By Ande Jacobson
34 years ago at the time of this writing on 17 October at 5:04 p.m. (or as I thought of it, at 1740 L), I was in class in grad school at San Jose State University. I was an engineering student working on my master’s degree and was listening to a lecture in my digital data transmissions class. When the shaking started, one student in the back made a beeline for the door jamb while the rest of us dove under the tables. We were in the new wing of the engineering building in a sort of small, tiered lecture hall that seated 30-40 and had long tables with comfy rolling chairs along the tiers. The professor was still lecturing when he noticed us all under the tables and mentioned that he should probably get under a table or something. He was originally from Switzerland, but this was his first earthquake here, so he wasn’t quite as well-versed as the majority of the class in our earthquake protocols.
The rest of that lecture was disbanded, and getting home after the initial shaking stopped was a challenge. I was living within 10 miles of the campus at the time, but it took what seemed like forever to get home. I made the mistake of getting onto a local freeway which crawled because all of the traffic lights at all the exits from the major freeways in the area were out due to massive power outages backing traffic up on all of them throughout the region. I was stuck on a major overpass going from one freeway to another for around 30-45 minutes thinking to myself as I sat there unable to go anywhere that this probably wasn’t the best place to be as the overpass swayed with each aftershock.
When I finally got to my apartment, I noticed that there wasn’t any water in the pool. It had evidently all sloshed out because the ground and plants nearby were all wet. Also, for some reason our complex had power, but a quarter block and beyond in every direction was dark. Neighbors who were there at the time of the quake said our power blipped momentarily, but came right back on. Inside my unit, there was very little damage. My ironing board had fallen and almost hit my computer, one lamp fell off a bookcase and bent the shade supports (I still have that lamp), one kitchen cabinet had dumped its contents all over the floor – the one with the sticky stuff like teriyaki sauce and the like, and a gallon jug of water had fallen off the top of the refrigerator, broken open, and mixed with the sticky stuff making a mess of my kitchen floor. The constant call of car alarms kept us awake through the night as the aftershocks kept coming.
As for the new (at the time) wing of the engineering building at SJSU, that was interesting. There were a total of four lecture rooms across two floors above the lobby like the one I had been in. Ours was the only one with a class in it at the time of the quake. In the other three, the long ceiling lights had come crashing down snapping right through the tables. In our room, the lights swayed during the quake, but they hadn’t fallen while we were in the room. The facilities folks lowered the lights in our room to the floor the next day to examine them for damage. The civil engineers were trying to figure out why they hadn’t fallen in our room during the quake. If they had, they likely would have crushed us as we huddled under the tables. The only thing they could come up with was that the class being in the room changed its resonance frequency, so the lights weren’t swaying hard enough to snap their conduits. Yes, their conduits. Those lights were supposed to have been reinforced with airline cables in addition to the conduits, but the builders made a serious error and forgot the cables, so in all four rooms, the only things holding them up were their electrical conduits. We were very lucky.
Reference:
Photo license: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SJSU_Engineering.JPG
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