Loma Prieta’s legacy, 25 years later (w/video)

A quarter-century has passed since Charlie Eadie and his wife stood outside their home overlooking Santa Cruz and watched a cloud of yellow dust billow above the city’s central core.

The couple didn’t know it then, but the magnitude-6.9 temblor that caused the telephone poles on their street to - in Eadie’s words ­­­­- “wave like windshield wipers” also leveled much of Santa Cruz’s downtown, killing six and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

“This place has changed forever,” Eadie, the city’s planner at the time, recalled saying.

As hyperbolic as that may have sounded in the moment, it was a prescient observation. The Loma Prieta earthquake did change almost everything about the iconic beach town.

One of the less discussed realities of that seismic event, which struck at 5:04 p.m. 25 years ago today, was the devastation it visited upon Santa Cruz, Watsonville and other small communities clustered near the quake’s epicenter. Most people instead focus on the Bay Area, where the temblor killed scores and left indelible images of collapsed freeways, burning neighborhoods and the Bay Bridge in a state of partial collapse.

While that focus is understandable, it also obscures other important legacies of the Loma Prieta quake, including the manner in which Santa Cruz and other small communities rallied to repair and rebuild.

Those lessons resonate today, in particular in Wine Country, where a magnitude-6.0 temblor that struck south of Napa on Aug. 24 underscored how much planning and work has been done in California since Loma Prieta to minimize the risk of damage and death from earthquakes. At the same time, the Napa temblor also exposed how much has been left undone.

“We’ve done a lot in 25 years,” said Danielle Hutchings Mieler, an earthquake and hazards coordinator for the Association of Bay Area Governments, who noted in particular the billions of dollars poured into transportation systems, hospitals, schools and other public infrastructure.

But Hutchings Mieler said the South Napa earthquake, which caused major damage to the city’s downtown, also showed lingering problems.

“So many of our small downtowns in the Bay Area are like this,” she said. “They have beautiful, old brick buildings that are at risk. But they can be retrofitted and improved.”

In Sonoma County, as many as 170 structures in the unincorporated area alone could present a safety risk because of their use of unreinforced masonry - brick, stone or cinder blocks mortared together, largely without supporting steel rods required for decades by building codes. Most Wine Country cities, pressed by the necessity to bring their buildings up to code and a more recent push to save historic downtown buildings, have made quicker progress than unincorporated areas in shoring up their unreinforced structures.

Statewide, there are 7,800 unreinforced masonry buildings, or URMs, in 29 counties that are at “significant risk of collapse,” according to the state Seismic Safety Commission.

“The problem is, you don’t find out where the gaps are until an event occurs,” said Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, who is a member of the commission. “You have to make a commitment each and every year to make those investments. You can’t wait until something happens nearby to remind you, ‘Oh yeah, we need to get moving.’?”

Rabbitt, an architect, has vivid memories of the Loma Prieta quake, which struck while he was working in his office on the second floor of a century-old building on Sausalito’s waterfront.

“I was ready to jump out the back into the bay. Thankfully, I held on,” Rabbitt said. He said nobody inside the building was injured, but outside, two German tourists were left bloodied by falling bricks.

Anthony Duckworth of Petaluma recalled being on the Bay Bridge, heading to a blind date that warm evening in 1989, when the temblor forced him and other motorists to an abrupt stop. As plumes of black smoke began to rise from the city, a black-clad motorcycle rider, like someone in a Road Warrior movie, weaved headlong through stopped traffic on the bridge, shouting, “The bridge has fallen down!”

“I thought, as many others did, that the bridge beyond our line of sight had fallen into the bay,” Duckworth recalled this week. “There was some panic at this point.”

A section of the deck on the bridge collapsed when bolts sheared off and it slipped off its perches, killing a woman who unwittingly drove into the gap. A five-mile stretch of the Cypress structure, a raised Oakland freeway, also crumpled, killing 42 people.

