Loma Prieta 1989
The strongest earthquake to hit the San Francisco Bay area since 1906, occurred on October 17, 1989, a few minutes after 5PM. That evening, one of the historic World Series games between the SF Giants and the Oakland A’s was being played at Candlestick Park in south San Francisco. The earthquake registered 6.9 on the Richter scale and shaking lasted for 15 seconds. A double decker freeway in Oakland collapsed, a section of the Bay bridge failed and there was widespread damage to buildings and structures in many places around the bay.
In the Summer of 1989, I was a middle manager at Wells Fargo. I had ten direct reports who were each a manager of a team of employees in what we called the Specialty Assets Group. That Summer, Wells Fargo instituted a program to create business resumption plans for each department across the whole company in the event of a disaster. The output of this program included large red binders of information for each manager that contained information including personal contact information for their employees and where each team should relocate to resume conducting business in the event of a fire or an earthquake that damages their offices.
In early September, I received a huge box of these large red binders, one for each of my direct reports who was a manager. On the front cover, in bold type, was the title in a circle. The top of the circle said Wells Fargo. The bottom of the circle said Disaster Plan. The cover of these binders was eye catching. The look of these binders commanded ‘Use this in an emergency!’
At the time, my direct reports were located in several offices across California. I decided that I would distribute binders to my direct reports as I made my normal travel around California to connect with them and their staff. When I gave each manager their binder, I would explain what they should do in the event of a disaster that affects their business operations. It took about a month in this fashion to deliver most of the binders.
On October 17th, I started out my day as usual. I drove from my home in Orinda, a suburban community in the East side of the Bay, to the local BART station to catch a light rail train into San Francisco. Getting off along Market Street in San Francisco, I walked to my office at 525 Market Street. My office was on the 17th floor of that 38-story building. My office was in the Northwest corner of the floor. I’m guessing that fully occupied, the 17th floor held about 100 employees.
In an odd coincidence, throughout my adult life, if I needed to describe a random number in conversation, I would typically pick 17. Many times, I have suggested black 17, a fantasy roulette bet, in conversations about random numerical guesses, even though I rarely gamble. If 17 was my psychic power number, I was all-in that day.
My work day on October 17th was normal for a senior manager/junior executive with a total staff of about 150 located in multiple offices across the State and involving four or five different business functions. There were lots of meetings, phone calls and problems to solve.
At 5:00 that day, I was tired and I wanted to head home and catch at least part of the World’s Series game that evening. However, as a card-carrying Virgo, or maybe just a bit obsessive, I thought I might fit in one more task on the way out, so long as it was easy. I discovered that there was one big red disaster binder left in the box yet to be distributed, and this one was for the direct report of mine who was located the closest to me. This managers’ name was Ed and his office was also on the 17th floor, in the corner diagonally opposite from mine. Perfect! Picking up Ed’s big red disaster binder I walked out of my office with my coat on to deliver the binder to Ed and end my day.
Curiously, I had previously learned something important about the 525 Market Street office building. A neighbor in Orinda was a partner of a structural engineering firm. I met him while watching our kids play soccer on the weekends. I learned that his firms practice was very specialized. Their expertise was seismic engineering. As we got to know each other better, he tried the ‘small world’ thing, asking me the address of my office. When I told him, I saw him make a grim half smile. ‘What?’ I asked. He told me that his firm had made a seismic assessment of 525 Market Street. Unfortunately, I learned, that building had been the last high rise built in the 1970’s before San Francisco implemented comprehensive new building codes focused on seismic safety. Great…
On October 17th, just after 5:00, I walked across the 17th floor, with the last big red binder, to Ed’s office. When I got there, I observed Ed at his desk, staring out of his windows without seeing, engaged in a furious argument with someone on the phone. I stood in Ed’s doorway, waiting for the call to end or at least for a pause in the argument. I simply wanted to signal to Ed to talk with me later about the disaster binder, to give him instructions in case of an emergency. Unfortunately, Ed’s desk was facing away from the doorway. I couldn’t get his attention given the intensity of his phone conversation.
After a minute or two, I was tired of waiting. Knowing Ed’s temper, I could see this argument continuing for some time. I walked into Ed’s office. As I walked closer, I expected Ed to see me in his peripheral vision. But not this time. Ed was completely in his head, doing battle through the phone. That’s when I did something uncharacteristic for me. To get his attention, I held the large, fire engine red binder ‘Wells Fargo Disaster Plan’ right in front of Ed’s face. In that instant, before Ed could turn toward me, is when the first, large shock wave of the earthquake hit!
Ed stared at the binder for a fraction of an instant, then his head whipped around and up towards me. His angry expression screamed ‘What the Hell have you done?!’
