October 22, 1989

I WAS GOING through a mountain of mail in the San Francisco Examiner’s newsroom when Tuesday’s earthquake hit.

The sheer physical terror I’ll remember forever. But for some reason, probably because I wasn’t hurt and didn’t yet know the magnitude of what had happened, my blood ran cold when I heard the buzz, then dead silence, of the Examiner’s massive computer system crashing.

One reporter put his lifeline to the world up to his ear and yelled, “The phones are dead!” Someone else replied, “They’re hooked to the computer.”

Everywhere you turn, and especially in Silicon Valley, brave new entrepreneurs have, over the past couple decades, found many reasons to sell us the brave new world of computers and technology. The fact that almost every business in the U.S. is run on a computer of one kind or another shows their beliefs have validity.

But they don’t usually mention that when somebody pulls the plug, it’s all over. Something as elemental and expected as a power failure after an earthquake brought the Bay Area’s big, macho, high-tech, mass-communicating culture to its knees. No telephones. No on-line news services. No desktop publishing. No e-mail. No fax. No computer-generated anything. No manufacturing facilities where products spring off the assembly line untouched by human hands. Even if you had cash to buy batteries or water, the store probably had an electronic register that wouldn’t open.

How ludicrous that here of all places, with Silicon Valley sprawled at our feet, sophisticated metropolitan newspapers like the Examiner and the Chronicle were reduced to hooking up Macintoshes to electrical generators, staffed by reporters wearing miner’s hats so they could see their stories as they wrote them.

In other disasters, like the Chinese student revolt, technology was our friend. Students hooked up to electronic networks could send reports to the news-hungry in the outside world. This time, until our electricity and phones were back, the only link outside was ham radio, where amateur operators practice disaster-readiness procedures once a week.

Dewayne Hendricks, a computer buff and ham radio operator, said the computer networks went down right away, so he tuned into the ham’s emergency coordination frequency. People were already checking in from all over the area with damage reports. Within minutes, he got a fairly clear view of what was going on. “We heard nothing from Watsonville or Santa Cruz,” he said. “That’s how we knew something was really going on there. Nobody was checking in.”

Hendricks says the ham community talks about changing the emergency network from voice to computer operation, since computers can digitize data and broadcast it more efficiently. “But it’s clear as a result of (the earthquake) that we’re not ready yet,” said Hendricks. “We’re not ready to run without electrical power.”

It’s devastating, certainly, to be without information in times of disasater. But the curse of not having blow-by-blow reportage pales in comparison to what high-technology in Silicon Valley could cost in other ways. Bill Hatch, a volunteer for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose, says he’s been calling around to fire departments in the valley to see what kind of earthquake damage was reported by firms who use toxic chemicals.

In addition to the fact that some semiconductor and electroplate firms reported some accidents involving toxics, Hatch says one department he contacted is also worried that it takes a while for the contents of a leaking tank to reach the ground water where it can be measured.

The other scenario questions whether toxic leaks already identified move faster after an earthquake. It may take months to discover whether a quake makes a toxic milkshake out of contaminated ground water that wasn’t an immediate health threat before. A scary, scary thought.

It will take months for Silicon Valley to realize the full extent of the damage the earthquake has caused. And it’s probable that we’ll discover in the course of due diligence that yes, there was something we could have done about it before 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 17. And if we’re lucky, we’ll be humbled into seeing the tender Achilles heel of our much-vaunted high technology.