British Guy Reacting to San Francisco 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
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It's crazy that this wasn't even the worst earthquake to hit San Francisco that century - the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was arguably apocalyptic.
in 1906 earthquakes were seen as an act of god and not something you were able to insure. people started setting their houses on fire once they collapsed in hopes that they were able to collect insurance on their very expensive san francisco homes. the fires were much more destructive than the actual earthquake because of how much they spread.
@@redletter2008 I lived less than 3 miles from Northridge during that one. Wow, scary!
@@redletter2008 I came here for this because my parents lived in ventura at the time. They said the aftershocks lasted all day. The entire city shut down for a few days. A 6.7 followed by a 6.0 aftershock, the estimated damage in todays money according to wikipedia is 22-86 billion
plus that one hit at 430 am, not in the middle of the afternoon, which probably saved more lives
And I think the Northridge quake was pretty bad, too.
Tornado, earthquake, volcano eruption...? Doesn’t matter, still have to go to work tomorrow ✨
"A tree fell on my flooded car that got thrown a half mile by the tornado in the midst of a pandemic, still gotta go to work tomorrow"
Actually earthquakes scare the shit out of me I don't think I've been more panicked in my life.
Our corporate masters don't give a shit....they will still squeeze the money out of our lives.
UK: It's been cold, overcast, and raining for days. Mother Nature must hate us.
US: "DO YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT *OUR* DAY?!?"
US: we've had 170 tornadoes, 20 of which higher then f2, San Andreas and New Madrid have both shaken within hours of eachother, and seismologists are picking up seismic activity at Long Valley AND Yellowstone...
@@novastardom2689 I'm glad to see someone else who's aware of the New Madrid.
"Is this the worst in US history" lol this isn't even the worst in San Francisco history
Yeah lol.. 🤯
I mean you can't forget the one in the 1800s in the East that caused the Mississippi river to run backwards and created a new lake.
@@Nostripe361 Yup, the new madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.
This is not worse SF earthquake in history. Look up 1906 SF earthquake.
@@jpman2173 erase your comment... lol
Almost died in this earthquake. I was an infant and a radio almost smashed my head but my mom scooped me up just in time. Crazy
1980s radios were the size of a sedan too.
Wow!
Lucky
God saved you
Wow, the things we _remember._
The fact that complete strangers didn't hesitate to crawl inside that collapsed bridge on just the small chance that there might be survivors shows you the best that humanity can be.
In California, kids have earthquake drills in schools, and most employers have disaster protocol.
Up and down the west coast do this.
We have tornado drills in Wisconsin
@Christopher Storey Right. We had them, too, in West Tennessee, for the same reason.
oh no this isn't the worst earthquake in San Fran history, that would be the 1906 San Fran Earthquake
Yeah, the entire city burned to the ground, what hadn't already been knocked over. Although the strongest is the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, a 5-minute-long 9.2 magnitude earthquake. Keep in mind that this is over 200x more powerful than the one in the video. In Anchorage, only 75 miles from the epicenter, two-story buildings all along the major roads suddenly would find their rooftops at ground level, because one entire side of the road dropped 10 meters within minutes.
Right, but sadly the TV coverage wasn’t quite as good in those days
@@BinkyTheToaster Can you imagine enduring that for five straight minutes? Jesus the people in southern Alaska must have legitimately thought the world was ending. I sure as hell would have.
@@BinkyTheToaster That’s not the biggest in history though. The biggest that was recorded was the Chilean Quake which pretty much saw the entire Nazca plate slipping 2 inches which resulted in a 9.5
@@diegopuga5043 Damn, nature, you scary! Amazing how long, and how energetic the original collision between Earth and the Mars-sized object that hit it over four billion years ago must have been, in order to keep doing things all the way until today.
"What is the worst place to be in an earthquake?" Bobs Glass, Nails and Acid Emporium.
What about a snow globe factory? Or a warehouse that contains fireworks and nitroglycerin?
OH😳 😂🤣😂🤣. 🙏🌍✌️🇺🇸
Lowes. So many things to fall and/or stab you on the way down.
Worst possible place to be during an earthquake? Anywhere where a bunch of heavy stuff could fall on you
Best place to be during an earthquake? In the middle of an open field
Imagine being balls deep in an Amazon warehouse during a quake...
@@SansAziza run to the clothing section lol
Unless, of course, the open field has the fault line going down the middle of it. Then you might have to avoid the growing chasm at your feet.
@@kbob1163 far less likely, theres generally one line of ground shift and buildings and stuff can fall down for miles around. Plus it's easier to move away from a ground chasm outdoors than indoors (risk of it being where you are is the same either way)
@@clintlarvenz2570 Yeah, I wasn't really being that serious with my comment.
We Americans are incredibly resilient that’s how we’re able to deal with all these tragedies.
Yes, but also the country’s so big that what happens in one part doesn’t affect the rest of us. If media didn’t exist, we’d have no idea that earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, or tornadoes were even happening in other parts of the country. Heck, I was 8 or 9 when this happened, and don’t recall it at all.
We may argue have different points of views amongst ourselves but let tragedy strike We Come together Real Quick. That's what I love about America
@@callherfoofoo Arguably the best thing about us. When it comes down to it, we've all got each other's backs, no matter what. We can fight and rage about anything from sports to religion to politics, but a tragedy hits, that all goes away in an instant.
