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Some of the high-rises, however, swayed in the air, terrifying their occupants. Mark Ragsdale, a loan officer working in 2 Embarcadero Center, "knew it was something big" when he tried to get up from a sofa but was tossed to the floor. "I wobbled all over, trying to get my footing. It was like trying to balance on a moving waterbed." Ragsdale walked down 19 flights of stairs and went home.
Victor Rosen, an Oakland lawyer with a 20th-floor office in the Clorox Building, was in an elevator at 5:04 p.m. As it swung and banged violently, he thought "something had been disconnected." Once the shaking stopped, the adventure was not over for him and six other passengers. Between floors, the elevator doors sprang open. Chunks of concrete flashed past. The cage dropped slowly, then faster, before shuddering to a jarring stop. The occupants found themselves staring at a plaster wall somewhere below the 13th floor. No one screamed, but Rosen conceded that the situation was "very nerve-racking." It took 35 minutes before rescuers hand-cranked the elevator up to the 13th floor and the passengers were able to crawl out.
The situation was far worse in the Marina, a district of Mediterranean-style houses built on landfill in the early part of the century. It was mainly the soft earth that doomed the 60 houses. Still, the Marina devastation would have been worse if fire fighters had not labored through the night to confine the inferno to a single large block. Their problem was a lack of water because so many mains had broken. Using a system of portable hydrants and hose tenders devised by assistant fire chief Frank Blackburn, they drew water from the Bay. The absence of a breeze in an area where 30-m.p.h. winds are common proved a blessing. "With its earthquakes and construction, this city is built to burn," said Blackburn, who was hailed as one of the night's heroes.
As in so many tragedies, there was no clear pattern, no consistent explanation for why some people lost everything, in some cases including their lives, while others were unscathed by the Great Quake of '89. For one family on Russian Hill, the only evidence of the disaster was a broken wineglass. Lacking power and therefore radio or television, they had no idea how extensive the damage was until their worried son-in-law called from Darwin, Australia.
On Front Street, the mortar that binds the terra-cotta tile and brick skin of the Golden Gate Bank disintegrated into powder and the southeast corner of the top floor cascaded into rubble. No one was injured on the street below, but the handsome structure, erected in 1908, will have to be torn down. Chinatown, where relatively frail buildings are densely packed, seemed even more vulnerable to a quake. But Doris Hallanan, a real estate agent whose car was "bucking like a wild bronco" as she drove down Grant Avenue, saw only that the street "looked like a scene from ancient China because it was veiled in dust and smoke." The area sustained little serious damage.