By Don Wegars
Catherine Stone
on the 42nd floor
of
the Bank of America building
' It was like the Turn-of-the-Century roller coaster'
Captain Gerald Mahony and a truck-and-ladder crew responded.
"There are some cracks up there, all right," Mahoney said.
The cracks - two of them, each about three feet long - run perpendicularly on each side of the corner of the building and pose no structural problem, Neibert said.
"A contractor's coming right out," he said.
Janice Fry stood on the corner, looking up at the cracks for a long time. She supervises the work processing department for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro on the second floor.
"It was enough to stop my heart," she said. "All I could think of was when is it going to end?"Fry was in the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, living at Elmendrof Air Force Base outside of Anchorage.
"My brother had cerebral palsey, and my father and I had to sort of hold him down so he wouldn't get whiplash," she said. "This one was a slow swaying. Everybody started grabbing people up from the desk and getting them into doorways. Somebody ducked under a desk."
One woman ducked into Harrington's Bar and Grill at 245 Front Street for a gimlet or two.
"But I canceled my appointments first," she said.
An elderly man in a grey business suit and straw hat walked in, sidled up, and put his boater slowly and carefully down on the bar.
"I remember one in San Luis Obispo," he began...
The steel and concrete spires of downtown San Francisco - and the hardy spirit
of those who toil there - were shaken but unbroken by yesterday's lateral
earth movement.
Construction worker Neil McClure, on the roof of the 38 - story Shaklee Terrace
building going up at 445 Market Street, had the best view in town.
"It was OK," McClure recalled. "It was coffee break, and I
just sat down with a cup, and the windows across Market started moving."
McClure said he was sitting a foot from the edge of the unfinished building
- nothing above him but a pure blue sky, and nothing below the cup in his
hand but the 38 floors of empty space. Waves started to race across the surface
of the coffee.
"It was kind of like the Turn-of-the-Century roller coaster down at Great
America, you know?" McClure said at noon, when he and his fellow construction
workers descended in the cage for lunch. "A lot of shaking."
Dick Bussani was two floors below about ten feet farther into the building.
He felt something but paid little attention at first.
"It felt like they were hoisting up cement," he said. "Sometimes
they hit the building when they do that. But I looked around and they weren't
hoisting the cement."
What he saw instead was the building across the way at 333 Market Street tilting
and fro, causing light to play across the windows.
"It looked like the windows were winking at me," he said.
Andreas Morales, bartender at the Carnelian Room on 42nd floor of the Bank of America, was surrounded by glasses, bottles,
ashtrays and ice, setting up shop for lunch when the quake hit.
"At least that's what they say happened," he said, looking out at
the bird's eye view of the city. "I didn't hear or feel a thing. The
glasses didn't tinkle. Nothing. Somebody runs and shouts 'Earthquake!'"
Security man George Boulter said the room wasn't open to the public yet, and
members of the Bankers Club, who frequent the room for lunch, had not yet
arrived.
"Everyone took it pretty well," he said. The chandeliers shook a
bit. You could see the other buildings moving, but we always sway in the wind
anyway..."
Catherine Stone, a receptionist, took some exception. "People
were leaning this way, than that way," she said. "People, were trying
to figure how to get out..."
At 350 California Street, Christopher Neibert was on the eight story when
the floors shuddered and the walls swayed.
Neibert decided to go
back to his own office at the Adam Grant Building at 114 Sansome Street, which
he manages.
He saw a crack in the brick facade up around the sixth floor and called fire
department engine company 13 just down the street.
