance that a large earthquake--at or above magnitude 6.7--will strike the Bay Area in the next 30 years. The agency’s scientists released the first updating of risk maps since 1990, showing which parts of the Bay Area are most at risk of being damaged in the next big quake.

Future Damage Could Be Much Worse

Their message: Loma Prieta, which left 13,000 homes uninhabitable in the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay areas, was mild compared to the damage the next quake might cause in the area. Analyzing 18 potential temblors around the Bay Area, geological survey scientists say 13 would have a far greater impact than Loma Prieta, and eight would have a greater impact than the 1994 Northridge quake, which left 46,000 homes uninhabitable in Southern California.

“We’re at ground zero,” geologist David Schwartz said. “We’ve had large earthquakes. We will have large earthquakes in the future, and the only question is where, when and how large. There’s really no escape.”

Zan Turner, a San Francisco building inspector who heads the Building Inspection Department’s earthquake preparedness effort, said various incentives offered to businesses and homeowners by local governments have been generally unsuccessful in encouraging mass retrofitting. Local governments would like to see homeowners bolt their frames to foundations and strengthen walls to make them more earthquake-resistant.

“We’re still in a quandary, trying to figure out how to encourage people to retrofit,” Turner said. Some are put off by the expense, she said. Others simply can’t be bothered.

“I had a PhD student come interview me about the constant fear that we live with in San Francisco because of earthquakes,” she said. “I said, ‘Say what?’ He had to rewrite everything because there is no constant fear.”

Turner said she marvels at the popularity of the Marina, the district she was put in charge of inspecting in the days after the quake. She surveyed hundreds of damaged or destroyed homes and apartment buildings.

Today, studio apartments in those rebuilt Marina buildings rent for $1,800 a month and there is a zero percent vacancy rate.

“Why? Because it is still gorgeous and it is still prime real estate,” Turner said.

Mike Smith understands the syndrome. He was living in Santa Cruz, running Bank of America’s branches there, when the quake hit. Smith still remembers how swirling dust from the collapsed downtown buildings coated his clothes and shoes that evening when he went to inspect the damage, and the despair that gripped the town as the extent of the destruction became clear. After the quake--which also caused serious damage to his home--Smith’s wife was so terrified at the prospect of living through another temblor that the couple accepted a transfer to New Mexico.

“Didn’t take us long to decide that wasn’t a very smart move,” Smith said. In 1995, they moved back.

“I just missed the ocean. I missed Santa Cruz,” said Smith, now chief executive officer for the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce.

“I’m just so proud of this community,” he said. “We completely redesigned the downtown. We created a partnership of enormous diversity,” pulling together businesses, residents, the University of Santa Cruz, nonprofit organizations and even representatives for the homeless into a committee to rebuild.

Smith helped organize this year’s commemoration. “We thought it was appropriate to have some type of remembrance, to close this chapter and move on to the next chapter,” he said.