October 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

USGS ^ | n/a | USGS

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On October 17, 1989, at 5:04:15 p.m. (PDT), a magnitude 6.9 earthquake severely shook the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions. The epicenter was located near Loma Prieta peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, approximately 14 km (9 mi) northeast of Santa Cruz and 96 km (60 mi) south-southeast of San Francisco.

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This is a quasi-vanity post, but I couldn't find anything about this event.

I was there back in '89 when this hit, so this date still resonates with me (sorry about the pun) even now, 18 years later.

I was up on the 4th floor in an office building out in Redwood Shores, and we got rolled around pretty good.

I just thought I would put this up so any Freepers who went through this could post their experiences from that day.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Well, I was on a bus going down Highway 101 in Marin County at 60 mph. Didn’t feel a thing. ;)

[Redleg Duke]

I was driving a Honda Accord down 101 south past the San Jose Airport when it hit. It felt like all four tires blew. I "locked tracks" and watched the big sign pylons swining back and forth about 4 feet in each direction.

I drove home, called my folks to tell them I was okay, heard my Dad say that the Bay Bridge had collapsed and went for the bottle of Jim Beam!

[dblshot]

I was on the Coast Guard Cutter Sherman moored at Alameda. I felt it as I was changing into civilian clothes to go on libety. We lost shore power so went to the engine room where we stated up generators and stood by for rescue ops. Thankfully we weren’t called out to the bridge for search and recovery ops as there were incredibly few commuters on the roads due to baseball playoffs, people had left work earlier than usual. Some of our crew was on the way home at the freeway collapse and wound up doing treage there.

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I also remember drinking stronger drinks than usual that evening. Especially after driving through downtown San Mateo and seeing all the rubble on top of cars parked along 3rd Avenue, then turning on the TV and seeing what happened in Oakland and SF.

[Finny]

I was about 225 miles south, in Arroyo Grande (near San Luis Obispo) when it hit. My teenage stepdaughter was sound asleep and it woke her up. She asked (oddly, I thought), "What does it mean?" I said, "It probably means there's damage and trouble in a big city somewhere, L.A. or San Francisco." You could just tell, somehow, that it was the tail end of something big far away.

Must have been mighty frightening for you folks up in the Bay Area. We certainly felt it way down on the Central Coast, no doubt about it.

[Michael.SF.]

Classify this under the “Blind Squirrel finds an Acorn” heading. But as a result of the Loma Prieta Earthquake the City of SF had an opportunity to fully revitalize an eyesore of a water front. The results have brought life back to an area that was avoided in the past.

Before…. After

……

….

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[svcw]

I was in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County. As my daughter and I drove home north on HWY Nine, we saw homes collapsed and wondered what our home would look like.
We had several friends who lost everything, including their homes.
We had allot less stuff to dust, our fridge fell over and was totally busted up. Our foundation separated (shifted slightly) from the post and pillars, we lost some of our plumbing. (We got to remodel one bathroom.)
Nothing left on any wall, every cupboard opened and spilled...man flour bags busting opening is a pain to clean up, especially mixed with the stuff from the fridge.
We had just bought our first computer, it slid off the desk and well we had to replace it.
My husband worked in San Jose and it took him twelve hours to get home.
It was an exciting time, we really reevaluated what was important, and stuff is not important.....we had friends stay with us because their homes were gone or destroyed beyond habitation.
Eighteen years later.....

[garyhope]

I had just moved there 2 weeks before from LA. I was in the kitchen, got myself between a door jam and held on while watching the big hanging light fixtures swing way back and forth.

Fortunately our Soma building was reinforced with 3/4 inch plywood screwed to all the studs.

I immediately called my folks in Texas and told them we were OK and told them to call my mother and father in law in Florida with the news that we were OK in case our phones went out.

The wife was at work further South and her suspended ceiling fell in on her. She immediately jumped in the car and miraculously made it home in good time.

7th St. was split right up the middle length wise. The access ladder was poking up 3 feet out from a manhole. An old 2 story, wood frame building at the corner just broke in half. Water was pouring out the sides of some buildings from broken pipes.

Everyone was out on the street and for a while it was a party atmosphere. The wife and I went down to a local bar/restaurant and had a glass of wine.

It started getting dark and the electricity was out everywhere. We could see huge plumes of smoke from the fires in the Marina. We got home, locked the doors and I loaded the shotgun. The electricity was off for 3 days and nights.

