Posted on 08/08/2020 1:27:42 PM PDT by DallasBiff
I drove the Nimitz ~ 10 min before it hit. Saw all the cars stacked to go on 80. Most were crushed. I made it through the toll plaza, no backup. The Bay was like a mirror. No waves. I made it over the Hayes St hill. I was just crossing Masonic when the wave forced me to a stop.
I was there. 5:03 PM I believe. I was in San Rafael actually talking to a man who hid under his desk on the 18th floor at our office in the financial district. He kept telling me earthquake and I said I didn’t feel it was probably just the wind and then the lights went out. It was a nightmare for quite a while for a lot of people after that.
Then they took 20 years to rebuild the bridge with Chinese steel.
Trucks above would make the lower deck jump in some spots, though you only noticed that when stuck in a traffic jam.
It's interesting to watch the paramedics work on your body from somewhere near the ceiling.
At least that's my experience. YMMV.
Yes. They didn’t get him all out, they had to amputate his legs to extract him.
IIRC, he later died of crush syndrome. Lots of toxins built up in his legs and enough of them made it to his bloodstream to ultimately kill him.
Even on the occasions where traffic was moving, there was just something about the structure that just didn’t look right to my engineering mind.
Granted, my training was electronics, my experience was semiconductor processing, minimal mechanical engineering and no civil engineering background, but still, it simply didn’t look right.
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