Deborah Woehr

This is nothing new or anything to get really excited about. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 32 years and have experienced only one Big One. In December of 1981, we had approximately 10 earthquakes that hit us in the middle of the night. They would startle me out of a dead sleep, but that was all.

The Loma Prieta Earthquake (1989) caught me while I was driving home from work. I was about two miles from home when my ‘72 Duster started bouncing all over the road. The first thought was I was that I’d hit an oil slick. In the next second, I saw the road sidewind in front of me. Now, that was freaky!

There was one car ahead of me and three behind me. All of us bolted to the side of the road in one choreographed-like step. I watched the light poles swaying to the point where I worried that they were going to snap. I heard a binging noise, but couldn’t place where it was coming from.

Then the ground stopped shaking. A Hispanic man ran out of his house and shouted, “What the hell happened?”

The people behind me started honking because I was blocking their way. The woman in front of me didn’t move, and I was too close to her to pull out. I knew she was petrified and felt bad about having to honk at her.

She drove off. We were hit with the first aftershock moments later. I had driven a mile by then and was very anxious to get home. I found my future mother-in-law (I was living with them at the time.) standing in her front yard, babbling at the neighbor.

She had been unloading her dishwasher and had all of her glasses lined up on the counter. When the earthquake hit, she couldn’t do anything but hold on as the glasses marched off the counter and shattered around her feet. Luckily, she wasn’t cut.

Now, here’s something humorous. I like to paint with acrylics and had been trying to open a jar of brush cleaner, without success, the weekend before. I’d left it in the bathroom, along with my brushes. When I went into the bathroom, I found that jar busted open. I joked to everyone that it took an act of God to open that damned jar.

My family was very tense, but no one had gotten hurt. My father had the TV fly at him. My mother was also on her way home, sitting behind someone at a stop sign before the 280 overpass. After the quake was over, that lady got out of her car, ran up to my mom, shrieked, and then jumped back into her car and sped off.

I remember being very afraid of doing simple things, like taking a shower. I didn’t want to drive to work, which was located in Sunnyvale. Since I needed the money, I went. But everything felt so surreal. I couldn’t shake the sense of vertigo, which stuck with me all day. When I complained to a coworker about this, he said that he had the same thing.

To be continued . . .