Compared to previous decades, the 1980s may have arrived in San Francisco with a whimper, but they went out with quite a bang. At 5:04pm on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, as more than 62,000 baseball fans filled Candlestick Park for the third game of the World Series -- and the Bay Area commute moved into its heaviest flow -- an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 struck. Within the next 20 seconds, 63 lives were lost, $10 billion in damage occurred, and the entire Bay Area community was reminded of its humble insignificance. Centered about 60 miles south of San Francisco in the Forest of Nisene Marks, the deadly temblor was felt as far away as San Diego and Nevada.
Although scientists had predicted an earthquake on this section of the San Andreas Fault, certain structures built to withstand such an earthquake failed miserably. The most catastrophic event was the collapse of the elevated Cypress Street section of Interstate 880 in Oakland; the upper level of the freeway pancaked onto the lower level, crushing everything between them with such force that cars were reduced to inches. Other heavily damaged structures included the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, shut down for months when a section of the roadbed collapsed; San Francisco's Marina District, where several multimillion-dollar homes collapsed on their weak, shifting bases of landfill and sand; and the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, which was devastated.
President George Bush declared the seven hardest-hit counties a disaster area; at least 3,700 people were reported injured and more than 12,000 were displaced. More than 18,000 homes were damaged and 963 others destroyed. Although fire raged in the city and water supply systems were damaged, the major fires in the Marina District were brought under control within 3 hours.
After the rubble finally settled, it was unanimously agreed that San Francisco and the Bay Area had pulled through miraculously well -- particularly when the quake was compared with the recent earthquake in Kobe, Japan, which had killed thousands and displaced an entire city. After the quake, a feeling of esprit de corps swept the city as neighbors helped each other rebuild and donations poured in from all over the world. Although over a decade has passed, San Francisco is still feeling the effects of the quake, most noticeably during rush hour as commuters take a variety of detours to circumvent freeways that were damaged or destroyed and are still under construction.
