c.Figallo

October 17 will mark the 20-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake here in the Bay Area. Though most of the damage happened south and east of Marin County, we got a lot of movement nonetheless. I had just gassed up the car on the way home from the WELL office in Sausalito and was walking over to the pay booth (before remote payment kiosks) when the pavement began to feel more like the deck of the Sausalito Ferry en route. My eyes locked with those of the cashier. Holy Shit, this is the real thing.

Soon after, as I was driving into the hills above Mill Valley, I could see the smoke rising from the burning homes in the Marina District. I could even see the collapsed section of the Bay Bridge. What I didn’t know as I hurried home to West Marin to check on my kids, was that the WELL’s CPU had survived the temblor and, after power was restored, was rebooted by David Hawkins, our sysadmin.

The great majority of the WELL’s members were local. In those days, you dialed in to online systems through modems and you paid by the minute to use the commercial communities like the WELL, Compuserve, BIX, the Source and many home-based bulletin board systems (BBSs).

If you had to dial long distance to reach our modems, you either paid the tolls or you registered with a packet switching system that cost you considerably less. Still, being on the WELL from the East Coast could cost you up to $5/hour. But in the days before digital phone communications and cell networks, long distance voice service was a fragile thing.

Friends and families of Bay Area residents were understandably concerned when viewing scenes of fire and collapsed freeways on the TV news. And with so many people calling in to and out from the area, the long distance trunk lines jammed – phone service stopped working.

To our  surprise, though, packet switching services to the WELL did not seem to be affected. WELL members in the Bay Area began making requests of those who lived beyond the area to call their immediate family members to report that they were OK. A virtual phone tree was created on the fly.

These are the first posts made after the WELL came back up:

There was a 7.0 earthquake today.  Over 200 have died.  Large fire
in SF's Marina district.

fluster and tech are OK in southern marin.  tech was in the upper deck at
Candlestick park when in hit.

I was in our apartment in Sausalito -- which sits on a steep
hillside.  I had no doubt that we were going to slide right on off.
Drove and walked over to WELL office, and we all played volleyball
for an hour while early reports came in.

Power just came back up around 11:00 or so.  The system should be ok,
but if you notice any oddities, send email about them to dhawk.

Wow! I was in the avenues, on the third floor of
an old building, and exceptn for my heart (Beat, BEAT!)
I'm okay. Got back to Bolinas, and everything had fallen:
broken poster frames w/glass on the floor, files cabinets
open or dumped onto the floor, etc. Hope you all survived.
It was pretty scary! Did anyone have any genuine premonitions?!

Courage to you all from New York.  Your reports here are more
riveting and inspiring than any other media I've seen.

Would any of you who have told stories here be interested in being
quoted in the Wall Street Journal, where I work.  I'm certainly
respectful of the privacy of Well communications, and of course
wouldn't use any of this material without the author's permission.
But since these are such remarkable stories--and the whole phenomenon
of staying in touch electronically during a crisis is itself
remarkable--I'd love to know if any of you might grant permission
to be quoted.  (You can email me at mikeym.)

There didn’t seem to be any resistance and the next morning, the central column of the front page of the WSJ contained a transcript of the first morning’s post-quake comments. It was a dramatic portrayal of a new form of community reacting to a human scale disaster, and a demonstration of how caring and compassion could be shared through a medium about which few people had knowledge.