Inside Apple for the 1989 Earthquake….

Seeing Tim’s burned iBook story reminded me of another great Apple disaster recovery story:

I worked at Apple when the big earthquake of 1989 hit, which completely destroyed the insides of the building, I was in (DeAnza 3, across from the current campus). The earthquake hit that building so hard, that a MAJOR water main (I believe they said it was a 4 main) broke open on the top floor (the 4th) and literally flooded the building with water, several feet on each floor after several hours I was told.

But what was worse was that many of the Herman Miller cubicles we all used basically fell apart, the horizontal surfaces in many of the cubes dropping off or falling to a 45 degree angle dumping most of their contents and all of our equipment on (or near) the floor BEFORE the rush of water started. Imagine everything on your desk being pushed to the floor. So much for the great advice to get under your desk in an earthquake.

The afternoon the earthquake hit, I was towards the backside of the third floor returning a cart full of test equipment to a lab in the Apple II group. The first jolt hit the building hard enough to cause this cart I was pushing to jump away from me by at least 10 to 15 feet. I let out an “Oh S&!T! and ran like hell, but not after the cart, but rather towards the stairwell. As I hit the doorjamb and made the turn into the well, I could see cracks crawling up and down the walls, and plaster was falling onto the stairs from above. The building was rocking, and the creaking and moaning sounds in the stairwell were scary. When the movement stopped, I jumped over the rail I on the stairs where I was standing and vaulted to the landing below, half way to the second floor, and repeated this vaulting to the lobby basically touching a few stairs before jumping down to the next landing. I covered my head with my arms and coat and with my head down in case any glass was falling, rushed out of the building into the parking lot, where many of the car’s alarms were still blaring.

Turns out, I was one of the first people out of the building, even from my location on the third floor, and I watched people stream out of the building in a hurry, get in the cars and leave. I realized, however, that in my haste to leave the building, my keys, in my briefcase, were last seen sitting on my desk on the third floor, along with my asthma medicine which I now felt I needed. They security people would not allow anyone back into the building, but I explained my situation and was told to wait at least an hour before they would let me try. From my waiting place, the hood of my car in the parking lot, I watched the side of building start to turn wet, as water seemed to stream out of cracks and even some broken windows on the fourth floor.

An hour after the quake, I finally convinced the guards to let me re-entered the building. As I went up the stairwell, it looked like a ride from Disneyland, basically a large waterfall coming down, with the occasional piece of paper being carried along. Climbing the stairs was not fun, holding tightly to the handrail and carrying a flashlight. On the third floor was about a foot of water now, and water was raining down from the ceiling above through the light fixtures, and I do not mean fire sprinklers, but water seeping through from the floor above. The roof tiles from the suspended ceiling were scattered all over the place. I was thankful the power was out, as computers, drives, monitors, and other equipment were dangling into the water supported from the tilted work surfaces by their power cords! When I found my office, or the mess that use to be my office, all but one of the horizontal surfaces were now tilted at about 45 degrees, and much of my equipment was either hanging by power cords just above the water level, or now completely under water! I also had a small 20-gallon salt-water aquarium on my desk, still on the one flat surface, but it had dumped 50% of its salt-water onto my two external disk drives that were sitting next to it. But, being in an extreme hurry to get back out, I just grabbed my briefcase, which lucky for me was now sitting on my chair (it must have slid off the disk and onto the chair) and quickly left the building. I did not get to go back to Apple for a number of days.

I volunteered for the equipment recovery team after the quake. Volunteers collected equipment from around the buildings that were damaged, and from the now condemned DeAnza 3 building (where my office was) as well, and brought it to the team I was on, œdiscover and recover. Unfortunately, given the need to do this quickly, much of what came from DeAnza 3 was not marked as to who owned what. Hundreds of Macs, monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, and hard drives poured (literally) into our triage center, where we were to evaluate their condition and recover what we could. Believe it or not, opening and drying out the equipment with high-pressure air and using the hardware test chamber oven to “cook out the water, we were able to recover, I am guessing, more than 80% of the equipment. Most that did not make it had cracked cases (one monitor fell out a third story window!) or, in the worst cases, the lithium battery that powered the Mac CPU logic board got wet and shorted out and eroded away the battery power traces, leaving the board dead. But even on many of those computers we were able to boot by applying start power through the ADB keyboard connector (which is really all that the battery did, keep the keyboard and buttons alive so the system could read the start button…and yes, non-volatile memory and time settings too.)

But my favorite items were when my own two external hard drives hit the table. Nothing was really labeled as to who owned what, but here came an Apple 80 and 160 MB (large for the time) external drives caked with salt, and still wet with salt water inside. That HAD to be mine, and it was. I immediately dunked them both into a bucket of clean water several times to eliminate the salt, and then opened them up and dunked them again. I then blew dry the units with the air, and set them in the oven for a while to completely dry. They actually looked slightly rusted from the salt water, but being the optimist I was, I put them back into the cases and powered them up. After all, what did I have to loose but a fuse or circuit breaker!

Imagine my surprise when both drives spun up immediately! Ok now to my computer, I believe it was a zone 5 (a prototype of the IIfx close to completion), which was only slightly wet (it managed to stay on the desk they told me), and my color monitor, which was also only slightly wet. I dried them as well, plugged it in, and connected it to the hard drives, and hit power. It booted immediately from the EXTERNAL drive (how I had it set) and mounted all three drives (2 external and 1 internal) as if it were simply the next day of work! I of course moved all the data off to new drives, but today, almost 15 years later, I still have that IIfx computer AND one of the two drives as well, and they still work! The other drive’s case was so rusted that I opened it and let it sit exposed, RUNNING, on the windowsill of my new office. I did not put anything on it important, but it was connected to my computer and ran non-stop in this exposed manner for almost 2 years. It died only because some bozo tossed a nerf football at it, and knocked the running drive on its side! Parts flew EVERWHERE!

So when I saw Tim’s story of the burned iBook, I realize that Apple still builds them as strong and solid today as ever. After seeing what we recovered, I feel very good about every Mac I buy!

As for my salt-water fish? The three were found barely alive about a week later, in half a tank of cool water, and died, unfortunately, shortly after being moved to a new tank.