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| I saw your column about the 1980 Livermore earthquake, and thought I would
share some of my memories of it. By the way, the slogan in the subject line
of this email (I Survived the 5.5!) was taken from a t-shirt I saw shortly
after the event. My wife and I were working in Hayward at the time, and our children were in school out on the other side of Springtown (Christensen School). We lived on Bridgeport Circle. I was sitting at my desk at work when the shaking started, and it was a pretty good rattle. We turned on the news and really got rattled when we heard reports that the freeway overpasses on 580 were down, suggesting that we were in for a tough time getting home that night. My wife left work immediately and headed home, after making sure the kids were alright, which took about 40 minutes due to phone disruption. The most surprising thing to us was the pattern of damage. Our china closet stood on the east side of a north-south wall. It came down as if it had been jerked onto the dining table, and snapped off one of the table feet clean as a whistle. In the kitchen and bathrooms, any cupboard whose doors faced east flew open spilling the cupboard's contents all over the floor to a distance of about four feet. In one long bathroom cabinet that faced south, everything slid to the east, so that you could open one side and it looked empty. Open the other side and the entire contents of the cabinet was jumbled together. All of our neighbors had similar odd patterns of effects. It was pretty clear to us that whatever happened caused our neighborhood to move to the west - in a hurry. One of our neighbors was Thomas Coyne, of local vintner renown, who at that time was much less well-known, and was making some very nice wine blends in small batches in his garage on Broadmoor (I think that's what the name of the street was). He had wine all over the floor in the garage. It was quite a mess. The neighborhood had a big party shortly thereafter where we toasted whoever had the most damage with some of Tom's wine. It was great, even then. Kent Blair |
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