There was no time to explain. Massive shock waves were hitting us. Books were falling off Ed’s shelves. Pictures were falling off the walls. I couldn’t stay on my feet and it seemed safer to be on the floor anyway. Ed and I both hit the deck.
From the floor, on my hands and knees, I felt the building swaying wildly. It felt like it was whipping, as if the whole building was a giant flyrod. I remember thinking ‘This is a huge block of steel and concrete. It shouldn’t move and sway like this.’ I was also surprised by the sound the building made as it moved. The building made a loud screeching sound each time it swayed. It sounded like a very rusty, metal gate. Not a healthy, confidence invoking sound in the least. However, the worse aspect of the buildings’ swaying was that it felt like as the building swayed in a direction, it would get to a maximum range of movement, then it would pause for a heartbeat, tilted to one side, before recovering and swaying in the opposite direction. It was that pause that really got to me. I thought ‘One of these times, this building might not be able to recover… it could just keep going!’ I held my breath during each pause. This is when I heard my neighbor/soccer dad/seismic engineer’s words in my head about the vulnerability of this building in an earthquake. Time seems to slow in emergencies sometimes. It felt like the nightmarish swaying lasted a long time…
Seconds later I could feel that the swaying diminishing, finally stopping. The building was very quiet. Initially I didn’t move. I was tentative in getting to my feet. So was Ed. I remember feeling as if I was on high alert with adrenaline. I asked Ed if he was OK. He was and Ed asked back about me. I felt disoriented as he and I just stood there for a few moments looking around Ed’s office. It was quite a mess with books and small objects all over the floor. Then we heard the speaker in the ceiling crackle to life. The PA system was coming on and both Ed and I automatically looked up at the speaker.
After a few moments of both of us looking expectantly at the speaker in the ceiling, the stupidity of what we were doing hit me. I forced myself to look away. But then the speaker crackled again and my eyes were drawn back to the speaker. Didn’t want to miss anything…
Pause for a moment: who do you suppose was in charge of a high-rise office building in 1989? In an emergency, who had control of the elevators, the communication system and who gave orders to the occupants? I never met the fellow, but I believe that on October 17th, the person in charge of a 38-story building which fully occupied might hold a few thousand people was a minimally trained, probably minimum wage young man who worked at the counter/desk in the building lobby. I also believe that this young man had a large red binder of his own to guide his actions.
With no preparatory statement, no comment about what just happened, a young male voice, shaky and cracking, yelled/pleaded ‘Stay calm!’. Then silence. I didn’t realize until that moment how clenched I was. When Ed and I heard this attempted command, we looked at each other and spontaneously exploded with laughter… at least it was a good tension release.
A few minutes later our commander had regained some composure and he must have found the right section of his big red binder to read through the PA. We were told to move away from the windows and relocate to the elevator lobby in the center of the floor. However, we learned that the buildings elevators had been turned off. Apparently, the policy was to disable the elevators after an earthquake until they could be inspected by specialists. We were instructed to wait there while the building engineer climbed the entire staircase, 40 stories including the basement, with a flashlight, making sure the stairway was structurally sound before we would be given the green light to climb down the stairs to exit the building.
Can you imagine in a post 9–11 world, waiting for a technician to climb 40 stories of stairs before fleeing the building?
My thoughts went to my wife and kids in Orinda, east of the hills from Berkeley and Oakland, which are cities in the interior Bay Area. Were they OK? We tried Ed’s phone. The phone was dead. I had no way to reach them. All I could hope for was that the earthquake had been located near San Francisco and that they were safe, 20 miles to the east and on the other side of the over one-thousand-foot range of hills that ringed the bay.
As the senior Wells Fargo officer on the floor, I asked Ed to walk one way around the floor and I went the other way to herd employees into the elevator lobby. As I walked the floor, I realized that it was fortunate that a World Series game was scheduled for that evening because over half of the employees had left the office early to watch the game. When everyone arrived in the elevator lobby, I estimate there were only about 30 or 40 people still on the floor.
