Pratap Malik had just pulled up next to Old Chem to drop off friends when the roar began, a huge rumble the chemistry grad student instantly grasped as an earthquake.
But from where the instinct came to flee the seeming safety of his car—a boat-like 1977 Ford Granada—without so much as removing the keys, he can't really say, other than to thank destiny: "We just had to survive for some reason," he says, looking back 25 years later.
Indeed, any hesitation that October afternoon might well have been fatal. The three students had barely backed away from the vehicle before two body-sized blocks of sandstone plunged off the facade of the building, which had been vacated for structural reasons two years earlier, crushing the sedan like an empty can.
"The first reaction was, 'Oh, my car is gone," Malik, PhD '94, says. "The second was, 'Oh, I'm still alive.'"
Photo: Courtesy Pratap Malik
After they'd gathered themselves, Malik rushed into nearby Stauffer to check on his experiments and then headed back to his dorm to try to reach family in India. The crumpled Granada was left to languish, headlights beaming into the night until its battery died. When he later learned the temblor had lasted just 20 seconds, Malik was astonished. It had seemed so much longer.
Twenty-five years later, photos of the car remain among the most vivid illustrations of Stanford's good luck in the Loma Prieta quake. The university suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, but by the slimmest of margins, there was no serious injury from a disaster that elsewhere killed 63 people. For his part, Malik got a certificate from the chemistry department for saving his own life and those of others.
1,600: Stanford students displaced the night of October 17, 1989
150: Students still in temporary housing a year later.
750,000: Books dumped off campus library shelves.
13%: The drop in applications to the Farm the following year.
The near miss has proved to be more of a tale than a trauma for Malik, an interesting story to occasionally share, not something that's caused him recurrent nightmares—although he's never talked about it with the friends who survived with him. But its influence remains, an ongoing lesson on the ephemeral nature of life.
That realization has inspired him to make turns and take chances. After Stanford, he declined top job offers, moved by a less practical curiosity to head to the University of Cambridge in England. In the late '90s, he left an academic position at Harvard for the risky life of a serial entrepreneur, his current occupation. "You start doing things that you want to do rather than keep to a set course," he says. "You do realize how close you are to death every moment that you live."
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
