San Francisco -- Seldom have 15 seconds wrought so much for so many. By the time the 6.9-magnitude shaking ended at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake had transformed the lives of thousands of people throughout the Bay Area. Some became heroes. Some were damaged deep in their psyches, while others were spurred to make the world safer for next time. Here are some of their stories. Carol Dickinson was about to change the diaper on her 3-month-old son, Scotty, in their Marina district apartment. Tyrone Banks was driving to the dry cleaners nearby. Neither knew each other. By the end of the evening, they would know life and death together. 'If I really start thinking about it, it comes back quite vividly,' Dickinson, 57, said from her home in Spokane, Wash., where she now lives. 'Every year I think, 'Holy cow, Scotty would be in college, he would be doing this or that.'' She took a deep breath. 'I don't talk about it much here. Not many people know what happened.' What happened was Loma Prieta demolished Dickinson's apartment building at 2 Cervantes Blvd., and she lay pinned in the rubble with Scotty in her arms as he choked to death on dust and debris his tiny lungs could not filter. That's when Banks came upon the scene. An Army medic stationed at Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, he was headed in a Jeep to a laundry when the world bucked wildly beneath his wheels. Fires erupted, walls tumbled and Banks did what he was trained to do -- he jumped out to help. 'I got to this collapsed building where a guy was busting out windows and heading in, so I went in, too,' Banks, 50, said from his current home in Webster, N.Y. Crawling through the wreckage, he said, 'I came across this woman -- she had a beam across her back, and I could see her baby's face was turning blue. So I started talking to her, calming her down until some firemen lifted up the rubble with a scissors jack enough that I could get the baby out.' Banks handed Scotty to the firemen and said, 'Start CPR.' Still trapped, Dickinson began to panic at the words -- but calmed again after Banks went back to reassure her. ''You've got to stay strong for your son,' I told her,' Banks said. 'Then we made a stretcher out of a sheet, I handed her off to a fireman -- and that's the last I ever saw of her.' As she emerged, Dickinson said, 'I looked up and saw the other buildings and thought, 'Oh my God, how come those are still standing and mine fell down?'' Then came the news that Scotty was dead. It was devastating. Dickinson said faith in God helped her and her husband, Walter, eventually emerge from their grief -- that and the birth and growth of second son, Peter, now a husky, 16-year-old football player 'and a great kid, a real joy,' she said. But the anguish of losing Scotty never left. She just learned how to handle it. 'I've found a lot of people have very sad stories in their lives, too, and what I can say to them is, 'Look, I survived. You can do it, too.' Banks found the same resilience. It wasn't easy for him, either. 'I have four kids, and I noticed that with each one after they were born, I would guard them like a hawk until they were 4 months old,' he said. 'I finally realized that whoa, it goes back to Scotty. He was 3 months old. That's when I realized I needed some help -- so I got it.' Banks had read accounts of Dickinson's rescue, so he knew her and Scotty's names. But not until this month did he work up the gumption to get ahold of her through The Chronicle. There was crying over the phone. And healing. 'It tied things together at last,' Banks said. 'I'd always wondered what I would say to Carol -- and finally, I got the chance to say I was glad her life went on and she had another wonderful child. 'It was good.' The 1989 earthquake is never far from Dr. James Betts' mind. But he's not usually thinking about how he had to chainsaw a dead woman in half to get to a young boy so he could slice off his leg and extricate him from the crushed Cypress Freeway in Oakland. He's thinking instead about how the next quake could rupture tomorrow. Or in the next hour. And how he believes virtually nobody is ready for that. 'We're in the Pacific Rim, and it's not a question of if there will be a big earthquake here, but when,' said Betts, 62, a surgeon and director of trauma services at Children's Hospital in Oakland. 'People look on that last event in '89 as the Big One, but that was not the case.' Tens of thousands of people will probably die, and doctors such as him will probably be so overwhelmed they won't be able to treat everyone, Betts said. 'People will need to take care of themselves with first aid, water and other necessities for the first 72 hours -- but I don't think people are prepared,' Betts said. He learned about such things the hard way. Dashing from Children's Hospital to the Cypress Freeway in West Oakland when he heard the upper deck had pancaked onto the lower, Betts was soon on his belly trying to extricate 6-year-old Julio Berumen from his family's car. Julio's mother was dead at the wheel, a family friend was dead in the passenger seat and Julio was in the back, legs trapped under the front seats. Betts and the firefighters working with him had no choice. To extricate Julio, Betts had to cut the family friend in half and then slice the boy's right leg off at the knee to get him free. 'It was horrific,' Betts said simply. Meanwhile, others were burning or suffocating to death all around him in the Cypress. The final death toll was 42. Today, Berumen is an energetic 26-year-old with a prosthetic leg. 'The anniversary of the quake? It's just another day, bro,' he said recently, hosing down an all-terrain vehicle in his Concord driveway after a dirt ride. 'For me, it was all over in a minute. I live my life now.' Said Betts: 'He's moved on. Good for him.' Joseph Omran didn't just make lemonade out of lemons when the quake cut power to his upscale Le Beau grocery on Nob Hill. He made sausages. And salads. And cheese sandwiches -- essentially, all the food he could drag from his freezer before it could rot. He did that all on the sidewalk in front of his store, and after charging at first he just started giving everything away. The power was out for a week, and he realized he might as well share with his neighbors before there was nothing worth sharing. It was one of the finest times of his life, he said. 'It's not often we have quakes of that magnitude, and it's not that anybody wants them -- but it was nice to see everyone come together like that,' Omran said. Over the next few days, Omran's grocery became the main gathering spot for the neighborhood, where people could trade repair tips or just comfort each other. Longtime residents still talk about how, in the midst of disaster, there was this one bright spot on Leavenworth Street where you could forget the tragedy for a few moments. 'It was very warm back then, so everyone would be out in their T-shirts until 11 at night,' Omran said. 'No noise, no lights, just us, all talking and being together. 'It was pretty great.' For two days, Tamara Holmes hoped her husband, Ray, was just too disoriented to call their home in Mill Valley. Then she saw a newspaper photo of his Volkswagen Beetle being hauled from the wreckage of the Cypress Freeway, and she knew the worst had happened. She channeled her grief at his death into creating the Earthquake Reform Committee, a volunteer group that pushed for seismic retrofits for all California bridges and buildings. Holmes' husband was a 50-year-old seismic engineer, and she reckoned helping prevent other Cypress-style tragedies would be the ideal way to honor him. The group pushed Caltrans to make the replacement for the Cypress a single-decked structure and to retrofit the state's 2,200 bridges. Today, only a handful of bridges need upgrading, most notably the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which is being replaced. 'We went to every Caltrans meeting, and I wish we could have done more,' said Holmes, 66, who now lives in Loveland, Colo. 'We cried a lot. We made a difference, but after about a year we'd had enough.' Holmes, a painter, said that when she and her three daughters look back now, they smile. 'We only celebrate Ray's life, remember what a great dad he was,' she said. 'If you make the death the central thing, you lose a lot. 'So don't.' 