Fortunately we still had water and natural gas, so we made pasta. We had to go down to the garage and listen to the news on the car radio because we didn’t have a portable radio. Good lesson there folks.

5 or 6 people were killed 5 blocks from where we lived when the brick front of the building where they worked fell on them and their cars as they were leaving work. I saw their cars later, they were about 2 or 3 feet high.

On another nearby corner was a cheap beer bar and the next day they had rescued one of their pinball machines and put it out on the sidewalk. I burst out laughing when I saw it sitting on the sidewalk. The name of the game was “Earthquake”, swear to God.

[Finny]

I was about 225 miles south, in Arroyo Grande (near San Luis Obispo) when it hit. My teenage stepdaughter was sound asleep and it woke her up. She oddly asked, "What does it mean?" I said, "It probably means there's damage and trouble in a big city somewhere, L.A. or San Francisco." You could just tell, somehow, that it was the tail end of something big far away.

Must have been mighty frightening for you folks up in the Bay Area. We certainly felt it way down on the Central Coast, no doubt about it.

[garyhope]

You’re right about that. I had moved there 2 weeks before the quake and always wondered why one of the worlds most scenic and beautiful waterfronts had that hideous freeway smack in front of it.

I was in SF long enough to see it torn down. It was like a window opening or the shade or curtains being pulled when they got the last of it down.

[JerseyHighlander]

I was just a kid at the time, I was 4 days away from moving to a high rise condo in Burlingame, my father and uncle were already there prepping the place. And because the building had a structural problem from the quake, and no water for a few months, I ended up growing up in NJ instead. My father and uncle were entering the Golden Gate Bridge as the quake started, or so they say, and that’s the story they’ve stuck to for all these years.

[raccoonradio]

The 1989 world series between SF and Oak was the “Earthquake
series”. Just as one of the games was about to start,
the quake hit...
The stadium was evacuated...ABC was doing some kind of
pre-game show and the signal cut out when it happened.
They went back on and reported the quake—and I believe
at the time they had no idea how much damage was out there.

Wikipedia:
>>The earthquake occurred during the warm up for the third game of the 1989 World Series, coincidentally featuring both of the Bay Area’s Major League Baseball teams, the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. This was the first major earthquake in the U.S. to be broadcast on live television... At the moment the quake struck, sportscaster Tim McCarver was narrating taped highlights of the previous Series game. Viewers saw the video signal begin to break up, heard McCarver repeat a sentence as the shaking distracted him, and heard McCarver’s colleague, Al Michaels exclaim, “I’ll tell you what — we’re having an earth—.” At that moment the feed from Candlestick Park was lost. The network put up a green ABC Sports graphic as the audio was switched to a telephone link. After a brief explanation from Michaels (”Well folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television, bar none!”), accompanied by the cheering of fans who would have had no idea of the devastation elsewhere, ABC switched to their “rain delay” backup program, The Wonder Years, while attempting to restore electricity to their remote equipment. After about 15 minutes, and with anchorman Ted Koppel in position in Washington D.C., ABC began continuous news coverage. Michaels (who had extensive knowledge of the Bay Area from his time as a San Francisco Giants broadcaster), effectively became an on-scene reporter, narrating video shot by the ABC Sports cameras and the Goodyear Blimp from the safety of the TV truck. Michaels was later nominated for an Emmy Award for these news broadcasts....Fortunately, fewer than half of the 65,000+ fans had reached their seats, lessening the load on the structure of the stadium. T

[raccoonradio]

more from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loma_Prieta_earthquake

There were 57 deaths directly caused by the earthquake, and six more deaths were ruled to be indirectly caused by the temblor. In addition, there were 3,757 injuries as a result of the earthquake. The highest concentration of fatalities, 40, occurred in the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct on the Nimitz Freeway (Interstate 880), where a double-decker portion of the freeway collapsed, crushing the cars on the lower deck. One 50-foot (15 m) section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge also collapsed, causing two cars to fall to the deck below, leading to the single fatality on the bridge...
Because the 1989 Loma Prieta quake occurred during a Tuesday evening rush hour, there normally would have been a large number of cars on the freeways at the time, which given the collapse of the Bay Bridge, would have killed hundreds of commuters. However, due to the World Series, many people had left work early or were participating in after-work group viewings and parties. As a consequence, the usually crowded freeways were experiencing exceptionally light traffic. The initial media reports failed to take into account the game’s effect on traffic and initially pegged the death toll at 300, a number that was corrected in the days after the earthquake.