I felt I had returned to 1989… The day after I had my bookcases fall in on me. The day after I realized I could of died. When the Loma Prieta quake hit I had just gotten home from work. I worked as a pipe organ tuner apprentice at the time, and I had gotten home from South San Francisco via Highway 80 and then came home to my apartment in time to kick back in my Lay-Z-Boy™ and turn on the Battle of the Bay (World Series between the Oakland A’s and that other team the San Francisco Giants). Just as I was relaxed all of the sudden my bookcases fell and m chair started rocking. I untangled myself and sat there for a second and then went outside to see a Suburban and a Nova rolling back and forth and knocking into each other lightly (weird since the e-brakes where on).
The next day I drove around and looked over the devastation. Highways (The Embarcadero) where flattened, houses where damaged and that’s without going over the Bay Bridge which was closed with damage. And I guess that it was these pictures that brought this to my mind.
The Great Hanshin Earthquake Disaster, or Kobe earthquake as it is more commonly known overseas, was an earthquake in Japan that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. It occurred on January 17, 1995 at 5:46:52am in the southern part of Hyogo Prefecture and lasted for approximately 20 seconds. The focus of the earthquake was located 16.0km beneath its epicenter, on the northern end of Awaji Island, 20 km away from the city of Kobe with a population of 1.5 million.
[More Pictures at Architecture Portal News]
Tags: Earthquake, Interesting, Photographs, Stories
