NEWSPAPER LIBRARY DISASTERS: EARTHQUAKES
Mike Johnson, account executive for DataTimes, and I were sitting in Hanno's Bar having a beer when the old brick building began to shake. The bar is in the alley behind the Chronicle building. It was full of rowdy printers waiting for the beginning of the World Series.
We were waiting for DataTimes account executive Vicki Hutchinson before the meeting of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of SLA.
I said to Mike, "This is an earthquake." As a native Californian, I was not too concerned. But as it began to intensify beyond any I've ever experienced, I led him over towards the door and out from under the swinging chandeliers.
One man started yelling hysterically at the guys remaining at the bar, "This is the big one, take cover! This is it!" A bunch of us were huddled against the wall near the door. When it stopped shaking, the power was off and most people took off. Mike and I were standing in the alley, broken glass on the ground, beer in hand. We finished off those long-necks and went back for my briefcase, which I'd forgotten.
I asked Mike what he thought of it, and he said the brick walls looked as if they were made of rubber.
I knew it was a sizable quake, so we walked back to the Chronicle. We found the building in darkness and many of the staff out on the street. We went in through the pitch-black stairwell to the third floor. The newsroom was taking stock of the situation. Knots of people were huddling around battery-powered television sets and radios. Most telephones were knocked out.
As we waited to set up generator power, we watched in disbelief the footage of the disabled Bay Bridge and the devastation of the double-deck Interstate 880.
We eventually set up two generators on the fire escape near the art department. The Wednesday morning paper was written on battery-operated computers. Stories were then fed by modem into the art department/library Macintosh network. They were then edited, heads and captions set, and type printed. Veloxes of photos were done with a special art department photocopying machine.
The library's Macintosh became the city desk. We also set up a temporary darkroom in the library, using our coat closet.
The pages were then pasted up in the composing room. Generator power was connected to the microwave transmitter, and the pages were sent to our satellite plants in southern San Francisco and the East Bay. Using this method, we were able to print over 600,000 copies of an eight-page paper on Wednesday and a sixteen-page paper on Thursday.
Power was so limited that the library was unable to use any for two days. Since most of our materials were in either fiche or electronic form, our hands were tied. But we were able to supply earthquake fault maps, graphics on quakes, books on earthquakes, and a few specialized clip files. We phoned out our searches to DataTimes' Vicki Hutchinson and Randall George. They read back the information to us over the phone.
Another factor in library use was that, since the editors and reporters were collecting so much original data from the outside, they had little time to use the library as a resource. That was to come later, when the more analytical and investigative pieces were written.
Then there was the problem of getting the earthquake editions into the database. When I talked to DataTimes about updates, they had assumed we'd have to get the paper typed in. But between library system editor Jerry Jampol, librarian Bll Van Niekerken an d myself, we were able to retrieve most stories from stacks of Macintosh disks pirated from the art department. We scanned the few missing stories in our Apple scanner.
The text needed a lot of work. We had to type in the heads, cutlines, bylines, etc., and put in paragraph marks. But we were able to get the Wednesday paper in the database Thursday night and get back on schedule by Friday night.
Now I'm pondering what I should keep in hard-copy for the next "Big One." I fantasize about a battery-powered optical disk library system for emergency use. And I know the Chronicle is looking into a better emergency power system.
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This page was created by Barbara P. Semonche and Sheila Denn. It was last updated November 1997. If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to contact Barbara
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