A Personal Reflection by Fr. Brian:
(continued from May 30th)
As the ground stopped shaking, an eerie silence set in. It was quite spooky. All of our seminarians were out in the street. I was halfway out the front door, making sure that if the house had begun to collapse I would rush back in and protect our superior.
All electricity, phones, cell service was disrupted. The sun was beginning to set in the west and as the sun went down I went upstairs to our guest room which had a big window that looked out over the SF Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco. Usually at night the city would be all lit up with lights. But, that night, all you could see were flames reaching to the sky coming up out of the Marina District from the broken gas lines. It was spooky!
We were hearing reports that the Golden Gate and Bay bridges had collapsed, that freeways had collapsed and that the Berkeley Library collapsed. There was chaos.
And, what about all those people waiting to see the first game of the World Series?
This was my second experience of an earthquake in California. But this one was a big one!
That night there were aftershocks after aftershocks after aftershocks, some almost as strong as the initial quake. We learned that the quake was a 7.1 on the Richter Scale and that it was centered in the mountains to the north of Santa Cruz.
It wasn’t until the next day that we were able to see reports on the television.
(to be continued tomorrow)