San Francisco Earthquake circa 2030

When it first started shaking, I sat there, dazed.

“What the fuck? Did a car just hit us?”

San Francisco drivers are batshit crazy, so you never know.

I went on X. “Did anyone else feel that earthquake just now?”

I scurried under my table. Those elementary school “great shakeout” drills really were something.

My hastily assembled Ikea table leg wobbled, just as shaken as me. Muffled screams remixed with crumbling concrete and falling wood reverberated from outside.

Ugh.

What did we even do to deserve this?

Not long after the shaking settled, I heard what sounded like glass shattering in the sky.

I couldn’t see anything from my window that faced the wall so I ran outside, dragging Aaron, my half-awake brother, along.

Did he even realize there was an earthquake?

Then we saw it. The tallest apartment complex in San Francisco, Millennium Towers… was falling. It was surreal, like a well-rendered scene straight out of a movie.

It had been leaning for years. I had read about it but never imagined I would witness it fall.

The glass panels gave in as the structure bent. The building had sunken into the ground on one side, tipping the rest of the structure with it. Glass shards shimmered in the sunlight as they fell, like broken ice raining down below. A flock of birds stirred by the conundrum surfaced from the skyline, flying off into the distance.

“Usually skyscrapers have a counterweight to prevent them from falling,” Aaron rattled on, referencing the repository of trivia facts he had digested from his peak Quizbowl days. “The counterweight seems to have shifted. It’s hitting Salesforce for sure.”

One by one, tiny dots, ants from this distance, started jumping off the railings.

I shut my eyes. I couldn’t watch.

“Nature’s 9/11…” Aaron whispered.

We stood there for a while, dumbfounded and in disbelief.

No fucking way. Even though we had all known this was coming, no fucking way.

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When the shaking started, no one left their home.

Over the years, small quakes had occurred here and there, but nothing comparable to the magnitude of the big ones from 1989 or 1906 whose stories have been lost with time. But this one didn’t stop. The 45 seconds of tremors felt like an eternity as residents gripped onto furniture for dear life.

There had been earthquake drills. Complete curriculums on the art of hiding under tables. Like fallout shelters during the nuclear scare, these drills placated the fears only superficially.

The earthquake struck early in the morning.

The instinctual response for many was to check X to see if anyone else was feeling it. Once socially confirmed, it was too late.

Within minutes, the city fell to ruins—BART and Muni lines paused, roads blocked by damage, and a portion of the Bay Bridge fallen in once again. Those who resided close to the piers in the Marina District and on higher ground in the Presidio were the first to leave. They left for Oakland by ferry and helicopter as the rest of the city struggled for cover. Others gathered in parks, awaiting rescue. The parks didn’t have enough space for everyone, so authorities began to limit the parks to only humans. Dogs were set off-leash, as people sacrificed their fur babies for a spot to sit.

With the electricity out and phone wires down, there was no cell signal. People wandered aimlessly on the streets sans Google Maps. Without the cover of their studio apartments, young tech workers became indistinguishable from the longtime residents of the streets, clad in hoodies covered in dust and looting shops for water and food. In desperation, the mayor issued a public notice forbidding anyone from stealing. The order was futile. All the years of investments in home security cameras on doorbells did nothing to deter thefts. Haphazardly throwing canned soup into abandoned Target bags was indistinguishable from shoving camping gear into branded backpacks.

Although 90% of buildings in the city were proclaimed safe from falling during an earthquake, the 58-story luxury apartment Millennium Towers wasn't so lucky. The building had been leaning westward towards Salesforce Tower, a few inches a year. The earthquake freed its foundation, giving gravity its chance to finally take over. As the “Leaning Tower of San Francisco” fell, it impacted next door Salesforce Tower along the way, wiping both its 6th place and Salesforce’s 1st place among the tallest buildings in San Francisco. The inspectors who had repeatedly claimed the building was ‘safe for occupancy’ went under further investigation. They pushed the blame onto the city, arguing that retrofitting hadn’t been strictly enforced, even though no amount of retrofitting could have prevented the building from leaning. It became apparent city officials hadn’t learned from the Miami Surfside condominium collapse of 2021.

