Epistemology of a disaster: a physicians's lessons from the Bay Area's October 1989 quake - in Oakland

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1990 by Mark Renneker

On October 17, 1989, I was returning home to San Francisco after an afternoon of meetings for a cancer prevention project that I'm helping organize for the West Oakland community and I was planning to stop at an exotic reptile store on Cypress Avenue, which is the frontage road alongside and underneath the double-decked portion of the 1-880 (Nimitz) freeway. I hoped to buy an iguana as a surprise birthday present for my girlfriend.

After a hot, windless Indian-summer day, it was starting to cool down, and since it was a little after five o'clock and the third game of the World Series was about to start across the bay in Candlestick Park, on each block of this otherwise bleak ghetto were groups of people all black - casually engaged in pre-game festivities, wearing tank-tops or going shirtless, drinking beer, sitting on their front porches or clustering on comers, many with ghetto blasters" set up to broadcast the game to the neighborhood.

I'd already written the Giants off after their losing performance in the first two games - Oakland seemed far too powerful to me - so I was ghetto-blasting on my own, with "Steel Wheels;' the new Rolling Stones cassette. Despite the pleasant temperature and apparently relaxed, happy atmosphere of the neighborhood, I had my windows rolled up and the doors locked. West Oakland can be a dangerous place.

I was about a block from the freeway, near West Grand Avenue, when my van began rocking - not violently, more as if someone were bouncing up and down on the back bumper. Looking around the car, I saw a group of kids waving their arms, jerking their bodies, as if in a voodoo dance, and I thought they were responsible for the rocking - that they were taunting me to get out so they could mug me. I wished I could tell them that I was on, their side (thinking about the cancer project), but, instead, I gunned ahead to escape, and was brushed by what looked like an electrical wire, swinging down from above. I looked up and, only then, seeing everything in motion, realized that it was an earthquake. By that time, the quake was already ending. I drove on, looking for a safe place to stop.

Metalogue; How long does it take to recognize a disaster? The October 17th quake lasted fifteen seconds, the duration of which I spent thinking it was anything but an earthquake. Baseball, work, my car, fear of the neighborhood I was in - these things were on my mind when the quake hit, and they clouded my thinking as I tried to comprehend what was taking place. Growing up in California, I'm no stranger to earthquakes, but having not experienced any quakes in some months (and never having been in a major quake) my "quake reflexes" were dulled (and underdeveloped). Consequently, I didn't spend those first dangerous seconds as I should have: seeking a safe place.

Fat Into the Fire

When I rounded the comer ahead, I found myself at the foot of the crumpled freeway, from which debris was still raining down. On the top deck, cars and trucks were scattered randomly - frontwards, backwards, some upside down, some teetering atop places where the roadbed had buckled, suspending them like roller-coaster cars ready to plunge. Some had already fallen the forty or so feet to the street below, landing front-first, spreading fluorescent green oil and gas over the pavement. As I stared, people began to appear - moving slowly, dazed, atop the freeway, and below, emerging from the ghetto houses and industrial yards.

I wish I could say that, being a physician, I immediately leaped into action, but that wasn't quite the way it happened. For a dazed moment, I first considered trying to continue on my way to the pet store. Luckily, I was awakened by the sight of a tall black man stepping forward into the intersection to keep me (and cars behind me) from continuing forward into the rubble of the fallen cement columns. I pulled my van to the side, grabbed my stethoscope from my briefcase (completely forgetting the blood-pressure cuff and other medical equipment I keep in the back of the car) - and hurried to the closest fallen vehicle, a wide-bodied semi-trailer truck.

Metalogue: Why do some people freeze up at a disaster? I was senseless in the first moments after the quake, in active denial of what my eyes were seeing. It was my knowledge of CPR that brought me back to reality. In fact, simply knowing that one knows CPR empowers one to act in such a situation. CPR is the ultimate tool, far more powerful than any other medical tool. It is something that all citizens can and should learn,

The Trucker's Death

The truck's cab was crushed and twisted to half-size. A young black girl was peering into it, crying "he's dead, he's just plain dead'" However aggravating or comforting my usual optimism may be to my patients, it is clearly so much a part of me that even at that moment it tumbled forth. "Maybe not," I said, "let's check." A white man, perhaps 50 years old, lay inside the cab, unconscious. He had light, thinning hair, looked like a career trucker, and had on the kind of cheap white undershirt you can almost see through.