How the Weekly covered the Loma Prieta earthquake 30 years ago.

Today, Oct. 17, is the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, whose epicenter was less than 40 miles away from the offices of the Weekly in Seaside. The newspaper was about a year old at the time and it was known by its original name, Coast Weekly. 

Bounded archival copies reveal interesting details about the paper’s coverage of that seminal disaster. For one, the staff managed to put out a paper on schedule, two days after the earthquake struck and one day after a series of aftershocks. 

On the first page is a rallying cry for earthquake relief efforts: “Sure, we were hard hit, but hit harder still were Hollister and Santa Cruz. You can help our neighbors at the north end of the bay by donating goods and services.”

From the following week’s story, we learn what Dan Rather said on national news: “South of Santa Cruz, in Monterey, they were harder hit than San Francisco, but we have no news out of the area.”

Weekly staff member Sue Fishkoff reported that “phone lines were jammed for hours as Easterners frantically tried to reach their loved ones on the Monterey Peninsula, knowing nothing and fearing the worst.”

In the aftermath of the quake, the Monterey Bay Aquarium realized it had no emergency plan so it started drafting one. “These things have a way of changing peoples’ priorities,” Aquarium spokesperson Hank Armstrong said at the time.  

The local radio station KOCN also had no plan for how to handle a major natural disaster: “The result was mayhem: unsubstantiated rumors flying right and left, panic calls and outright misinformation called in by well-meaning listeners.”

One caller, for example, told people on air to make sure their water was safe to drink by putting mixing bleach into it: eight drops for every quart of water. (A note of caution: Don’t ever do this.)

Overall, though, emergency services planner Greg Meyer came away from the experience with renewed faith in humanity. “We really saw the good side of people, folks really coming together and working shoulder-to-shoulder to get the job done. I wish we could work under those conditions of fellowship and camaraderie all the time.” 

A few weeks later, the Weekly ran a story that speaks to just how long ago Loma Prieta was. In 1989, there were still people around who remembered the great quake of 1906 and writer Elizabeth Barrett interviewed one of them. Barrett also shared memories of her own grandmother, who was 16 in 1906, then living with her family on a farm outside Aptos. Grandma Barrett described her experience in a family memoir: “We went back inside after the big shock. The pantry was a mess, jars and dishes mixed with canned tomatoes, asafetida pills mixed with tomatoes made a terrible smell.”

Now, think of yourself today. Learn from the troubles suffered by Grandma Barrett and from the embarrassing broadcasts of KOCN. Make an emergency plan for your family. 

The staff of the Weekly just had its own refresher on what to do in case of an earthquake (at 10:17am on 10/17, the official “Great ShakeOut” day). Hopefully, our archives survive for another 30 years and more.