Reflections....
Lots of things happen in October besides Holloween
20 years ago was the disasterous Oakland Hills Fire...Houses stacked up the hillsides, narrow streets, and tall wild grasses and explosive Eucalyptus trees, and hot weather...all converged into one of this nations most infamous urban wildfires...25 people killed, including a firefighter and a cop...this occured the same weekend as one of the KFAT family reunions in the South (SF) Bay...we could see a huge plume of thick dark smoke rise from the East Bay...80% of the homes in the Oakland-Berkeley hills had shake roofs.
Last night KTVU-TV (Oakland, CA) had a restrospective look back on the "Second Look" program (http://www.ktvu.com/) and very few people have seen a firestorm that close up...and many lessons were learned from that incident...
Conditions like this also exist in Sausalito, Orinda, and the Russian River resort area of Sonoma County...and a firestorm like this could break out in these and other places if conditions converge...
22 years ago was the disasterous Loma Prieta Earthquake...As seen live on TV, during the 1989 World Series...we'd been waiting a long time for Oakland and San Francisco to face each other in the World Series...the only time they usually play against each other are the pre-season exhibition games known as the Bay Bridge Series...
It was a hot day and I was at work at a winery in Geyserville (northern Sonoma County), and all of a sudden the ground started violent shaking, there was the sound of a roar, like a freight train, and cloud of dust were stirred up...
Light poles were doing the hula...30,000 gallon stainless steel wine tanks were doing the shimmy...loaded semi trucks dancing up and down...and I was trying to hold on to a safety rail near a control panel as I was bouncing up and down...
Geyserville was in another world for about 15 seconds...and then it settled down...and we were totally stunned. I'm a native of the SF Bay Area and am no stranger to quakes, but this one was a doosey...the Roger Creek Fault runs from the SF Bay to northern Sonoma County, and it thought to be linked with the Hayward & Calavares faults...all 3 are considered very high risk faults...and they're though to be able to interact with the San Andreas Fault...and THIS quake was on a branch of the San Andreas Fault...
We soon found out the epicenter was SOUTH of San Jose...wow...that far away and the effects we felt were making us very concerned for those much closer...this was 125 miles away to our south-by-southeast...
3,550 ft Loma Prieta is about 11 miles dues west of Morgan Hill (on US Hey 101) in the coastal mountains...
63 people died, and the coastal resort town of Santa Cruz was hit VERY hard, wiping out much of the downtown area...the collapse of the Cypress Freeway (part of I-880) squashing cars like pancakes...buildings collapse in SF's Marina District and subsequant fire...the collapse of the upper deck of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge...such a massive scale...
Those watching the World Series saw LIVE on tv the initial shocks...and there was confusion at first but soon the reports atarted coming in of the widespread devastation...
TV stations were on standby generator power, and could only have 2 or 3 lights turned on, on the news set...no telepromters...bulletins handed live on camera the old fashioned way: on paper...the Goodyear blimp that was covering the World Series started shooting live video pictures of some of the devastated areas...
I left work as soon as possible and headed north to my home, and then tried calling my folks in the East Bay to see IF they were OK, but the phone circuits were jammed. I called relatives in Texas to see IF they could get through..later that evening I was able to talk with my folks and they were OK...
I turned my scanner on and was getting an ear full as state, federal, and local agencies rushed to the SF Bay Area...California State DOJ was rushing to secure certain state buildings, the FBI was doing the same for their interests, Cal-OES (Office of Emergency Services) was trying to evaluate incoming info and dispatch resources...fire depeartments task force teams were formed for mutual aid, law enforcement went for mutual aid, Red Cross was doing the same...
Regular citizens were helping to man fire hoses, and famous people like Oakland A's player Dave Stewart was helping rescue people in the collapsed Cypress Freeway...and the whole nation was rivetted to their TV's, watching it live and in color, as news reports came in, with video reports when possible...
ALL tv-stations with news departments went into emergency coverage mode..and I was archiving as much as possible onto VHS video tapes...
At one point I myself went into "newsman mode" and started making notes, gathering fast changing info, fired up my computer to bang out a script, and broke the news on the KZYX-FM 6:oo PM News (they didn't get much news from the outside world, except Pacifica)...
I answered phones for the Red Cross for people who wanted to know if their friends and relatives in the damaged areas were ok.
ReplyDeleteThe ham radio operators in the bad areas would read lists of door-to-door checks on residents to ham operators in areas outside. The inquiries were then matched up with the ham radio reports.
It was nerve wracking watching rescue operations especially on the pancaked bridges. I was afraid some of my relatives might be under there. It helped to keep busy with the phones for other people who were worried too.
When I was a kid we calle dthe Cypress Freeway the "three layer cake"...
ReplyDeleteAnd you'd bounce while driving it...just as soon as you got off the Bay Bridge, going south on the Cypress, the concrete sections had a bit of SAG to then between the support columns and beams, and at 65 MPH the sag and peaks were noticable as far back as the 1950's...
I know one of the EMT's that responded to the Cypress, and he has psychological scars for the rest of his life, due to some of the grizzly things (squished cars with people inside) he saw in there...