The power was out in the building so the elevator lobby was only dimly lit by emergency lights. The phones didn’t work and in 1989, cell phones were many years away. We were very cut off. However, we had one source of information. Ed had planned to work late and watch the World Series game on his battery powered, Sony Watchman TV! With its’ 3" screen and portable antennae reception, we couldn’t see very well, but we learned about the collapse of the double decker freeway in Oakland, the failure of the Bay Bridge and fires in the Marina district. From Ed’s TV I learned that BART was not running until the entire system could be inspected for damage. The Bay Area had been hit hard…
With the news of significant damage around the bay, I remember thinking that it was probably a good thing that the building engineer was inspecting all the stairways. The 17th floor employees settled in to wait for the ‘all clear’ to descend and exit. After 45 minutes I began feeling the urge to do something. I was the floor leader after all. Then it occurred to me that there must be an emergency cabinet full of supplies on the floor. Turns out the gray metal cabinet was located in the elevator lobby where we were waiting. For years I had seen cabinets like this in buildings, with the classic instruction ‘In an emergency, break glass.’ In my examination of the cabinet, I saw that there was a small, rectangular window in the metal door. Behind the glass of the window was a key on a hook. Aha, I thought, that’s why you were instructed to break the glass…so you could unlock the cabinet. I remembered seeing other cabinets like this, which often had a small metal hammer hanging from a chain on the side of the cabinet, intended to be used to break the glass window. I looked around my cabinet and there was no hammer. How was I supposed to break the glass? For lack of a hammer, I took out my keys. I started lightly rapping on the glass with a key. As I did, I remember thinking ‘This has to be safety glass…’. However, the glass was strong and I had to put more force into the impacts. Eventually I was hitting the glass about as hard as I could with a key, while many the waiting employees were watching with curiosity. Finally, after a very strong blow, the glass broke. Unbelievably, the window glass was not safety glass that would break into a hundred harmless, blunt pieces. This glass was regular, lethal glass, that had been glued with silicone cement to the inside of the window opening. When the window broke, it shattered into several long, thin, razor-sharp knives pointing towards the middle of the window, where the break occurred, and each of these knives were still glued to the inside of the window. To get the key necessary to unlock the cabinet, I would need to reach through these knives with my fingers without lacerating them and causing an additional emergency. Very carefully I reached in and retrieved the key without injury. I proudly held the key up for my audience to appreciate my success. I then turned and opened the cabinet. I was amazed. The cabinet had obviously been raided like a pharaohs tomb. There was only a small water bottle and a small package of saltine crackers in the cabinet. Pathetic…
An hour later, the building commander came back on the PA, announcing that we were approved to descend the stairs and exit the building. I was very relieved to get out of this building. The 17th floor group headed for the stairway door and joined the throng of people from floors above us who were coming down the stairs. It took a while to walk down 17 flights of stairs but eventually we all spilled out onto the Market Street sidewalk. There were a lot of people walking down Market Street. Without BART, I had no idea how I would get to the East side of the bay to get home. I heard rumors of a plan to run emergency ferries to carry people like me who lived in the East Bay. With that hope in mind, I looked down Market Street toward the Ferry Building, where the ferry ports are located. It was an awesome and discouraging sight. It looked like a million people had crowded together at the bottom of Market Street. That seemed an impossible way to get across the bay.
In the crowd of people in front of 525 Market, I spotted a colleague and peer, Kent, who like me, was a senior manager at Wells Fargo. Kent came over to talk about the situation. I had five or six employees from the 17th floor in tow who also lived in the East Bay and didn’t have a way home. Kent agreed that the possibility of emergency ferries seemed very problematic. He told me that he lived in an apartment on Russian Hill and offered to have me and my small entourage come to his apartment to have a safe place to figure out what to do. It was still light because of Daylight Savings, but it would be dark soon. Kents’ seemed a very nice offer so the East Bay group began walking from the heart of the financial district up to Russian Hill.
Our walk to Russian Hill headed north and west. The day had been unusually warm. We had typically referred to hot Fall days as ‘earthquake weather’. Who knows? When we left the financial district, there were no more sky scrapers. We walked through older, residential neighborhoods, skirting to the east of Chinatown and heading towards Little Italy on Columbus. It was very quiet as we walked. Many of the residents were sitting out on their front steps. I saw some fear on their faces. Maybe it was kind of a resolute dread. Most San Franciscans anticipated a large earthquake returning. Now that idea was no longer a just a worry. San Francisco was in shock.
I didn’t see any major damage to the neighborhoods we walked through. Some buildings had lost some of their façade or other trim work and there was some broken masonry on the sidewalks and in the streets.
It was about a mile and a half to Kents’ apartment building. The sun had set and it was getting dark as we arrived. His apartment was very nice with expansive views of the bay to the north and east. Normally, Kent’s night time view would be filled with a galaxy of lights in San Francisco and in the cities on the east side of the bay. Now San Francisco was eerily dark. Shut down. Except for the red glow of fires in the Marina district… The east bay had a few lights, as if there were a few survivors across the water. I couldn’t see Orinda because of the tall hills east of Berkeley and Oakland, but I hoped that my wife and kids were safe and that they had power.
I tried to phone my wife from Kent’s apartment, but my calls wouldn’t go through. I learned later that in major emergencies like this, the phone companies have policies that restrict telephone traffic for anything other than emergency service providers.
