[I remember settling in to watch the game, then tuning in to this. Another case of proving that” life is a game, baseball is serious.” SB SM]
Today’s selection– from Portal by John King. Twenty-one minutes before the first World Series game in 1989, and earthquake struck:
“The Loma Prieta earthquake that struck the Bay area and beyond on October 17, 1989, may have been America’s first natural disaster to be broadcast live on nationwide television, without any advance notice.
“The 6.9-magnitude temblor wasn’t a hurricane that looms for days on weather charts before reaching land. Nor was it a volcanic eruption like the one that tore the top 1,300 feet off Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980, and killed fifty-seven people, a cataclysm preceded by weeks of small earthquakes. Even the octopus in It Came from beneath the Sea was being tracked as it neared the Golden Gate Bridge.
“No, when the San Andreas fault unleashed its force after eighty-three quiet years, it did so in almost absurdly theatrical circumstances—twenty-one minutes before the first World Series game to be played in San Francisco since 1962, with the San Francisco Giants hosting the Oakland Athletics at Candlestick Park. Sportscasters Al Michaels and Tim McCarver were dissecting highlights of the first two games, the fan-packed upper deck visible behind them, when static fuzzed the image that froze as Michaels’ voice broke in, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’re having an earth-’
“And the screen went silent and black.
“A green placeholder ‘World Series’ image appeared a few seconds later as the audio feed continued, airing the nervous excitement of the Candlestick crowd that had just felt terrifying waves of motion ripple through the ballpark, including that upper deck balanced on suddenly precarious-looking columns. ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re on the air,’ Michaels could be heard saying in an adrenaline-fueled voice: ‘Well, folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television, bar none!’
“‘We opened with a bang!’ McCarver blurted.
“‘I guess you can hear us,’ Michaels jabbered. ‘We’ll be back, we hope, from San Francisco in just a moment!’
“Michaels and McCarver wouldn’t resume their broadcast for another two weeks. Instead, devastating images riveted the television audience, nightmarish views commanding national attention. A fifty-foot-long section of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge had snapped loose and slammed into the lanes below, leaving one car hanging mid-air but somehow killing only one person. The death toll was exponentially higher in Oakland, where forty-two people were crushed or burned to death when a mile of the Cypress Freeway near the city’s port buckled and then collapsed; cameras captured a dystopian scene of professional fire fighters joined by neighbors with forklifts and ladders, attempting to pull out survivors. In San Francisco’s Marina District, which sat atop the site of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the soil that had been poured into marshes seventy-five years earlier liquefied and turned to mush. Buildings lurched off their foundations and burst into flames, a fiery disaster made all the more haunting that night by the serene backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The lens broadened the next day to take in scenes such as downtown Santa Cruz, ten miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, where historic brick buildings that hadn’t been structurally reinforced crumpled to the ground along the open-air Pacific Garden Mall. In San Francisco, there were the stark remains of a post-1906 building at Sixth and Bluxome Streets where an unreinforced brick wall buckled abruptly and crushed seven cars, killing five people. One man inside the structure described how the wall ‘just blew out like an explosion … there was nothing but blue sky.’
“The lens broadened the next day to take in scenes such as downtown Santa Cruz, ten miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, where historic brick buildings that hadn’t been structurally reinforced crumpled to the ground along the open-air Pacific Garden Mall. In San Francisco, there were the stark remains of a post-1906 building at Sixth and Bluxome Streets where an unreinforced brick wall buckled abruptly and crushed seven cars, killing five people. One man inside the structure described how the wall ‘just blew out like an explosion … there was nothing but blue sky.’
“Absent from these scenes was the Ferry Building where, as in 1906, the heavy arched foundation resting on those trunks of Oregon pine held firm. The lone sign of visible damage was the tower’s tilted flagpole; a military helicopter hovered low the following Sunday to lift it off, only to lose grip and send the flagpole into the landmark’s roof like a dagger. Workers cut the unexpected spear into foot-long pieces and carted them away, leaving the cupola bare until a replacement was lowered into place by another helicopter at dawn, eleven months later.
“The Embarcadero Freeway was another story.
“The structure hadn’t collapsed like the Cypress Freeway across the bay. But the two viaducts were of the same era, and the highway that had opened thirty years prior was closed to traffic almost as soon as the last cars could find off-ramps following the quake. A few hours later, the sky dark, the scene was visited by L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission. What he encountered was ominous, Tobin told state legislators that week, with deep diagonal cracks traveling up five of the ten concrete columns he examined. Before he could inspect other ones, or take photographs of the fissures, police guarding the scene said his time was up—they were concerned the structure might topple onto the bureaucrat.
“‘If the quake had continued for another five seconds,’ one engineer told the legislators at a special hearing three days later, ‘we think the Embarcadero Freeway would have failed.’”
“Absent from these scenes was the Ferry Building where, as in 1906, the heavy arched foundation resting on those trunks of Oregon pine held firm. The lone sign of visible damage was the tower’s tilted flagpole; a military helicopter hovered low the following Sunday to lift it off, only to lose grip and send the flagpole into the landmark’s roof like a dagger. Workers cut the unexpected spear into foot-long pieces and carted them away, leaving the cupola bare until a replacement was lowered into place by another helicopter at dawn, eleven months later.
“The Embarcadero Freeway was another story.
“The structure hadn’t collapsed like the Cypress Freeway across the bay. But the two viaducts were of the same era, and the highway that had opened thirty years prior was closed to traffic almost as soon as the last cars could find off-ramps following the quake. A few hours later, the sky dark, the scene was visited by L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission. What he encountered was ominous, Tobin told state legislators that week, with deep diagonal cracks traveling up five of the ten concrete columns he examined. Before he could inspect other ones, or take photographs of the fissures, police guarding the scene said his time was up—they were concerned the structure might topple onto the bureaucrat.
“‘If the quake had continued for another five seconds,’ one engineer told the legislators at a special hearing three days later, ‘we think the Embarcadero Freeway would have failed.’”