Los Gatos residents, enterprise house owners recall Loma Prieta quake and its aftermath – The Mercury Information

After 83 years of relative tranquility, the earth rumbled 11 miles below the surface near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It was on Oct. 17, 1989, and the approximately 15-second earthquake that shook the Bay Area that day was the biggest seismic event since the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Initially, the Loma Prieta earthquake was pegged at 7.1 on the Richter scale, but today it is generally accepted that the actual event registered 6.9.

It happened at 5:04 p.m., when much of the nation was settling down to watch the third game of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s.

It was the first time that an earthquake’s shaking was seen by millions of people watching live TV.

The resulting turmoil jammed phone lines as people in other parts of the country tried to reach loved ones here. People here, meantime, frantically tried to get to their homes on roads that were buckled and strewn with rubble.

“It’s an experience you never want to go through again, but you never forget,” Summit Road resident Freda Tranbarger said.

Tranbarger’s house is known to mountain residents as the “pink” house. Photos of her property show how the quake literally ripped the earth wide open. “The crack went right up to the front door. We couldn’t get out the front door.” Tranbarger said that big, heavy dishes were falling, and even her piano moved. “It’s a big shock to see everything shaking and spilling,” she said.

To this day, Tranbarger is thankful that her husband, John, was at home with her. “John had just walked in the door, and the good thing was that we were together. If you have to go through something like that, hopefully it’s with someone you love. We really hung on to each other, just shaking with the house.” Even so, Tranbarger doesn’t remember being particularly scared — she says shocked is a better word.

“When it quieted down, we ran to the back door and it was jammed, too,” she said. “We finally raised a window and climbed out. There were 100 people out there in the roadway staring at the hole.” Tranbarger said the rupture that ran through her yard was a good 6 feet deep and another 6 feet wide. “It was a real crack. The roadway was raised up. We could hear cars all night, jumping and bouncing over it.” One of those cars belonged to former Los Gatos High School assistant principal Patti Hughes.

“I leaped the crack at the pink house,” Hughes said. “A CHP officer told me that if you go fast enough you’d skip right over the crack.” Hughes was anxious to get home after staying at the high school until the wee hours of the morning. “I was responsible for finding any mountain kids who were still at school and finding a place for them to stay,” Hughes said.

In fact, that night Los Gatos was jammed with people who could not go home because of landslides on Highway 17 and the fear that aftershocks would make things worse.

People helping people

“The restaurants brought food to town hall to feed the stranded folks,” former Mayor Joanne Benjamin said. “People were bringing food out of their freezers, having barbecues and offering people whose homes were destroyed places to stay. The biggest thing that happened in this community was people helping each other.” Also, the power was out in much of the town and would not be restored for several days.

“The whole town was dark, but we had power,” Village Liquors owner Eric Shang said. “Everybody came here after the earthquake to buy stuff — food and chips. We stayed open until midnight. By then, we were wiped out; we didn’t have much left to sell.” Shang could allow only two customers in at a time because the store was strewn with broken liquor bottles. “My wife, brother and I cleaned the whole week after — you could smell the alcohol across the street,” Shang laughed. But he also wrinkled his nose just remembering the stink.

Shang said that immediately after the earthquake, he and his customers ran out the door to the corner of Highway 9 and N. Santa Cruz Avenue. “The traffic lights were shaking. There were ambulances, fire engines and police everywhere. It was just like in the movies.” Throughout the dark night, helicopters flew over Los Gatos, keeping an eye on things. “There was virtually no looting,” Benjamin said. “We put the fences up the next day.” The chain link fences were to become a way of life in the months to come.

Downtown Los Gatos was badly hit, with sidewalks buckled and unreinforced masonry buildings collapsing up and down N. Santa Cruz Avenue and Main Street. Other parts of town were equally damaged. “There were bricks all over the streets. I went out with the police and surveyed the damage,” Benjamin recalled. “I could see the fault line going down Los Gatos Boulevard to Los Gatos High School.” It was the first of many surveys the then-mayor would make. “The day after the quake I went around on my bicycle, and the question everybody was asking was,`What’s going to happen?’ They all wanted to know what’s the roadmap.” On the Sunday after the earthquake, the town announced that people who wanted to rebuild would not be charged permit fees and permit applications would be fast-tracked.

“The Farwells [who own the La Ca—ada Building at the corner of N. Santa Cruz and W. Main] wanted to retrofit right away because of the family’s attachment to the building,” Benjamin said. “The owner of the Rankin Building [which today houses Le Boulanger] had no interest in fixing it up. It was in bad shape. Eventually, residents came up with the money to fix it.” Benjamin said there was a lot of discussion on whether it was cheaper to demolish damaged buildings or retrofit them.

“There was an awful lot of interest in preserving the historic buildings,” she said. “The Farwells helped to set the tone, but the consortium that bought the Rankin Building is just as important.” Los Gatos architect John Lein put together the group that bought the Rankin Building.

Tempers flared

Although there was a lot of goodwill going around town, Benjamin says there was also acrimony.

“Some people were mad because their buildings were red-tagged,” she said. “We couldn’t let them in until we knew it was safe.” On E. Main Street, where the Beckwith block was particularly hard hit, Benjamin said tempers rose to a pitch. “The building that today houses I Gatti Bistro was a bookstore back then,” she said. “The owner was unhappy because he couldn’t get in for fear of the Beckwith Building falling on his building.” The Flick Building, which today houses the Discovery Shop, was also retrofitted, as were the Opera House and the Southern Kitchen building.

