1989 Earthquake and Reflections on Resilience

October 17th 1989 at 5:04pm, my world literally shifted as the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit.?Fifteen seconds is all it took to forever change my life and outlook. Fifteen seconds that I remember second by second to this day.

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I was a 2nd grader at Loma Prieta Elementary living on the side of a mountain in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. Me and my mom were at home after a full day of school. She was upstairs making dinner and I was downstairs playing in my room. My dad was still at work in the Santa Clara valley. I first noticed something was wrong when the hangers in the guest closet started shaking and making noise, then it sounded like a freight train was coming through our house. Not knowing what to do, I fell to the floor as the earthquake hit. First my lamp fell right next to my head followed by the oil-filled portable radiator. The radiator smashed the lamp and caught my hair. A few inches closer and it would have fallen on my head. To me, it felt like hours of laying on the ground while the whole world shook.?And as suddenly as it came, everything stopped and was eerily quiet.?My mom came running to me and we went outside not knowing if the house was stable on the mountain. We found the garage door had fallen on the car essentially trapping us at the house. There was some cracks in the foundation, but nothing that would cause alarm. We went inside to find the kitchen a complete disaster. Everything had fallen out of the cupboards and smashed on the ground. The fridge was six feet forward and the boysenberries we had picked the last weekend strewn across the broken dishes and combined with the fish from the fish tank, looked like especially gruesome.

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With no phone or electricity, we decided to camp out at our neighbors who had their generator working. We slept in the living room and were woken many times by aftershocks, scaring and terrifying us every time. My father was still not home, and with no way to communicate with him, we waited and made it through the next couple days.?Eventually he and a friend were able to get up the mountain and home. We found out that multiple powerlines were down as well as rubble in the streets making passage earlier near impossible.

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Life as we know it paused. We focused on cleaning up and rebuilding. Halloween was cancelled and school was closed for a while. About two weeks after the quake, Dad and I went to survey the damage in the area. A house up the street fell off the foundation and down the hill.?The person inside luckily was napping in their bed and only suffered a broken nose. My school, it turns out, was right on the fault line the crack going directly underneath my desk. We took pictures of the damage and even got a couple of me inside of cracks (I went searching and couldn't find the picture. Will update if I do).

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San Francisco, while 70 miles away, suffered a lot of damage because of the way the city was built over the bay. It was right during rush hour, and interstate 880 a double-deck freeway, collapsed causing the worst disaster as cars were trapped in between the freeway. Buildings all over the Bay Area were destroyed and Downtown Santa Cruz was especially hit hard with almost the entire downtown totally leveled.?

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With all the devastation, destruction, and many lives lost, we as a community rebuilt and moved forward. My school was deemed unsafe and rebuilt using portables in the Middle School parking lot. Cities pulled together to rebuilt using safer building methods for earthquakes. We had a make-up Halloween in the school gym. We found a way through it all to push through and make our new normal. It brought the community together and to this day, anyone from the area there at that time always has the earthquake as a connector and their story to share.

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This year my son turned 7, and it has me reflecting on the 1989 Earthquake as I was his age when it hit. Watching my son start to turn into a young person, holding hands with hands that are almost my size, seeing him go through a pandemic that is in its second year, really brings me back to my 7 year old self experiencing and living through the Loma Prieta Earthquake. We always hear "kids are resilient" and I think we can all agree, especially now, they are. And what we learn and experience as a child follows us through to adulthood. My experience taught me that even in the worst disasters, we will move forward and we will make it better if we come together as a community. The lowest points teach us how to grow from them and cherish the good when it comes. It's what keeps me optimistic and pushes me forward even when it feels like we'll never get there. How the pandemic will impact our children, my son and daughter, we can only guess. But I hope it teaches them the importance of resilience and the drive to never give up.?