Loma Prieta earthquake remembered in Santa Cruz on 25th anniversary

Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck the greater San Francisco Bay area but hit Santa Cruz County particularly hard.

Much of the city’s iconic Pacific Garden Mall downtown was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Six people were killed in the county, including three people who died inside the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company’s building when a brick wall collapsed on them.

In honor of this somber event that so many in Santa Cruz still vividly remember, the Downtown Association of Santa Cruz held a memorial ceremony Friday morning.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and UC Santa Cruz joined downtown merchants, past and present city officials, the American Red Cross and others to look back at the Oct. 17, 1989 tragedy.

NewsChannel 5 reporter Jake Reiner spoke Thursday with the family of Shawn McCormick, one of the employees killed in the collapse. His sisters, Terri Griswold and Melinda McCormick, also attended Friday’s memorial, along with his daughter. Amber McCormick was a toddler when her father died at the age of 21.

All three women still live in the Santa Cruz area; Melinda McCormick lives across the street from where her brother died, in fact.

Griswold said she was working as a dispatcher with Yellow Cab in downtown Santa Cruz when the earthquake hit. She immediately began checking in with her drivers to make sure they were safe, and asked her husband to go pick up their two daughters and make sure they were safe.

She says she then began calling the rest of her family but couldn’t get a hold of her brother.

(See what people are saying on social media about the earthquake by clicking here. )