Loma Prieta earthquake memories still fresh in Sonoma County 30 years later

Thirty years ago, Bill Cordell could see for miles across the flat, mostly empty baylands near the south end of Sonoma Valley. The sun was setting on a fine fall day, and he had driven with two friends to a remote spot called Wingo, reached only by a long partly dirt road off Highway 121 at Schellville.

Fifty miles to the south, Game 3 of the 1989 World Series was about to start at Candlestick Park before a crowd of 62,000 fans. It had been more than 80 years since the 800-mile San Andreas Fault wreaked havoc in the San Francisco Bay Area, a period one government scientist described as “decades of tranquility.”

Without warning, the bucolic scene before Cordell, then 20, turned phantasmic.

“We watched as the ground rolled away from us like waves on the ocean and we were lifted up and down like on a trampoline where we stood,” he recalled.

“It was super strange,” Cordell said, likening the scene to “giant snakes underground writhing to get out.”

The earth was, indeed, moving under his feet, as shock waves fanned out from an epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Jose in the deadly and devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989.

The magnitude 6.9 temblor - the first of such strength on the San Andreas system since the 1906 quake that devastated San Francisco and Santa Rosa - killed 63 people, injured 3,757 and did about $6 billion in damage, the equivalent of $13 billion today.

A 1.25-mile section of Interstate 880 in Oakland, known as the Cypress Structure, collapsed onto its lower deck, crushing 42 people in their vehicles. A 50-foot section of the Bay Bridge collapsed like a trap door, resulting in one death and a news photograph that traveled around the world.

October has since become a month of Bay Area tragedies, with the 1,500-acre Oakland Hills firestorm in 1991, the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma in 1993, and the North Bay wildfires of 2017 that took 40 lives and destroyed nearly 6,200 homes.

Eerily, as Loma Prieta’s anniversary approached, the Bay Area was rattled by a pair of earthquakes less than 24 hours apart on Monday and Tuesday, with some Sonoma County residents feeling the first temblor. Both were below magnitude 5, considered light and resulting in only minor damage.

Loma Prieta’s seismic thunderclap remains fresh in the minds of almost everyone who experienced it.

An 8-year-old Santa Rosa boy sought comfort in his mother’s lap, a 24-year-old woman froze in a San Rafael shopping center, and a 26-year-old woman on a business trip in Hong Kong got a frantic account of the shaker when she called her Petaluma office.

David Rabbitt, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, was working as an architect on the second floor of a century-old building on Sausalito’s waterfront.

“I was ready to jump out the back into the bay,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Thankfully, I held on.”

Loma Prieta dealt severe damage to San Francisco and Oakland, and from the South Bay down to Monterey County, but left Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties unscathed. It was a contrast from the 1906 quake, which leveled much of Santa Rosa and killed about 100 people.

“We lucked out,” Dan Nichols, then Sonoma County’s emergency services coordinator, told The Press Democrat the day of the quake that struck at 5:04 p.m.

Power was knocked out to about 1,500 PG&E customers, but service was expected to be quickly restored. But the shaker made people dizzy, uneasy and fearful they were having a heart attack, the newspaper reported on Oct. 18.

Huge indoor trees inside the Santa Rosa Plaza shook with the force of a hurricane, spewing leaves to the ground floor as if fall had come and gone.

Office workers on the sixth floor of the Eureka building on Old Courthouse Square fell into silence as the building began to shake.

“All you could hear were people’s hearts,” said Charlie Cochran, an attorney and Rohnert Park mayor who said the top of the building swayed 5 feet from east to west with the temblor, which lasted about 15 seconds.

Two elderly women residents at Santa Rosa’s tallest building, the 14-story Bethlehem Towers, went to nearby Memorial Hospital with heart problems attributed to the quake.

Glasses, lamps and pictures crashed to the floor, but no windows were broken in the seniors apartment complex and the 18-year-old building sustained no structural damage, the resident manager said.

Cordell, a 1987 graduate from Santa Rosa High School who now operates seven local restaurants, headed to the baylands 30 years ago for a safe open place, dotted with willows and criss-crossed by creeks, to shoot 12-gauge shotguns. “It was a great day,” he said, that turned truly unforgettable when solid ground seemed to become liquid.

