In one of your columns you asked for folks who were in Livermore, and at Sandia, in 1980 when the “Big Earthquake” hit. I was at work that day, and remember it well. One of the fellows who worked in the moving department was helping me to move a heavy, expensive, electronic camera from the old air gun shack at Area 8 to the photo lab in Building 913. I had the camera cradled in my arms, as it was about 30 inches long, weighing about 25 pounds, very delicate, and attached to the control console by a thick umbilical cord. My helper had the console on a dolly, and was coming down the stairs behind me. Just as we reached the bottom of the stairs, the
world started to roll, and roll, and roll! We had a pickup truck parked facing east, with the tailgate down. That truck nearly came off its wheels as it rocked violently back and forth.

I held on to the camera and managed to balance myself so that I would not fall over. I was facing north, so rode it out well. After the shaking stopped, and we regained our composures, we put the camera system in the truck.

I looked around to see what else was going on, and saw several men working near a wooden utility pole not too far away. They had a truck with a crane on it, and the hook was about ten feet off the ground, swaying like a mad pendulum! And the men were transfixed watching it sway!

After things calmed down, I went back into the building to see what, if anything, had survived the quake. The building was fairly small, with a very large optical flat table in the center. There were tall lockers located all around the perimeter of the room. Every one of them had tipped over and come open, with pieces of hardware all over the place. If we had been in that room, we would have been very seriously injured, if not fatally.

David Abrahams
Livermore