“People rolled up their sleeves and went to work,” Benjamin said. “A lot of people with professional talents came to help. We had a lot of mutual aid, building inspectors who came from surrounding communities. That helped because the inspectors let people salvage their belongings.” That is exactly what Elayne Shuman had to do when her home in the Almond Grove district collapsed. She and her husband, Harold, were in another part of town when the quake hit. They quickly hurried home.

“When we got home the neighbors were all in the street. The house was collapsed,” Shuman said. “To come around the corner and see it was just devastating. It had caved in on itself,” Shuman said, making her hands into a “V” shape. “The front porch flew off. The pergola flew off. If Harold and I had been in the house we would have been badly injured or killed.” Twenty years later, Shuman still wonders at how the quake seemed to strike so arbitrarily. “At one house on Wilder Avenue there was no damage, but next door was destroyed. It was like a checkerboard. Over on Tait Avenue it was like a checkerboard, too.” A 1991 Los Gatos Weekly-Times article noted that “Harold became a hero of the Almond Grove after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, turning off gas and water mains for many of his neighbors.” Since the Shumans suffered structural damage, but the contents of their house were OK, Elayne and Harold sat out in their front yard long into the night because they didn’t know if there would be vandals.

They were not alone. Many residents camped out in their yards, either because their homes were too damaged or for fear of aftershocks. In the 10 days immediately after the initial shaker, there were 79 aftershocks that registered 3.0 or higher.

“People reacted differently,” Shuman said. “It had a definite impact on people. Harold kept saying,`I can’t start over.’ I kept saying,`We can go on, Harold.’ ” Tragically, Harold died two weeks after the earthquake of a heart attack that Elayne thinks was stress-induced. “I had to take each thing day by day,” she said. “I had to get my belongings out and I had to be ready to say goodbye. You have to accept your fate in life.”

Beginning to rebuild

In Shuman’s case, she was destined to rebuild the house that she had shared with Harold since the late 1940s. She calls the new house “a 1991 daughter duplicate of her 1890 Victorian mother.”

“When the bulldozer hit it the first time, it was like the house was crying out,” Shuman said. “And then later we had a foundation party and everybody in the neighborhood came. I feel I was very fortunate to be able to rebuild.” Rebuilding, however, was not always easy. Ray and Robin Clayton lived in studio apartments for two years after their house at 54 Los Gatos Blvd. fell down. “Part of the reason it took so long was because so many contractors were tied up doing other work,” Ray Clayton said.

The Claytons’ Victorian, at the corner of Loma Alta Avenue, suffered about $500,000 in damage, plus another $72,000 to the contents.

“The reason Victorians are so high up is because they have a cripple wall,” Clayton said. “Our cripple wall failed.”

A cripple wall is an unreinforced wall. “The house moved away from the porch 3 feet and then dropped 3 1/2 feet,” Clayton said. “We had to lift the house up on jacks and move it back and build a good foundation.” Today, the Victorian still has a cripple wall, but it is reinforced with plywood and steel rods. “The frame was left, we kept the fancy shingle work on the gables, we kept 11 of the 13 pillars on the porch and the old fancy stained glass doors,” Clayton said. “Other than that it’s a new house. Engineers say it would take an 8.6 to 9 to do much damage.” Clayton received assistance in the form of a low interest loan from the Small Business Administration. FEMA and the Red Cross were also instrumental in helping people get back on their feet.

Town, Earth heals

Brick by brick, Los Gatos was slowly coming back to life.

“What was hard here was people lost their homes and their businesses,” Benjamin said. “So you had a double whammy. If you look at the town today, it hasn’t changed that much. You’ve got safer buildings and a redevelopment agency. You’re supposed to be able to have a redevelopment agency if you have blight, and Los Gatos was a classic example of blight.” From Benjamin’s point of view, several positives grew out of the town’s earthquake experience. “We had tried to have an unreinforced masonry ordinance,” she said. “We had tried to have an historic district ordinance.” Prior to the quake, both proposed ordinances failed.

Today, there are no unreinforced masonry buildings left in Los Gatos. Little diamond or square shapes on a building’s outside walls tell passersby that the building was reinforced with steel rods after the`89 quake.

The town also has an inventory of historic homes and buildings. “History is really important to a community. That’s what attracts people here,” Benjamin said. “If you were attracted to this community and an earthquake happens and you bulldoze everything, you’re going to look like every other community.” Just as Los Gatos eventually healed, so too did the area around the epicenter. “Right now you go on up there and you can’t even find it,” Los Gatos contractor Tom Dodge said.

Dodge hiked to the epicenter in November 1989 and retraced his steps just a few weeks ago. “You can still see where some stuff slid down the hill, but the trees are standing tall. If there wasn’t a sign, you wouldn’t have any idea that’s where it happened. It’s amazing how the Earth heals itself.” The sign Dodge refers to is a simple brown metal sign that notes the date, time, magnitude, longitude and latitude of the earthquake at its epicenter — all the facts, you might say.

And yet it was so much more, both in real time and now in our collective memories.