Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 20, 2017

The San Francisco quake of ‘89.

That was my first and last quake. It scared the piss out of me and then to top it off, I had to work the night shift with no one else in the buildings. The aftershocks continued most of the night.

Despite living in a shaky state, I’ve never experienced a quake firsthand. I consider myself blessed.

And yet many with HIV have lived many decades since then.

Life gets better and better.

LET ME HELP YOU find the key that unlocks the shift, dude.

We have had earthquakes geologically recent in Wisconsin, about seventy years ago.http://arcturan.com/earthquakes-in-wisconsin/

Felt two small quakes many years ago. One in N. Indiana, one in NW Washington, but nothing in the ten years I spend in Missouri, not all that far from the New Madrid fault line. Lots of little ones here in NV, but haven’t felt one yet. Knock on wood…

Decades ago, a friend from southern California visited me in Brooklyn. We entered a subway station to head for Manhattan. As the train approached, the platform we were standing on began to rumble, as they do, and she said, “If I were in L.A., I’d recognize that as the beginning of an earthquake.”

Nothing changes with the natural disasters.

At least those who have AIDS have a way to live longer in 2017.

At least those who have AIDS have a way to live longer in 2017.

I moved back down to LA from Santa Cruz about a month before this quake. Sometimes my timing is good.

I was at UC Santa Cruz, about to enter my office when the 89 quake hit, so I stood in the doorway. My first thought was, another quake… but that quickly changed to “this is not how I want to die!” The building was really singing. (Steel reinforcements in even houses do this.) But the sound was much higher frequency than I had heard before. (That building had the most damage of any of the UCSC buildings, because someone had neglected to attach the special cables as they were supposed to. Repairs led to buttresses being added.)

Acoustic ceiling panels and fluorescent light panel covers started falling. But mostly I was watching the big plate glass windows across the walkway, hoping they would not shatter (they didn’t). When the shaking stopped I grabbed my briefcase and lunch pail and ran full speed for the stairs. Driving home (some distance away) was a bit surreal. Almost everyone acted with courtesy on the road. (power was out over a very wide area, so traffic lights did not work) That really impressed me.

The soil you are on makes a big difference. Witness the Marina District in SF, built on fill dirt.

I was visiting Los Alamos in 1990, and they were talking about the earthquake they had just had. I believe it was little more than a magnitude 1, and I was surprised that anyone would feel one that small. But it was explained that the mesas at Los Alamos are formed from volcanic tuff. I hope they don’t have any large earthquakes.

The one thing I’ll never forget about Loma Prieta, was looking at my swimming pool, and the water was rolling, actually showing the waves of the earthquake; A series of perfectly even arcs and dips, probably 4-6 feet from top to bottom, rolling across the water. And the concrete around the pool was also rippling, as if it too were liquid.

A childhood friend of mine was a doctor on that Cypress Structure (panel 2 above), tending to the wounded as the layers of roadway shook again and again in the aftershocks. Meantime, a friend’s son had come out of the cancelled World Series game to find his car had been stolen, but that’s the last thing the police were worried about that night. They did call him several weeks later, saying they’d finally found his car—but he wasn’t getting it back. It was in the Cypress Structure. The thieves? Car-ma.

Was studying graphic design at CCAC and in mid-class in SF when the quake hit. Struck me right then as slightly ridiculous that our whole class of 15 or so was all trying to get under the one door. Only thing odd was the loooong duration of the gentle swaying and seeing a hallway ceiling tile fall. “This is going on for a while,” I thought. Afterwards, everyone standing around outside at a nearby park in the fading late-afternoon sunlight. Still thought I’d get over the bridge for classes in Oakland – then I looked at the micro-TV I’d recently bought (B&W, 2" screen on which I’d been watching the Series) and saw live news footage of the broken bridge. Uh oh. Hooked up with some friends and caravanned through the dark streets to someone’s house. Power was out and not a single light anywhere – it was spooky, with the only light coming from our headlamps. Convivial group of folks at the house, cold dinner, attempted phone call home but no dial tone. Uncomfortable night’s sleep under my car blanket… breakfast with friends at some random diner, then home to Oakland – and a new crack in the sidewalk in front of our house. All in all it was a great adventure, but distressing to learn of the damage and the loss of lives that had happened in my then-home-town.