this one was scarey..

That's a huge earthquake. The Quake of '89 was like a 6.7 or 6.9 or something.

i will never go to san francisco!! 

In 89, I was working in San Mateo, south of South San Francisco. 

At 5:04, just getting off work, turned on the key to my car. Just paid $1500 for some transmission work. 
Quake hit (6.9, btw), car starts shaking. Damnit! 

That f'in transmission! Get out of car, slam door. Car still shakin' Damn! That F'in Rotten Robbie gas! Car engine won't stop! Car still shaking, engine has to be on, right?

Look down at my hand. I got the keys............I see the pavement moving. Most of Foster City (other side of 101 freeway) and some parts of San Mateo were built on landfill. It's rippling like water waves. ENTIRE parking lot. I look up, my office was two 9-story buildings..............and they are swaying like Hula girls......

I had time to ask myself a question "Could I outrun a falling 9-story building"? I concluded that I was so scared I PROBABLY COULD...............................fortunately, it didn't happen.

Took forever to get home. They had Al Michaels recording of his feed going out, and players for both teams were on the field, because being under a structure was not a good idea. Going down freeway, halfway home, fast lane dropped 4 feet, so everybody move over.....

Getting into town, all the signals are out. Garage under apartment. No choice. Girlfriend in tears when she gets home from interview at Stanford. We go into the apartment........................TO BE CONTINUED

........we go in, two cats cowering under the bed. They wouldn't come out until we both got under the blankets. The dishwasher wandered out into the middle of the kitchen. Our everyday plates over the sink, move a few feet horizontally, then went straight down into the sink. Perfectly still stacked, not one plate even broken. Had to go straight down 4 feet.

We went back out into the courtyard, where everybody was still too afraid to go back inside. Some of us would visit others (new friends made otherwise that would never happen). I remember we went up to a gay couple show us what they had left. They had this beautiful phonograph. It was like a 1906, over 80 years old. It was still standing on the rickety stand it had when new. 10 feet away in the bathroom, the shower/tub doors were shattered. I mean, busted to sh*t. 10 feet away. That's the way shock waves work. Some are concentrated in certain space, others, calm as can be....weird. The sun was going down, we had to go back inside. Her parents were calling us, and not getting through. We could get ahold of my Mother, so we gave them her parents phone number, and we relayed messages. My Mother heard the Golden Gate went into the water.........nope. An upper deck fell into a lower deck of the 880 in Oakland, totally crushing to death many lives. Place..........time.........just horrific. When people driving under an overpass, people would stop, and wait until it was clear that they could drive across with minimum of time spent under the overpass, lest it fall on top of you.

Looked it up. I was 55 miles away from the epicenter at 5:04. Later I moved to Bakersfield (company paid for the move). Got the Hell outta there 3 years ago to Tempe. Turns out, Bake town was just 77 miles away from Ridgecrest, as the crow flys. From a 7.l.  No wonder nobody wants to hang with me...

Wish more people were like you.

I was a little kid. I was maxed out on the couch getting ready to watch the game. My parents were one room away in the dining room playing dominoes. The shaking starts and I freeze up in shock. My mother calls out to me to get down. I'm frozen. So she runs in to me. We had this huge china cabinet behind where my mother was sitting. As soon as she runs to me it collapses on her chair. Could've been really bad if not fatal. She was saved by her motherly love.

I grew up in West Oakland so I was walking distance from the Cypress structure. Maybe a mile away, if that.

SF,love that city. My son lives there. 

its the weather .

When you grow up in Oakland, especially the West, you kinda grow up like, "F*ck Frisco!" but I grew to love it as an adult. I'm a Union man in SF and through that, some of my closest bros are natives. I also spent a lot of time going to shows in SF in my 20s.

What's going on, bro?