When it happened my girlfriend and me were at a pizzeria in San Francisco. My girlfriend was sitting down and I was coming in through the front door. A woman was leaving and we were just inside of the doorway when the shaking started. I'm a California boy so I took the earthquake in stride for the first couple seconds. But the shaking continued and it got louder. The woman and me instinctively held each other sort of at arm's length. Man, it was loud.

It was only so many seconds but it felt like five minutes. But then it was over. The woman and me were sort of embarrassed and we let go of each other. I don't think we even said anything. We just smiled at each other. Then I walked towards my girlfriend who was greatly amused by events near the doorway.

"You were really scared, huh?"

"No."

"Liar."

And she was right.

When I got home I learned a bookcase had fallen over and there was a big crack on the outside of the apartment building. That was typical. Most places had no or little damage. I lived in the Sunset District which is built on bedrock.

But the average American must have thought San Francisco looked like a bombed out city after just about a dozen minutes of shaking. The public was deceived by network news. Their coverage of the damage in the city was super-sensationalistic. They went to worst hit place - the Marina District. That part of the city is built on landfill which shakes like crazy in a major earthquake. During an earthquake liquefaction can be nasty.

Another thing that bothered me was the tv anchors coming to San Francisco. There was no need for that much less day-after-day coverage. But it maxed ratings to have them report live from the Marina in their dramatic "anchor voice" like they do when they are in a war zone.

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Soil liquefaction

Soil liquefaction occurs when a cohesionless saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress such as shaking during an earthquake or other sudden change in stress condition, in which material that is ordinarily a solid behaves like a liquid.