Twenty Years Later

October 17, 1989, 5:04PM, the Monterey Bay Area. The Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter Scale (7.1 according to other people). I remember it like it was yesterday. I even remember what I was wearing, how hot it was, and what I was eating for dinner. I lived through this, I experienced it, I thought the world was going to end. I didn’t sleep for four days. I was nine years old.

It was the most terrifying event of my life, even though I wasn’t in a majorly affected area. My dad worked as a custodian at a high school in a town that was pretty much flattened by it. They made him crawl under the high school to check the foundation. We were having aftershocks every hour. I remember the tent cities set up by people that lost everything. I remember the roar of it, the ground buckling, the screaming of my mom, the terror in my aunt’s voice. I remember when I heard that the Nimitz Freeway collapsed, I remember hearing that the Bay Bridge had fallen, I remember the horror of seeing how Santa Cruz and the Marina District in San Francisco looked afterwards.

We had no power for a week after it happened. We lived a nightmare of trying to stay sane during the thousands of aftershocks afterwards. We followed my dad around to his various jobs because we did not want to stay at home. Our little alleyway neighborhood banded together during that time and pooled resources so we fared well in that department. Our parents tried to keep the youngsters distracted so as not to dwell on the fact that a major aftershock could hit and knock down our homes. I’m pretty sure I was in shock for three days after, until the night of major aftershocks when I snapped out of it and started screaming.

I remember. I don’t think I will ever forget. Twenty years have passed, but when I think about it, it is as fresh as the day it happened. That was the day that I learned that Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit about what us puny humans have planned. It was a telling lesson.