Stories from the Epicenter

Producer Daniel Story introduces the series with a hike to the Loma Prieta Earthquake epicenter sign in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park and a quick chat with UCSC earth science professor Gary Griggs. Then we spend some time with Ross Gibson and, via a 1989 archived interview, Esther Abbott as they describe the creation of the Pacific Garden Mall—the incarnation of the Santa Cruz downtown that existed in the two decades prior to the earthquake.

Charlie Eadie, who headed the emergency response in Santa Cruz, and Nikki Silva, who spent the few weeks after the quake recording interviews with Santa Cruz locals, take us through the early days after the earthquake. We explore the damage that the downtown suffered, and how a team of city employees and volunteers worked to move the downtown through the crisis to a temporary new normal.

Rebuilding the downtown meant negotiating the diverging views of progressive and pro-development factions in Santa Cruz. A planning group called Vision Santa Cruz was formed to work through the design guidelines, and a newly created city redevelopment office worked to take those general guidelines and put them into practice.

Watsonville’s downtown, like Santa Cruz's, was hit hard in the earthquake, but by far the most severely affected group was the large Latinx population who were already dealing with a critical shortage of housing, which the earthquake, combined with a poorly executed emergency response, only made worse. Out of these challenges, however, came opportunities for Watsonville leaders and activists to make progress on affordable housing in the years after.

Unlike the downtowns of Santa Cruz and Watsonville, the UCSC campus was spared significant damage. Campus architect at the time Frank Zwart explains why. But the story of McHenry Library illustrates that the lack of severe damage did not spare this particular building a monumental mess—collapsed bookshelves and piles of books in the thousands that would have to be cleaned up before the campus could become fully functional again.

An event like the Loma Prieta Earthquake can look pretty different through the eyes of those who were very young at the time, like a fifteen-year-old exploring the rubble on his bike, or a one-year-old too young to appreciate (at the time) her narrow escape from a falling bookshelf, or the boy whose dad was the park ranger in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park—the epicenter of the earthquake.

Local news reporters cover crises like the Loma Prieta Earthquake, but they also experience those crises themselves, often in very personal ways. For some, like photojournalist Shmuel Thaler, the earthquake opened up new possibilities with his employer the Sentinel. For others, like writer/editor/translator Stephen Kessler, it closed the chapter on his alternative paper venture The Sun, only to open up new adventures in the near and distant future.

Memory is a tricky thing. How does the earthquake look to someone who experienced it in the moment versus thirty years later? In this episode we tracked down two UCSC alums who in the months after the quake were involved in an oral history project—the one interviewed the other. We played them snippets of their 1990 conversation and let them respond.

At the thirtieth anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, there was a high interest in commemorating the event, and a variety of cultural institutions in both Santa Cruz and Watsonville took on the challenge of staging a number of engaging exhibitions and events to help the community mark this occasion. One of the more fascinating of these was an exhibition called Art and Healing put on by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History that explored the response of local artists to the earthquake. The MAH's Marla Novo and Gabriel Kittle-Cervine interviewed two of those artists—Robin Kandel and Alison Woolpert—both of whom also helped organize the Art and Healing exhibit.

Another of the commemorative projects that marked the thirtieth anniversary is still ongoing—an oral history project called Epicenter: An Oral History Project of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. Project leads Jennifer Hooker (Santa Cruz Public Libraries) and Kathleen Aston (Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History and Santa Cruz Public Libraries) discuss their experience collecting the stories of Santa Cruz locals who experienced the quake. Then, producer Daniel Story provides a conclusion to the series.