The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake
—Chrissie
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The 1989 World Series, played between the Oakland Athletics (A’s) and the San Francisco Giants, was the first “Cross-Town World Series” in three decades. The Oakland and San Francisco area was caught up in the games, with team rivalries raging that would normally have been put aside to support the one local team against a team from elsewhere. People in Northern California shifted their schedules around the games, making sure they were home in time to see them or planning for friends and coworkers to meet to watch the game. These arrangements became surprisingly important for Game Three of the series when a massive earthquake rocked the Bay Area just a few minutes before the game was scheduled to begin.
ABC Sports’ pre-game broadcast began at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern) with a recap of the first two games but was interrupted at 5:04 pm as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the area. Everyone watching across the country saw the screen go black, then return to a “technical difficulties” screen before only audio came back with the announcer saying “I think we’ve had an earthquake.” Candlestick Park saw surprisingly little damage; it had recently been renovated to deal with potential earthquakes and only about half of the expected 62,000 fans were already in their seats. The fans, players, and staff walked away with few injuries. The game was delayed for ten days while electricity was restored and the structure was inspected.
San Francisco’s Marina District saw serious damage due to the material on which it was built, a landfill. Ironically, a great deal of this fill was related to the 1906 Earthquake, both the debris from the cleanup and fill laid in preparations for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expedition held in San Francisco to show how quickly and well the city had recovered from that disaster. The instability of the ground meant that it experienced liquefaction, the term for when an earthquake causes loose sand and soil to take on an almost liquid state, and one that is made worse by high water saturation in the ground, as is the case on any coastline.
Two of the points of earthquake damage have become iconic for this quake. The first is the single section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed onto the deck below, looking almost like a ramp from one layer to the other. This damage, though it caused many injuries, killed only one person. The second and much more deadly was the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct, a section of Interstate 880 that passed through Oakland. A combination of shaking and liquefaction caused the support columns of the double-decker highway to fail, triggering a collapse of approximately 1.25 miles (2 km) of the upper deck directly onto the lower. Forty-two people were killed in this collapse and hundreds injured. The casualties were considerably fewer than they would have been were it not for the World Series game scheduled for 5:30 that evening, right in the middle of what would normally be the evening rush hour. The freeway that regularly saw approximately 180,000 cars on a daily basis had very little traffic on this day. Even so, this collapse accounted for two-thirds of the 62 deaths directly attributable to the earthquake.
The cost of damage across the Bay Area totaled nearly six billion dollars (about fourteen billion in 2022 dollars). The collapsed Cypress freeway was demolished and replaced with new roads over the next decade; the final work was completed in 2001.