Serendipity infused Kent’s offer for us east bay people to find shelter in his apartment. As it turned out, Kent and his girlfriend had entertained another couple for dinner the previous night. Fortuitously for us, Kent and his guests got their wires crossed and each thought they were to supply dinner, which meant there was an unusually large amount of left overs in Kent’s refrigerator! Kent clearly entertained regularly, because he had an ample supply of wine. Lastly, as a romantic single man, Kent had a bunch of candles in his apartment. As a senior professional, everything Kent had was high quality. Soon we were having a candlelight dinner of very tasty food with great wine in an apartment on Russian Hill with views of the Bay Area that had been torn up by a major earthquake. The scene felt quite surreal.
Kent had brought out a battery-operated transistor radio and we learned more about the damage around the city. We didn’t hear anything about emergency ferries to the east bay. In another stroke of good luck, one of the women in the east bay group was married to an FBI agent who worked in San Francisco and who drove a very large car. Strangely, perhaps because it was a call to the FBI, she was able to call her husband and the plan was that he would drive to Kent’s apartment, we would all cram in and then drive across the Golden Gate bridge to Marin, then across the Richmond bridge to the east bay to get home.
Amazingly, Kent’s phone rang and it was Kents’ and my shared boss, Bill. Bill was using his big red binder to try and reach all of his direct reports. Fortunately, Bill had already phoned my house and had spoken to my wife, Terry. I asked how he was able to call through and our guess was that because Bill lived on the peninsula, he was able to call to the east bay, where I couldn’t from San Francisco. I was so relieved to hear that Terry and the kids were OK and I asked Bill to call her back and let her know we were fine and that the plan was to drive the long way home because the Bay Bridge was damaged, and that I should be home sometime later tonight.
Best laid plans. The FBI agent thought he could arrive at the apartment by 10PM. However, around that time he called back and said that there were reports of looting in San Francisco and the SF police asked the FBI to help patrol the city. He said he would get to the apartment as soon as he could, but it might be late… He showed up at around 4:00AM. The east bay group packed in his car, luckily it was huge, and we made the drive to the east bay. At least there was no traffic at that time in the morning after a major earthquake!
I finally got home around 5:30AM, so tired but so happy to be back with my wife and kids. I was unconscious for a few hours. Terry wanted me to take the day off given the ordeal we had all been through. I would have loved to. But I had responsibilities that compelled me to stay engaged.
I was responsible for the Specialty Asset Management Group within the Asset Management Division of Wells Fargo. The largest portion of my responsibilities involved the management of all of the real estate held in trust accounts by the bank. The real estate portfolio included thousands of properties ranging from bare land, to single family dwellings, to apartment buildings, and including commercial properties like retail stores, industrial buildings and office buildings. In the Bay Area, some of the properties in our portfolio had been severely damaged. There were apartment buildings that couldn’t be lived in by our tenants who were now in shelters. There were commercial buildings leased by businesses that now had no place to conduct business. I felt that I needed to be on the job of helping occupants of our buildings who were in significant need. However, I couldn’t return to work at 525 Market Street. That building couldn’t be occupied until it was fully inspected and deemed safe.
Therefore, I opened my big red binder and learned that my business was to be resumed, in the case of an emergency like this, in Wells Fargo offices in Sacramento, an hour and a half drive away. On the Wednesday following the earthquake I drove to Sacramento and spent the rest of the week coordinating emergency responses across my group.
By Monday, my office building in San Francisco had been cleared to reoccupy, at least for senior professionals, so I resumed my usual commute. For the next week, a few employees worked on the 17th floor, continuing to resolve issues caused by the earthquake. During that week, there were a few after-shocks which got my pulse going rapidly each time.
One could reasonably ask how Californias handle living in earthquake zones. Many times, I have had people who live in other States ask ‘How can you live there?’ I suppose it is what you have grown up with. Compared to hurricanes and tornadoes, earthquakes for me are perversely ‘normal’. I remember the sensation of earthquakes as far back as I have memories.
A popular family story of mine is that when I was a baby, I was napping on my parents' bed. At the head of the bed, there was a large mirror on the wall. Apparently, a strong earthquake hit. My mother ran in to the bedroom and to her horror, saw the large mirror banging on the wall over where I was sleeping. Becoming the protective mother bear, she grabbed me and thought the safest place for little Timmy was under the bed. Never mind that I was a large baby and there wasn’t much room under their bed. She was a very large, strong woman, so I ended up under the bed. After the earthquake subsided, my father had to lift the side of the bed up to retrieve me. My mother did what protective parents do in emergencies. She did her best and didn’t have a big red binder to refer to…
I am a native of this shaky part of the world… During my life I have come to appreciate the truth in what I was told years ago that ‘Life is a full contact sport’ and none of us came into this with a big red binder.