The front tires of a pickup truck that had pulled up next to them started to bounce up and down off the ground. “The sound of the earthquake was everywhere, like a booming echo through the valley,” Cordell said.

Earthquakes create acoustic waves in the air but are most often below the range of human hearing. The rumbling people perceive is usually from buildings and their contents moving.

Without cellular phones and still happily in what Cordell called “the analog world,” the three young men had to rush home to make sure their homes and families were OK.

“I have a fond memory of it,” he said.

Carolyn Masini of Petaluma was 24 when Loma Prieta caught her ordering food at a McDonald’s in the food court at Northgate Mall in San Rafael. The clerk, who was about to hand her the bag when the floor started shaking, dropped it and ran out the door, she recalled.

Figuring the glass windows might shatter, Masini froze rather than follow the man and was considering where to take cover when the motion stopped. “I just stood there,” she said.

Retrieving her car from the ground floor of the parking garage also seemed risky, given the possibility of aftershocks, she said.

But she made it to her parents’ home at Hamilton Field in Novato, where they had planned to eat and watch the baseball game. Her father, Daniel Westfall, had left his job at Coast Guard Island in Alameda early, driving over the Cypress Structure hours before it fell.

“Any other day, he could have been on it” when it collapsed, Masini said.

She was on the phone with her future husband, Val Masini, in Petaluma as an aftershock rumbled through Novato and seconds later he felt it about 11 miles to the north.

Masini, 54, said she still carries two instincts implanted by Loma Prieta: Not stopping her car beneath an underpass - “even when I am back East” - and always parking on the top level of a garage.

Loma Prieta triggered a costly statewide effort to fortify older buildings, especially those made from unreinforced masonry that are considered potentially lethal hazards during earthquakes.

In 2014, Sonoma County said it had whittled an initial list of 315 old buildings down to 170, and officials said this week 131 remained in areas outside city limits.

Santa Rosa has issued 11 permits for seismic retrofitting since 2014, and work has been completed on two buildings, said Jessie Oswald, chief building official. The city has also determined that 51 residences need work, primarily anchoring woodframe homes to their foundations, he said.

Shirryl Bayless of Sonoma can attest to the global fixation on California earthquakes.

On a work trip to Hong Kong, she called her Petaluma office at 5:15 p.m. California time, expecting to leave a message, she said.

A frantic custodian answered, declaring: “The bridges are out! Everything is falling apart, everything is crazy, there was just an earthquake.”

Bayless, now 56, said she was able to get the story straight, and later learned Loma Prieta’s energy had taken 14 minutes to reach Hong Kong.

And the next day’s front page of the South China Morning Post, an English language newspaper, carried a banner headline that read “US quake toll mounts,” with a large photo of the collapsed Oakland freeway structure.

John Green, then 8, was playing with Legos in the bedroom of his family’s Larkfield home when the shaking started. He ran to the safety of his mother’s lap as “the whole house started going up and down.”

“I was scared out of my mind,” said Green, 38, who works as an auto mechanic and lives in a second-floor apartment near Coddingtown.

Loma Prieta was tops for trauma in his life for the next 28 years, surpassed on Oct. 9, 2017, when the Tubbs fire consumed Coffey Park about 3 miles from his apartment. “You could see the big orange glow of the fire” and hear explosions, he said.

Green’s neighborhood wasn’t ordered to evacuate, but he grabbed a few essentials and headed for his father’s home in Rohnert Park, which turned out to be a two-hour trip.

Like almost every Californian, Green expects future temblors, and if there’s a big one while he’s still living one story above the ground, “I’m going to be screwed,” he said.

Seismic history is, in fact, bound to repeat itself in the Bay Area, owing to its location on the boundary between two tectonic plates, with the outer plate moving northwest 1 to 2 inches a year, inexorably building pressure in the rocks along the San Andreas Fault, which is actually a fault zone of many segments, including one that runs through Sonoma County.

Seismologists have estimated the probability of a magnitude 6.7 or greater quake along the Rodgers Creek Fault, which slices through Santa Rosa, at 33% between 2014 and 2043. The Bay Area as a whole has a 72% probability, the U.S. Geological Survey says.