An earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay Area on October 17, 1989, killing 67 people and causing more than $5 billion in damages. Though this was one of the most powerful and destructive earthquakes ever to hit a populated area of the United States, the death toll could have been much worse.
Athletics and San Francisco Giants, both local teams, had reached the World Series. The first game of the series was scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Just prior to the game, with the cameras on the field, a 7.1-magnitude tremor centered near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains rocked the region from Santa Cruz to Oakland. Though the stadium withstood the shaking, much of the rest of San Francisco was not so fortunate.
The city’s marina district suffered great damage. Built before 1972, on an area of the city where there was no underlying bedrock, the liquefaction of the ground resulted in the collapse of many homes. Burst gas mains and pipes also sparked fires that burned out of control for nearly two days. Also hard hit by the quake were two area roads, the Nimitz Expressway and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
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Both roads featured double-decker construction and, on each, the upper level collapsed during the earthquake. Forty-one of the 67 victims of this disaster were motorists on the lower level of the Nimitz, who were killed when the upper level of the road collapsed and crushed them in their cars. Only one person was killed on the Bay Bridge–which had been scheduled for a retrofitting the following week–because there were no cars under the section that collapsed.
Other heavily damaged communities included Watsonville, Daly City and Palo Alto. More than 10 percent of the homes in Watsonville were completely demolished. The residents, most of whom were Latino, faced additional hardship because relief workers and the Red Cross did not have enough Spanish-speaking aides or translators to assist them.
The earthquake caused billions of dollars in damages, and contributed in part to the deep recession that California suffered in the early 1990s.
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I lived in Berkeley then. The shaking lasted only about 20 seconds but was so severe my wife and I thought the building–aged family-student housing–would collapse. We grabbed our two children and covered them with our bodies and as soon as I suggested crawling under our kitchen table, the quake stopped. We immediately hurried down the stairs to the courtyard, joining the rest of the families. People on the road/freeways who came home invariably asked what everyone was doing in the courtyard; they hadn’t felt the quake while driving. Some of them went inside only to scurry out when a small aftershock hit. The only sign of anything amiss was constant sirens and numerous helicopters flying by. The collapsed road (driving on the lower level years before I had said to my wife this was where I didn’t want to be if we had an earthquake) and bridge were only a few miles away from us, but our old, wooden building survived without any damage (a broken pumpkin was the extent of our loss). The main immediate concern when we started hearing reports of how huge the quake was, was getting a message to our families that we were okay. Our power and phones were down. For some reason, one and only one phone in the surrounding apartments worked; a land line like all the others. Everyone took turns to make one call to family, asking that person to pass along the news. It was a somber mood around the Bay area for quite a while with dozens of people killed and critical infrastructure ruined; traffic was a nightmare before the earthquake, but after a few months it was as if nothing happened.
The deep recession in the early 90s also wreaked havoc on the NEastern US I remember it well living in Glen, NH
Yeah, condos were bottoming out at $25,000 to $35,000 when the recession struck in the early 90s. It was not the time to be selling or trying to refinance!
NH is now essentially defined by Walmart being the largest employer.
Sad.
I’m a huge A’s fan. I remember watching the game as a kid on my rabbit eared TV and asking Mom WTF was going on. Al Michaels I believe was calling the play by play.
Hey, AOC. I fondly remember the few times a friend of my Dad took me to the Municipal Stadium in Kansas City to watch the A’s. To me the place was magical. The A’s poor ranking in the league didn’t matter much to me as a kid. I saw Roger Maris hit home runs for both the A’s and later for the Yankees. Micky Mantle too.
The Loma Prieta EQ happened the same year as Hurricane Hugo at Charleston, SC where I lived. I grew up in Santa Clara, under Loma Prieta and remember well the Loma Prieta wildfires. Later that year in Charleston we had exceptional snowfall.
My sailboat was on its trailer in the front yard and the snow drifted over the gunwales six feet off the ground. On the trailer because its marina was destroyed. Ataxia may have been the seaward-most boat to survive H. Hugo.