Librarian Diane Moore was standing in my office doorway commenting on my birthday the next day. Immediately after she said, "Well, Judy, reaching 50 isn't the end of the world," the quake began.
In the eleven years I've lived in this most fair city I have certainly felt many quakes, but my gut feeling was to ignore the subject of San Francisco and earthquakes. This one was not to be ignored. My first thought was "This is it: the building is going down." followed by "If I live through this I'm leaving California immediately. But with the crash of our file cabinets tipping over and the incredible noise of the earth moving, I was 1000% convinced I wouldn't be alive to escape.
Well, I lived to reach 50, and I lived to work all night my birthday eve (missing a great surprise birthday party), and I lived to work all night my birthday (missing a surprise dinner with my husband at Masa's). But when it comes to the nitty-gritty in l ife we were very fortunate. Despite our living in the Marina, five blocks away from the fires and flattened buildings, we had no major damage. Broken lamps, books on the floor, broken plants represented the extent of the damage. Our house made it through the 1906 quake and came through this one very well.
The electricity was off at the paper from 5:06 p.m. the 17th until 3:00 a.m. the 19th. The library is windowless, so there was no working down here except for flashlit forages into the bowels of our photo collection to retrieve Nimitz Freeway photos. Our clip collection from 1906 to October 1981 is on microjackets, so there was no accessing that material since we needed electricity for the reader/printers. We're online from March 1, 1988, and with the computers down that material was not retrievable. Our only research hope was using the flashlights to read the hard copy clips from October 1981 to June 1988 and checking our reference books.
So what did I do during my all-nighters? I went through clip files to check statistics on previous quakes. I dug manual typewriters out of the libraries so reporters could use them to type their stories. I held flashlights over the typewriters as the repo rters worked.
What was amazing was the way the newsroom staff made it back to the paper, by hook or by crook, to work on the biggest stories of their careers. Never did it enter anyone's mind that we would not publish a paper on the 18th of October.
For a while it wasn't clear HOW we would publish it, but that wasn't the overriding concern. We had no generators, no phones, no computers, no electric typewriters, no food or drink, no water, no photo developing facilities, but we definitely had reporter s writing stories.
In the wee small hours a generator was found, and the Mac computers were hooked up to it. The paper was put out on the Macs. A photographer went home for his generator, and by midnight that department was processing its photos. Since I had not been out of the building since the quake, seeing these photos shocked me. I couldn't believe this wreckage had occurred in my neighborhood, the Marina. (An interesting point: my mother in Wisconsin had a fuller picture of earthquake damage than I did during the time our electricity was off.)
Life is starting to be normal again. We've had thousands of aftershocks, and every time the presses start up underneath me I jump a bit. We still discuss all predictions ad nauseam, and we don't joke about earthquakes any more. However, we're still living in San Francisco.
What will I do to prepare for the next quake? I've already prepared a survival kit for my office and have the essentials such as water, crackers, pills, snearkers. Everyone on the Examiner staff has been encouraged to do the same. We're getting more flash lights, a portable radio, walky-talky, and the like. And we're going to be more professional in relation to having hard copy earthquake reference materials at hand. It's a horrible feeling to have your most valuable reference material locked into a dead c omputer.
I was so touched by the many phone calls from all of you. God knows the News Division has always been like a second family for me, so I shouldn't have been surprised. You really know how to make a librarian feel warm inside in the midst of chaos. Thank yo u.
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