It was 4:30 a.m. exactly 30 years ago today when a massive shaking awakened me.
I literally had the feeling that a giant hand was cupping our house and shaking it. It took me only a few seconds to realize it was an earthquake. A pretty large one, in fact.
Close too. As it turned out, our house in La Canada Flintridge, California, was only about 22 miles from the epicenter of what would come to be known as the Northridge Quake.
It wasn’t my first earthquake. It wasn’t even the most powerful one. Northridge was a 6.7 on the Richter Scale, and the Loma Prieta Earthquake more than four years earlier was a 6.9.
That one was actually the first one I ever felt, but it was 275 miles away on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I was sitting at my desk in the sports department of the Reno Gazette-Journal, working a desk shift with the pregame show of Game Three of the 1989 World Series from Candlestick Park in San Francisco when all of a sudden we felt a second or two of shaking.
Almost before I could ask “What was that,” the TV broadcast cut out.
A few seconds later, there was a news bulletin saying an earthquake had hit the San Francisco Bay Area.
No game today.
When you live in California, as I did for more than 20 years, you joke about the Big One, and neither of those two even came close to the one that will someday hit. But San Francisco had a Pretty Big One in 1906. That one was a 7.9 and killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed 80 percent of the city.
I had been in Candlestick Park just eight days before the Loma Prieta Quake, covering the last game of the National League Championship Series. I had driven back and forth across the Bay Bridge, part of which collapsed in the earthquake.
The first one I really felt was the 6.2 that hit near Joshua Tree in 1992. I was living in a second-floor garden apartment in Anaheim. I slept in a waterbed in those days and I remember being awakened by the water sloshing back and forth. That one was about 125 miles from where I lived.
But Northridge was different. In the month that followed, there were hundreds of aftershocks. The truly bizarre part of it for me was that when I was in bed at night, there were dozens of times I could sense they were about to hit.
We were lucky. We lived in a one-story house built around a courtyard, so when it hit before sunrise, we just went outside and sat in our courtyard.
There are so many things in my life that happened so many years ago. Many have receded and are faint memories at best, but there are two early-morning memories that have not faded at all.
One is January 17th, 1994.
The other is September 11th, 2001.