🌁 The Day the Ground Welcomed Us: Loma Prieta, 1989
Today, October 17, is a day that brings back memories. Every year.
On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m., the earth beneath Northern California gave a violent shudder. The Loma Prieta earthquake, registering a magnitude of 6.9, struck the Santa Cruz Mountains and rippled outward with devastating force. It collapsed sections of the Bay Bridge, pancaked a freeway in Oakland, and silenced the World Series mid-game. Sixty-three lives were lost, thousands injured, and entire neighborhoods reshaped in seconds.
For many, it was a day of tragedy. For my family, it was also our first real “hello” from California.
We had just moved west from Arlington, Virginia, where I’d been working for the U.S. Department of State. Our family was scattered across the Monterey Peninsula that afternoon—each of us about to learn what it meant to live on fault lines.
I was at the Presidio of Monterey, mid-conversation with a calm, collected Army officer. He would later retire and become a lawyer, but that day, he was simply my colleague—unflappable, even as our old wooden building began to sway. We instinctively moved to the doorway, the safest spot we could find, and continued talking as if nothing unusual was happening. That is, until his very large bookcase began to wobble. Without missing a beat, he reached out and held it steady for the full 20 seconds of shaking. When it stopped, he looked at me and said, with classic understatement, “That probably was a big one.”
Meanwhile, my older daughter had just finished her shift at an afterschool care center in Seaside. She stepped outside to find her car “rock-and-rolling” in the parking lot—an image she still recalls with a mix of awe and disbelief.
Back home in Salinas, my husband Carl, our younger daughter, and our two pre-teen sons—including CB (Shenan), our hyperactive and highly extraverted youngest—were going about their late afternoon routines. Suddenly, the concrete patio cracked into four distinct pieces. File cabinets in Carl’s office began opening and closing on their own. Books and knickknacks leapt from shelves. Carl, hearing the chaos upstairs, shouted, “What in hell are you boys doing up there?”
A few days later, I got a call from a former State Department colleague. “We heard about the earthquake that occurred upon your arrival,” he said. “We’ve got a betting pool going. Was the epicenter CB?”
“No,” I replied, “but his father did initially blame it on him.”
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