January 24, 1980 was the first anniversary of my employment at Chabot
College, Valley Campus (now Las Positas College). To mark the event, I
had prepared a coffee cake for the staff (only five of us at the time)
to share at break time. Little did I know that a much more dramatic
celebratory event was about to take place.

At around 11 a.m., I was in the laboratory with Karen Pihl's Biology 1A
class when I felt some ominous shaking. I looked to my left and saw a
large glass cylinder containing glass pipets tip over and crash to the
floor. By that time, we knew it was an earthquake, and eventually we
cleared the building.

Returning to the Preparation Room area to look for more damage,
especially spilled chemicals, I found little more than two cabinets of
prepared microscope slides which had tipped forward enough for the doors
to swing open and several trays of slides, with 20 slides in a tray, to
slip out and fall to the floor. The cabinets themselves were heavy
enough not to fall. We had to replace quite a few slides, but the
damage was comparatively minor. Fortunately I don't recall any chemical
spills, probably because of the direction of the quake movement, but we
did lose a few other pieces of routine glassware.

It was a different story in the library, where the direction of
movement was enough to collapse all or most of the bookshelves. Linda
Lucas was librarian at the time, but she is recently deceased.

My most memorable experience related to an experiment I was
preparing for the Biology 1 class at the time. It was a genetics
investigation involving fruit flies (and we still do that experiment),
and I needed to prepare about 100 or more cultures of the tiny insects
for the student projects. This necessitated anesthetizing the flies,
sorting them under a microscope, and whisking them into culture vials.
Of course, the microscope illuminators were electrically powered, and
the power was out all around town because of the quake. With classes
cancelled, I needed to leave the building and go home. But I also
needed to prepare the cultures.

Fortunately, our kitchen window at home faced the west. So I took the
flies home, along with a microscope and the necessary supplies, and
sorted fruit flies on our kitchen table on Oriole Avenue for the rest of
the afternoon by the light of the setting sun, until the sun went down.

Thanks for reminding me of the exact date and time of the earthquake,
because I had forgotten the exact date I started working here. I enjoy
reading your reminiscences about local history and keep a file of all
such stuff whenever I come across it.

Jim Adams
Science Education Technician, Las Positas College