Stories from the Epicenter

Producer Daniel Story introduces the series with a hike to the Loma Prieta Earthquake epicenter sign in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park and a quick chat with UCSC earth science professor Gary Griggs. Then we spend …

Charlie Eadie, who headed the emergency response in Santa Cruz, and Nikki Silva, who spent the few weeks after the quake recording interviews with Santa Cruz locals, take us through the early days after the earthquake. …

Rebuilding the downtown meant negotiating the diverging views of progressive and pro-development factions in Santa Cruz. A planning group called Vision Santa Cruz was formed to work through the design guidelines, and a …

Watsonville’s downtown, like Santa Cruz's, was hit hard in the earthquake, but by far the most severely affected group was the large Latinx …

Unlike the downtowns of Santa Cruz and Watsonville, the UCSC campus was spared significant damage. Campus architect at the time Frank Zwart explains why. But the story of McHenry Library illustrates that the lack of …

An event like the Loma Prieta Earthquake can look pretty different through the eyes of those who were very young at the time, like a fifteen-year-old …

Local news reporters cover crises like the Loma Prieta Earthquake, but they also experience those crises themselves, often in very personal ways. For some, like photojournalist Shmuel Thaler, the earthquake opened up …

Memory is a tricky thing. How does the earthquake look to someone who experienced it in the moment versus thirty years later? In this episode we tracked down two UCSC alums who in the months after the quake were …

At the thirtieth anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, there was a high interest in commemorating the event, and a variety of cultural …

Another of the commemorative projects that marked the thirtieth anniversary is still ongoing—an oral history project called Epicenter: An Oral History Project of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. Project leads Jennifer …

This bonus episode, produced for the twentieth anniversary of the earthquake by then UCSC instructor Sarah Yahm and some of her students, is conceived as an audio walking tour of Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz meant to …

The collection of interviews that Nikki Silva did back in 1989—several of which feature in episodes 1 and 2—includes an interview with landscape …

Stories from the Epicenter is a podcast about the experience and memory of the Loma Prieta Earthquake in Santa Cruz County, California.