Hi All,

I awoke this morning and turned on the TV news, which is something I don't normally do and today I caught the images of the horror on the Cypress Structure in Oakland. That night it was rough going in that neighborhood. A lot of the locals had arrived on the scene early, long before the police and fire departments and they were using everything they had to get to the survivors despite the unsafe conditions, but they were told to get out of the way when emergency workers arrived. Many of them were black and it got kind of ugly for awhile and then when the emergency workers realized they had too much on their hands, they invited the locals back.

All in all Loma Prieta was a strange earthquake. Not only did the epicenter area have serious problems with houses being thrown down into creeks, brick buildings collapsing and killing people, but miles and miles away in San Francisco and Oakland it was a horrid mess.

The Bay Bridge disconnected and so did the power and telephones in most of the Bay Area. Even in Petaluma, hundreds of miles away the power was out for about an hour. I had a portable battery operated TV at the time and still have it, just in case and from that I got to see what many didn't for days. The Internet didn't exist like it is today, so there were no maps or places to talk about what was going on. We had to rely entirely on TV and radio to find out what was happening and then it went on to long.

On October 19th, Bryant Gumble of the Today Show and crew were camped out in front of the Cypress Structure and boy was he nervous. I don't think he'd ever felt an earthquake before, but he felt a few of the smaller aftershocks over there on that bay soil. I do recall sometime during the first 24 hours seeing news crews hit the decks in the studios and that was kind of curious.

Two things really made an important statement about Loma Prieta. First, we wouldn't have ever lost the people in downtown Santa Cruz if those buildings had been retrofitted and the Cypress Structure was the same. The Cypress Structure was on the list of places to be retrofitted, but didn't make it in time. Approximately 50 people would have lived through this event if those items had been addressed.

The news pair this morning both said they had renewed their earthquake kits and mentioned what items they refreshed and the gentleman said he was looking for a pair of EQ skivvies because you don't want to go the hospital in dirty....you know. And today in the East Bay, Meals on Wheels delivered earthquake food packages to their list of people. Each one includes water and food for three days. One woman interviewed was very thankful because she said she was alone a lot of the time.

Maybe we are at the turning point.

Petra