Digging Out, Looking Back

By LEE GRIGGS SAN FRANCISCO

On top of San Francisco's landmark Ferry Building last week, steeplejack Jody Mancuso eased herself carefully to the tip of a new white flagpole and crowned it with the same gold-painted sphere that was knocked wildly askew on Oct. 17, 1989, by the strongest earthquake to strike the city since 1906. This week the American flag will be hoisted there once again, to mark the anniversary of last year's temblor, which registered 7.1 on the Richter scale, killed 63 people, injured 3,757 others and caused at least $6 billion in damage.

Reconstruction has been slowed by bureaucratic delays and seemingly endless feasibility studies. A year after the quake, $630,568,706 in federal and state funds has been approved for relief and recovery. But only a third of the 38,000 people who requested emergency housing help have received it so far. Thousands more are still without permanent homes, a plight mainly affecting the poor because the quake destroyed so much low-cost housing.

In San Francisco's Marina district, where high-priced homes suffered heavy damage because many had been built on unstable landfills, low-rise apartment buildings still stand empty behind temporary scaffolding, awaiting new, reinforced foundations. The city's double-deck Embarcadero Freeway, which skirts the waterfront, remains closed. The board of supervisors voted narrowly to tear down the eyesore rather than rebuild it. But demolition has not yet begun because the city needs federal financing for much of the $135 million it will cost to replace the structure with a highway that runs partly underground.

While the most obvious damage has been repaired, huge expenditures still lie ahead. After a nine-month study, engineers have determined that the Golden Gate bridge, which apparently survived last year's quake in good shape, now needs a major retrofit of its anchorages and approaches that will cost at least $75 million. David Prowler, assistant to the city's chief administrative officer, says it is a "pretty good bet" that the board of supervisors will order a strengthening next year of some 2,000 unreinforced brick and masonry structures that are judged unsafe under current building codes. All told, such costs could approach $600 million.

Oakland has been slower than San Francisco to clean up. The 1 1/4-mile section of I-880 that collapsed, killing 42 people at the height of the evening rush hour, is long gone. But all over the city hundreds of small businesses remain boarded up, their plywood storefronts covered with layers of graffiti. Half a dozen residential hotels and more than 1,000 low-income rental units were lost in the quake, creating a severe shortage of affordable housing.

Oakland's beaux arts-style city hall, opened in 1914, remains uninhabitable. Repairing it will take three years and cost at least $80 million. Last week the Bishop of Oakland, the Most Rev. John S. Cummins, announced that St. Francis de Sales Cathedral and Sacred Heart Church would have to be torn down % because the diocese could not afford the $8 million price tag for repairing them.

The seaside resort city of Santa Cruz, only nine miles from the quake's epicenter deep under a hill called Loma Prieta, took a heavy hit. Much of a six-block stretch along Front Street and Pacific Avenue was reduced to rubble. A year later, 50-year-old masonry storefronts are still propped up with braces, but there are no stores behind them. At the Pacific Garden Mall, where three people died, only a handful of stores have reopened in temporary tentlike structures. The landmark St. George Hotel appears to be damaged beyond repair. "The impact here has been terrible," says Santa Cruz Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt, who estimates damage in the city at $155 million.

Downtown San Francisco has been largely repaired, but some luxury hotels and many restaurants report that the tourist business has not yet fully recovered. "The fear factor is gone," proclaims Tapan Munroe, chief economist for Pacific Gas & Electric. Not everyone agrees. In the past year more than 7,000 aftershocks, ranging up to 5.4 on the Richter scale, have been recorded on the northern segment of the San Andreas fault, where the quake struck. Last April, on the 84th anniversary of the Great Quake of 1906, which killed an estimated 2,500 people, a series of nine temblors occurred near the the town of Watsonville, which was severely damaged last October.

The Loma Prieta quake, says geophysicist Peter Ward of the U.S. Geological Survey, "might be viewed as a warning shot. We may be headed into a period of much higher seismic activity." Last July the USGS issued a "probabilities report" estimating a 1-in-3 chance that another quake equal in strength to Loma Prieta could strike the Bay Area. At a conference of 1,000 earthquake experts who are convening this week to mark the anniversary, participants will be reminded that a 7.5 quake is expected at some indeterminate future date along the Hayward fault, which runs through a more populous area than the better-known San Andreas fault does. Its consequences, experts say, could dwarf Loma Prieta's. Millions of residents in the Bay Area are obviously aware of these dangers. But apparently mesmerized by the benign climate and laid- back life-style they enjoy, most seem more than willing to take the risk of staying put.