I was an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley. It was my first year of school when the famous Loma Prieta quake happened. One game of the baseball world series between San Francisco and Oakland was just about to get started. The time was maybe 5:00pm or so. I was walking back from class with some friends. It felt as if somebody had simply pulled the rug out from beneath me (i.e., the world jerked two feet to the right) and that was it. Then, a second later, every bell in the clock tower rang at once, presumably a result of the shockwave travelling up the tower. I thought the whole thing quite entertaining, and my friends gave me crap for not being a real Californian. Then we saw the smoke coming up from the distance where a gas station had somehow blown up. They say that it's quite lucky that most people had gotten to wherever they intended to be to watch the World Series game, resulting in significantly less traffic on the freeways, where one section of double-decker freeway in Oakland collapsed, and a segment of the Bay Bridge fell down.

Fast forward 30 minutes later, and imagine 14 people crammed into a tiny dorm room watching the news reports on a 13" small television. "We feel another aftershock coming on." Two seconds later, your ears were telling you "simple harmonic motion" and your eyes were saying "no, everything's staying put." Very, very disturbing. The phones were worthless. You'd pick up the phone and maybe get a dial tone after ten seconds. I now understand that, in disasters, they try to reserve phone bandwidth for outbound calls from the disaster area, but even then there wasn't enough. The Internet, however, continued without incident and I e-mailed my parents to let them know I was okay.

The next day at school was quite a scene. The administration decided, at the last minute, to continue classes the next day. My first class was at 8am (uggh) in the Physics building. This is one of the older buildings on campus. There was plaster from the walls and ceilings all over the floor, with big cracks visible everywhere. Later in the day, I had an anthropology class with a professor who was something of an expert on Thai culture. He had an entire art exhibit's worth of Thai artifacts in his house and he described running around catching things as they were falling over.