The most catastrophic damage, however, occurred about 80 miles away from San Francisco, in communities near the quake’s epicenter in the Santa Cruz mountains. What happened there may offer the most valuable lessons for the North Bay, given the regional similarities.

In Santa Cruz, the primary focus in the aftermath of the earthquake was a nine-block area along Pacific Avenue downtown, where two-thirds of the buildings suffered significant damage or were destroyed. The Pacific Garden Mall, which at the time was the city’s main civic, retail and cultural hub, was hit especially hard. Many historic structures also were damaged.

The arduous recovery effort took place over several weeks and included the installation of a makeshift retail district in time for the Christmas shopping season. The focus then turned to the area’s long-term future, and determining what should rise from the rubble. The city formed a downtown recovery plan, to be overseen by a 36-member advisory committee called Vision Santa Cruz. The effort involved articulating values and aspirations for what downtown should look and feel like, with specific design standards and conceptual planning for streets and public spaces to carry out those ideals.

In a community where many looked askance at development of any kind, it wasn’t an easy undertaking.

But Eadie, who was the project manager of the Santa Cruz Downtown Recovery Plan, said this week that “recovery is about one thing, and that is capital investment.”

He said the city was receiving money for earthquake recovery from a variety of sources, including back then from redevelopment funds. But he said without sustained private investment, those would only prove to be half-measures.

“We had to change what the downtown was in order to be able to have a viable economic center,” he said.

He said one key to the recovery plan was allowing developers to get approval for their projects at the administrative level, without having to go through the time-consuming and potentially expensive planning process. That was made possible within the framework of the recovery plan, which outlined with a great deal of specificity what the city envisioned for downtown.

New redevelopment districts helped finance public investment and supported private projects. Santa Cruz County voters also pitched in by approving a half-cent sales tax tied specifically to earthquake recovery.

Today, downtown Santa Cruz is thriving, buoyed by an increase in enrollment at UC Santa Cruz and an influx of Bay Area technology companies that have helped nurture the area’s economic boom.

“There’s some folks that still have nostalgia, as do I, for the way it used to be. But this place is much more vibrant,” he said. “We have a downtown that’s active well into the evening, with big, wide sidewalks, street cafes and all sorts of things we didn’t have before.”

Napa’s downtown already was undergoing a profound transformation prior to the August earthquake. New restaurants, wine bars and other new businesses have proliferated in the area, while most historic buildings have been restored and improved with seismic upgrades. A project to control flooding on the Napa River, which flows downtown, also is continuing.

The city’s plan for future improvements downtown proposes to speed up project approval for developers, something Mayor Jill Techel said this week could help quicken the pace of recovery from the quake.

“The amount of property damage and heartache, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Techel said. “But I think the community can use the moment.”

However, the fact that some older buildings in Napa suffered major damage despite having undergone seismic upgrades has engineers discussing whether tweaks are necessary for future retrofit designs.

A handful of other damaged masonry buildings that had not been retrofitted exposed the city’s reluctance to wield a hammer against property owners who defied an ordinance requiring these owners to complete seismic retrofits by the summer of 2009.

Hutchings Mieler said it remains a challenge statewide to get home and business owners to make the structures more earthquake safe.

“It’s not something you can just issue a bond for,” she said. “It’s expensive to upgrade individual homes or businesses.”

Melvyn Green, a structural engineer in Torrance who consults with agencies statewide, said he expects a major focus of structural safety in coming decades will be with concrete buildings built prior to about 1980 and wood-frame apartments, including those situated above carports.

He noted it took 50 years for most schools in California to get upgrades following legislation passed in the wake of a 6.5-magnitude quake that struck Long Beach in 1933.

“And yet, we did it,” Green said. “It’s not something that’s going to occur overnight. We’re taking significant steps, but we have to go at a reasonable pace so that society can afford the cost.”

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. ?On Twitter @deadlinederek.