Reading: Loma Prieta – 20 Years Later
Listening to: 15 seconds of silence
Considering how heavily the media’s been covering the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake over the past couple weeks here, and how profoundly it affected me, it’s rather surprising that I completely forgot it was today.
I was just telling someone how clear the memory of it is — I am getting to the point where a lot of things have just fallen away, but the sound of the bricks of our chimney scattering, the roar of the entire world moving, the feeling of being knocked off my feet and the beams of our building creaking and snapping, and the following stillness except for the chunks of dirt dislodged from our hill settling on the asphalt are as sharp as if it was yesterday.
There’s a memorial park down where the Cypress Freeway used to be. There’s this beautiful piece that commemorates the people who died there and the members of the community who worked to free the people who were trapped in the collapsed double-decker freeway.
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