35 years later: the Loma Prieta Earthquake’s devastating impact on Santa Cruz

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION-TV) -- At 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake rattled along the Loma Prieta fault line in California. The epicenter: the Forest of Nisene Marks in Aptos.

"Redwood trees in Nisene Marks had shaken so much that the tops of them snapped off," said four-time generation Santa Cruz author and historian Geoffrey Dunn, who was in his 30s in Santa Cruz while the earthquake happened. "Something like that had not happened before in my lifetime."

"That 15 seconds caused about $6- to $8 billion worth of infrastructural damage, killed 63 people and injured thousands more," said USGS research geophysicist Curtis Baden. "The earthquake itself occurred on or adjacent to San Andreas Fault down near Santa Cruz, California [and] ruptured about 40 to 50 kilometers of fault line."

The earthquake shook moments before the third game in the World Series between two Bay Area baseball teams, the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. It was as if the world stage was set for a monumental event. Little did people know that the Loma Prieta Earthquake (often referred to as "The World Series Earthquake") would steal the spotlight that evening.

..."He fails to get Dave Parker at second base, so the Oakland A's take, take--" announced Tim McCarver from ABC in the booth with Al Michaels (who would later go on to win an Emmy for his coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake) as they covered the first few minutes of the A's vs. Giants game at Candlestick Park.

They were quickly interrupted, but followed up with, "I think we're having an earth, an earth--"

And that's how many people who lived through the extreme event remember the incident--an immediate interruption to their daily lives that would aftershock decades later.

"I was super excited because I was able to get off shift on time, and watch game three of the World Series," said Santa Cruz Sheriff Jim Hart. "I was in a hurry to get my uniform off and into my street clothes and get home so I could watch the game."

Like many people in the Santa Cruz and Bay Areas, Hart remembers that day well. "I was in the basement of the county building and I heard this rumbling and just an incredible shaking that was occurring; lockers were slamming back and forth, the lights went out so it was pitch dark," said Hart. "I grabbed up my equipment because my duty belt was off, but I forgot to snap my gun holster, and so as I was running out of the locker room my gun fell out and so here I am in the middle of this earthquake on all fours trying to find the gun."

Hart said that he found the gun and made his way out of the building. He also said that he never made it home that night, instead, like many other Santa Cruz law enforcement personnel, he would spend the next 12 hours helping neighborhoods, patrolling and caring for the community.

"I still get the sense of the extreme terror that occurs in the aftermath of a very large event like Loma Prieta," said Baden.

"People were under their desks and yelling. There was a lot of weirdness, of course," said Bill Lovejoy, a retired photojournalist with the Santa Cruz Sentinel at the time of the earthquake. Lovejoy was on duty in the newsroom at the time of the quake.

"I looked out the window where all the Sentinel vans were parked, and they were all just bouncing," he said. "For the first maybe 20 minutes I couldn't shoot any pictures because there was so much dust in the air."

Lovejoy and his journalist peers began traveling throughout the Santa Cruz neighborhoods and areas, witnessing the destruction in various locations first-hand. They would go on to spend hours and hours recanting and documenting the various local stories.

"It was a very hot, Indian Summer day," said Dunn. "We worried about our immediate families. It was immediate concern, immediate focus... who had survived, what had happened and what the story was."

Dunn said that he was on a landline telephone with his best friend discussing the World Series game that was about to take place. "Immediately thereafter I heard screaming downstairs," said Dunn.

"There were no cell phones at the time, so we were just waiting anxiously for word from family and friends about whether they were ok," said Santa Cruz Bookshop owner Casey CoonertyProtti, teenager at the time of the Loma Prieta Earthquake. Her dad owned the very popular Bookshop Santa Cruz that is still around today.

"The earthquake being one of the biggest moments in our [58-year] history," said CoonertyProtti. "So unfortunately we were renting a building that was all made of bricks. And as we all learned from that earthquake, that was the worst possible building to be in. One whole side of the bookshop had fallen into the Coffee Roasting Company."

"Many of the places that I frequented on a daily basis were destroyed," said Dunn, who mentioned the Coffee Roasting Company as well as Bookshop Santa Cruz. He clearly recalls immediately after the quake: "I could see the devastation and was told that there were people who were under the rubble."

"It immediately became a crime scene because they were trying to help these two people, who ultimately died in the Coffee Roasting Company," said CoonertyProtti. "For a number of days none of us had access to anything because it was a search and rescue operation to try and save those two individuals. People would come out and hold vigils."

CoonteryProtti and the rest of her family thought that Bookshop Santa Cruz (then known as the Hip Pocket Bookstore and across the street from its current location) was completely finished. "My dad didn't want to accept that and give up, and so he brought in an engineer that agreed he could go in for 15 minutes," she said. "He taped flashlights to his arms and he ran in and grabbed people's purses that they had left behind, financial documents, things that could be important for starting over."

According to CoonteryProtti, at the last minute, her father decided to grab an emblem, a mascot for what the new bookstore stood for. "He grabbed the wooden rocking horse that was in our children's section," she said. It then became a symbol for Bookshop Santa Cruz.

"I had a dear friend who had a bar and restaurant on Pacific Avenue called The Tea Cup... it was a hang," continued Dunn. "I tried to help clean the Tea Cup up after the earthquake, and the proprietor was in his 80s then. I said, 'Don't worry Don, we'll get it all back together.' He said, 'No, we won't. We'll never come back from this.' And he was right, they never came back.

"You can imagine that those of us experiencing this, had no sense of the expanse of the devastation. I had no idea where the epicenter was..." said Dunn. "It felt like our lives would be different."

Chaos is the word most people who experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake choose to describe the event. Lack of communication to the outside world, insecurity for the state of their loved ones, and not know what the future held had literally left the town in darkness.

"There was so much loss and so much destruction within our community," said CoonertyProtti. "There were inklings of the community coming out to try and support each other."

"To see smoke coming up from downtown, I knew it was bad because of how hard it was shaking," said Sheriff Hart. "We went out and just started helping where we could. We had lost all communications; radios were down, power was out, water was out... we were eventually able to get to a command post and receive some instructions from the management team and then go out and help as much as we could."

"This was another case that the overall sense of what it was like to live in Santa Cruz was changed in a very few seconds and it took years to play out," said Lovejoy. "It was a different place. It became much more commercially focused."

USGS's Baden said that the earthquake's intensity could be felt up north as far as Santa Rosa, which "was a major improvement from what we knew in 1989."

He also said, "the Loma Prieta Earthquake was predominantly a strike-slip earthquake, which is consistent to what we know to occur along the San Andreas Fault."

Baden says that it is pertinent that we, as California residents, prepare for another earthquake. "We will experience one in the next 30 years," he said.

ARE WE PREPARED FOR THE NEXT BIG ONE?