I was traveling from San Diego to San Clemente in my car for my second Easter day contracted show. I was, as usual, listening to CNN on XM satellite radio when they began talking about an earthquake that had rocked downtown Los Angeles. It was shortly after that that I reached my destination.
The people inside asked me, “Did you feel it?” I said, “The earthquake? I was driving and didn’t feel a thing.”
I was one of the few who didn’t. Inside their home, a big picture had fallen off the wall. And then I called my condo in San Diego and got my foster son. As soon as he answered he didn’t miss a beat: “Oh, this was big! I was sitting in your office at the computer and I thought the room was going to go down into the garage below. I never felt anything like that before.”
When I arrived back in San Diego about 7 p.m. PST the time the news was that an apartment building a few blocks away had apparently been damaged.
This was deja vu all over again. But this time, I somehow missed it by driving — and I don’t regret it.
I was a staff reporter on the San Diego Union on September 19, 1985 when the 8.1 Mexico City struck Mexico 7:19 local time, causing the deaths of about 10,000 people and damaging the nation’s capital. The late JD Alexander, the then Managing Editor, and Marcia McQuern, the then City Editor, had hired me three years earlier, when I had been working on the Knight Ridder newspaper in Wichita, Kansas. Before that I had worked in Spain for nearly 4 years as the Christian Science Monitor’s accredited “Special Correspondent” (sort of a super stringer who filed a large number of stories but was paid by the piece and for some special travel expenses) in Madrid.
When the Mexico City earthquake struck I at home listening to the late Jackie Gleason’s radio commercial hyping Mastercard when an editor called and told me to take my passport and get down to the Tijuana airport (Tijuana had been my beat) ASAP to interview people coming back. When I called I got this message: use your corporate credit card to get on the first plane to Mexico City and meet the others who were being sent in at a hotel — so off i went with no change of clothes, no toothbrush. Literally by the seat of my pants.
The Union sent out about a half dozen people for team reporting. I arrived to see a decimated Mexico City. I met up with Union Mexico reporter Art Golden (now retired and living in the Canary Islands), a world class reporter and human being who had served as a UPI bureau chief earlier in his career. We watched dedicated volunteer crews and emergency personnel trying to sift through huge piles of rubble to find survivors, or bodies.
But that wasn’t all that was to happen.
I wasn’t going to just observe. I was going to experience the severe jolt of an aftershock.
It came on on 20 September 1985 — magnitude 7.5. I was in a church interviewing people about the initial quake, including a father who could not find his family.
Suddenly a woman I was interviewing turned pale and her eyes widened.
“Oh, my God! It’s happening again! The earthquake!” she said in Spanish.
“What?” I replied. “I don’t feel anything.”
“BUT LOOK AT THAT LIGHT!!” she yelled, pointing to the single bulb on the wire above us.
It was swaying, almost circling, increasingly fast.
Faster and faster.
It felt like I was sitting on a spinning top.
Everyone ran out the door — and I did, too.
We stood out in the middle of the street, with big buildings surrounding us. You could hear them creak. There were some cries in the night.
I clutched my passport and my newspaper ID since I was thinking: There’s nothing I can do. These buildings or a powerline could fall on us and there is nowhere to go. I just want to make sure they ID the body.
But it ended, and a day later I was instructed to get whatever plane I could get out of Mexico City to whatever destination to get back to the USA to file my report. I managed to get a plane to Houston, and the paper arranged for me to work out of the Houston Chronicle office to write my report (this was during the days before staff laptops).
By all accounts, the 7.2 that slammed Mexicali/Southern California was close in intensity to what I felt on the aftershock in Mexico City, although I suspect the kind of quake itself was different.
But it’s not fun. So I had no regrets for not feeling it in my car today when I was driving up I-5.
And so, tonight we wait….for a possible 6-point-something aftershock..
Here’s a You Tube being shown on TV and on some websites of a video shot in San Diego at the moment it hit here:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.