Millie Braquet remembers the low rumble of the Loma Prieta
earthquake as it approached her three-bedroom home on Kentwood
Court at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989.
Millie Braquet remembers the low rumble of the Loma Prieta earthquake as it approached her three-bedroom home on Kentwood Court at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989.
She had arrived home shortly before 5 p.m., put some laundry in the washing machine and turned on the television to watch the third game of the World Series.
“I was on the phone talking to my friend Carol. I could hear it coming. I said, ‘Oh, Carol,’ and the phone line went dead,” Braquet said.
Then the house started to sway, and she could hear the sound of her treasured collection of fine china shattering.
“To this day I have never had the courage to go through (the china collection),” she said. “They just brought in wheelbarrows and took china and crystal out of my house. Every room was hit.”
The glass wall facing the backyard shattered, the hot water heater rocked off its foundation, the sprinkler system was pushed out of the ground, a tree in the front yard was violently uprooted, the doors were ripped from the refrigerator when it became dislodged, and canned goods and other cupboard contents were strewn onto the floor. Braquet had recently made two fresh batches of pepper jelly that lay in a sticky heap in the utility room. The damage to her home amounted to more than $40,000.
“It was a mess,” she said. “The mayonnaise and the coffee – all that stuff mixed together on the floor. We had to replace the rugs.”
After the shaking stopped, neighbors gathered on the street and performed a headcount to make sure everyone was safe.
“We were all out on the street just dumbfounded by what had happened,” neighbor Benita Reimel said.
Some of the residents were without electricity for a few days, and most residents had turned off their gas and water lines. Residents with swimming pools invited neighbors to use the pool water to flush their toilets – if their toilets weren’t lying on the floor, shattered into pieces.
Some people in the neighborhood went to stay with friends and family. Reimel and her husband, Bill, stayed in their home on Kentwood Court, climbing over the piles of broken china and crystal and an overturned armoire and nightstands to reach their bed at night.
“We slept with our shoes by our bedside in case we had to get up quickly,” she said.
Residents like the Biafores who lived closest to Uvas Creek were temporarily forced from their homes because city building inspectors condemned them.
The creek bed’s soft soil amplified the earthquake’s shockwaves, causing nearby homes to suffer the worst damage in town.
The Biafore home fell three inches off its foundation. Fortunately, Frank Biafore Sr. was one of the few residents in the neighborhood who had purchased earthquake insurance.
“Everybody else thought he was crazy,” his son Frank Biafore Jr. said. “We got everything fixed up and back to normal in about a month.”
Yet, while the earthquake devastated some homes, it spared others.
“Our neighbors to the south and north, sure they had some stuff come off the walls, but not the damage that we had,” Kentwood Court resident Muriel Brem said.
The Brems’ decorative adobe brick façade fell on their front lawn, rock planters in their front yard crumbled, their hot water heater crashed into the garage, their brick fireplace collapsed, and the home was ankle deep with broken china, crystal, liquor bottles and other debris
“All of the liquor came off the shelves,” Brem said. “It smelled like a real dive in here for a few days.”
Two deer heads were mounted over the couch where she and her husband usually sat. During the shaking, they flew across the room and their horns became lodged in the cushions.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic to be killed by a buck that I killed 30 years ago?” she said.
When the earthquake struck, Brem clutched the bar dividing the kitchen from the family room. Decorative plates sailed through the air around her like tiny missiles.
“Glenn was afraid I was going to be hit in the head by one of those plates,” she said.
But the residents of Kentwood Court count their blessings that no one was hurt or killed.
“Things can be replaced, but people are precious,” Brem said.
In the aftermath, residents’ friends and families came to help with the arduous process of cleaning up and making repairs. Because there was no phone service, residents drove to their repairmen’s homes and left handwritten notes on their doors.
Over the years, residents have taken steps to be better prepared for the next big earthquake. Reimel enrolled in emergency preparedness classes, purchased earthquake insurance and installed latches on her cupboard doors.
Braquet also uses museum glue to hold her decorative items in place.
“I have my pictures back on the wall,” she said. “You can’t live in fear.”
