Well, I’m pretty busy this month so I will cheat a little
and not really write a blog entry, but instead will link to a truly amazing
account of one person’s experiences in the hardest-hit section of San Francisco
immediately after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. This is written by Stewart Brand, who is
perhaps better known as having been the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand just happened to be in the Marina
District during the earthquake and helped with the civilian rescue attempts
that are credited with having been the genesis of the San Francisco Fire
Department’s Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) program and ultimately
the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programs throughout the
country. It’s interesting that Brand
encapsulates the lessons that he learned during the experience, things that
should be done before this happens again, and this basically sounds like a
blueprint for how these programs are run and what they teach to the
participants; a very forward-thinking individual!
In fact, this article was brought to my attention just last
month by Dennis Hyde, the Co-Coordinator of the Inner Sunset/Golden Gate
Heights NERT group. I’ve linked to it
instead of reprinting it here to avoid any copyright problems.
It’s quite long...but honestly, when I started reading it, I could not put it down, due to a combination of his excellent writing style and the no-holds barred and brutally honest account of how he and other people acted that day.
By the way, there’s been a bug in the last few months in
which people who receive this blog by e-mail have gotten messages in which some
words are run together, despite looking normal in the blog. I did some testing and I can’t reproduce the
problem right now, so hopefully it is fixed...and of course the e-mail people
might be laughing as they read this if it is missing spaces...
Good Article About A personal account from the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
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