Napa quake still on the minds of local residents one year later
FILE - Construction manager Joe Griego looks at the heavy equipment brought in to support the leaning earthquake damaged historic winery building at Trefethen Family Vineyards in Napa, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
NAPA - NAPA, Calif. (KTVU and wires) -- The 6.0 magnitude quake that woke the placid wine town of Napa at 3:20 a.m. on Aug. 24, 2014 was the strongest quake to hit the San Francisco Bay area in a quarter-century.
It killed one person and injured 200 as bricks and furniture - and wine bottles - toppled onto sleeping families.
The quake caused more than $300 Million dollars in damage to wine country, but government officials and business owners say that the area has rebounded quite well.
“We've made up all of the losses in terms of hotels, restaurants are booming,” says Napa City Manager Mike Parness. “This year we're probably going to be ahead of where we were before the earthquake”.
That being said, Parness says it could take as land as 5 years for the area to fully recover. 200 buildings were red-tagged after the earthquake; of those, Napa’s city manager says 134 remain uninhabitable and since many of those are historic buildings, repairing and even demolishing them is a complicated process.
KTVU’s Alex Savidge toured one building being restored that appeared to be frozen in time, with shattered dishes and glasses still littered on the kitchen counters, as they fell during the quake a year ago.
Napa's quake emphasized that outsides of buildings have to be strengthened along with the insides, Napa Mayor Jill Techel said.
Old buildings stood up, but the masonry falling off their facade could have hurt more people, if the quake had hit during the day, Techel said.
Napa Valley Vintners suffered major losses during last year’s quake; by some estimates the industry took a $100 million dollar hit.
However a year later on winemaker says ‘business is on fire.’
“Part of running a business is going with the ups and downs and lefts and rights,” said Steve Matthiasson of Matthiasson Family Vineyards.
Their family run vineyard suffered heavy damage and they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of irreplaceable wine.
Nothing was covered by insurance but thanks to FEMA funds and strong community support they are back on their feet.
“If you can just get through it you can’t really look at where you would have been you have to look at where you are now and things are great.”
The Napa Valley Vintners Associations says winemakers have learned important lessons from the quake, focusing now on safety and protesting their wine from future disasters.
“We've learned a lot and had experts come in and talk about changing the orientation and how we stack barrels and how we strap the tops of the barrels together to really make it safe for employees,” said Emma Swain, Vice President of the Napa Valley Vintner’s Association.
Earthquake experts call the Napa quake "the little quake that could," said David Schwartz, a Bay Area seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Cracking the earth for nearly 8 miles, the quake caused the longest, most complex rupture of the surface of any earthquake of its size, among other unusual movement.
"It really kind of stands out, sort of, on the spectrum," Schwartz said.
An earthquake early-warning system in the San Francisco area, though still incomplete, picked up the shaking in Napa several seconds in advance - enough warning to have given other Bay Area residents time to duck and cover, if they had needed to, Schwartz said.
Other new technology came into play as seismologists studied the quake afterward. Scientists used laser imagery, radar imagery and drones to help gather data on the quake site.
Smartphones, which developed since the last major quake here, let them share information in real time from the field.
On Monday, the city and county of Napa will commemorate the first anniversary of the earthquake with a ceremony and event at Veterans Memorial Park at 3:20PM, exactly 1 year and 12 hours after the quake began.
There will be guest speakers, live music, and community booths about earthquake and disaster preparedness.