The impact of the earthquake brought the top suite of the Millennium Tower apartment to ground level, a couple of blocks away from the tower’s base. Passersby did a double-take as they ran on the street, pristine white furniture incoherent with the colorless rows of tents on Market Street. As the survivors of the Millennium Tower struggled for cover, the tent residents of Market Street moved north. They scoffed at the residents as they cried about their furniture and excess belongings.

With the power out, people with electric vehicles were out of luck. In the days following the disaster, they had to ration what electricity was left from their vehicle, as car chargers were down. A community of tinkerers tried to devise alternative energy sources, frankensteining car chargers with solar panels, or attempting to drill into the ground in the hope of a secret oil reserve. A subset of compassionate Tesla owners welcomed refugees to get in their frunks and trunks to fit more passengers to safety. Though the price of gas and hybrid cars had been declining, the price now shot up, as people anxiously waited for the electricity to come back.

Over the years, self-driving vehicle companies had lobbied to divert funding from the maintenance of public transit vehicles to support their operations. Just as they finally succeeded, the earthquake proved this a faulty decision. While underground BART and Muni faced minimal damage due to soil’s natural seismic absorption, the fleets of self-driving vehicles above ground caused serious damage to the city.

Active self-driving cars that got notice of the earthquake simultaneously halted all operations within seconds. Since an earthquake was difficult to foresee in the eyes of engineers, they hadn’t programmed~~ ~~a specific action besides stopping the vehicle to prevent further damage. Though a good idea in theory, this proved futile as traffic became clogged by rows of zombie vehicles that were impossible to move without drivers. Only about 20% of adults now knew how to drive with the increasing reliance on self-driving technology to avoid owning a car.

Even though around 10% of the residents in San Francisco had earthquake insurance, insurance companies didn’t have enough liquidity to remain solvent. The housing market had shot up so much over the last few decades that all insurance companies could do was hope an earthquake wouldn’t come during their lifetime. A few loyal insurance customers could get back on their feet, but the vast number of unlucky landlords and homeowners faced financial difficulty with the astronomical decline in housing valuations.

San Francisco’s leadership moved too slowly for earthquake shelters to be built. Anxious, earthquake refugees still hopeful about San Francisco’s future flocked to purchase homes from portable housing. Interest exceeded demand, so these homes began to be jenga-stacked in parks and streets, with an extra fee for higher-floors for their “views” and distance from the tent residents on the ground. Although temporary housing sufficed for a couple months, young people eventually lost their patience, failing to adapt to park-life after years of pampering in luxurious studio apartments. In the months following the earthquake, housing prices plummeted as the youth defected back to their hometowns. As they left, so did the large companies that had attracted them.

The exit of young tech folks and their employers left a surplus of earthquake shelters, which the city purchased to repurpose as homeless shelters. Years of lottery housing had failed to solve the homelessness crisis, but with this silver lining, the city finally put the tent residents in city-funded housing. With housing prices returning to those prior to the housing bubble in the following years, residents used their newfound time and disposable income to go full-time on post-earthquake-reconstruction hobbies. New bakeries, cafes, and bookstores sprung up as petty theft and robbery rates decreased. San Francisco emerged anew from the ashes like a phoenix—stronger, and with newfound hopes of entrepreneurship rivaling the Gold Rush and internet boom.

Only this time, there were less hoodies.

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We got off my dad’s helicopter. He immediately rushed off to a meeting. Natural disasters like these meant good business.

Aaron had been playing Brawl Stars on his phone the whole ride.

“Where are we?” he mumbled. “I’m hungry.”

Why did this have to happen in our lifetime?

At least we got out of there.

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