@@callherfoofoo Then why can't Karen wear a fucking mask to save her fellow Americans?
It’s becoming more a curse than a virtue as time goes on. Problems here are starting to look like someone built a head-chopping-off-machine on a major road and everyone just decided to keep taking the same route to work anyway.
Worst part about the freeway collapse was ppl having to go in with saws to cut limbs off and save people's lives
Yeah, the I-880 connects SF to the rest of the East Bay, down to San Jose. After the earthquake, they changed the Cypress HWY to something else and now it is no longer a double-deck.
That was horrific. The one young man, they had to saw through his mother to get him out because it was the only way to save him. She had already passed and the after shocks were pretty big so they had to do it.
@@bellsca1917 omg!!
@@bellsca1917 Not to mention amputate both his legs, on the spot, to free him
I grew up here (born a month later) and I never heard of this story! I had to google it: oaklandnorth.net/2009/10/17/remembering-the-surgery-inside-the-freeway-collapse/. What an incredible story. He was only SIX YEARS OLD poor baby. They saved his left leg. I also found it touching that the surgeon thought to save his mom's wedding ring (before they chainsawed her in half)
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was worse, but it was the fires that started that ended up destroying 80% of all structures in the city. To prove how resilient they were, only a few years after the earthquake the city planned on having massive international exposition. They built an entire new neighborhood from landfill, with large buildings, hotels, theaters, etc. all for one event, to then be torn down afterwards.
It happened in 1915, less than 10 years after the city was virtually destroyed, San Francisco was already entirely rebuilt and larger than it was before. The neighborhood ended up becoming the Marina district, the Palace of Fine Arts the only thing from the 1915 Expo that was kept permanently.
My first serious bf, Bill, was a young highline electricition in CA at this time. He was one of the few trained in dealing with 'hotsticks' (live wires, as he was from MI and trained on the east coast). He had nightmares of his time climbing between the collapsed structures (to disable the wires) and recovering survivors... (The electricians had to go ahead of emergency services)
Bill is a hero.
Ty! He’s a HERO👏🏼🇺🇸
Hi, a wire wrangler rescued my baby brother. 45 years ago.
@@blankmike4613
That's awesome. People don't realize that these guys do a lot more than just keep the lights on. Merry Christmas 🎄
@Rhett Mclaughlins Chin Well at least we know he's a hero.
OMG! This brought back so many memories. I was at work in Oakland at the time of the quake. I was supposed to have left the office earlier so that I could pick up my daughter from day care and make it home in time to watch the 3rd game of the World Series being played in SF. My team, the Oakland Athletics, was to play SF.
I was a supervisor and one of my direct reports stopped me as I was leaving to ask a question. Of course I was pissed, but we went back to my desk. Before she could get the full question out, the earthquake hit. We were on the 16th floor and the building was erected on rollers, for just this purpose.
I went under my desk for protection and told my co-worker to join me. I could see her feet and she was frozen as the building began to move. She finally joined me after what seemed to be an eternity. It was only a few seconds.
Another co-worker who probably weighed less than 100 pounds was at the copy machine. She was wearing really high platform shoes. As the building began to sway from side to side, the copy machine on wheels began to move as did she. She was tipping along on those heels and the copy machine was following here. A moment or so after the machine stopped as the electric cord stopped its forward motion, Kathy was almost at the window, when the building started to move the other way! I could see all of this from underneath my desk. She couldn't do anything but move with the movement of the building. She managed to turn round when the building rocking in reverse. The copy machine followed, stopping abruptly when it reached the end of its cord. Kathy kept moving until the building tipped the other way.
I was able to also look out of a window. Just as it looked as if my building would tilt so far over it would crash into a building across the street which had only 12 floors, we tilted the other way with Kathy and the copy machine going back and forth. Kathy was screaming the entire time as it looked like she was going to be launched from a window.
Everyone but Kathy and another co-worker were under desks. Joyce was quite a bit heavier than Kathy, but instead of being tossed about, she was running through the office, screaming and pulling her hair out.
Finally things stopped for a bit, allowing for us to start our evacuation. Safety team members (I was one, checked the entire office...we occupied the entire floor...to make sure everyone was evacuating). The elevators are locked in place when a quake hits. If you're in one, you're stuck until the fire department can get you out. But for my co-worker stopping me, I would have been in the elevator.
Going down 16 flights of stairs is especially frightening when the after shocks hit. The hand railings were completely separated from the walls, debris was failing down all around us and the metal staircases were jiggling madly because they were only connected at the top and bottom.
Finally we get out. I'd driven to work. The building provided some parking. A few spaces on the ground floor with additional parking on a couple floors inside the building. These vehicles could only be brought up/down by elevator and there was no power. No power, no car. There was a taxi stand near the garage and I ran for it. One taxi left and three of trying to claim it. The driver let us all into the cab. Those living closer gets dropped off first. I lived the furthest away and I had to get my daughter from daycare.
Unbeknownst to all of us, the cypress double deck highway had collapsed. Two passengers lived in the opposite side of the cypress. We worked in downtown Oakland. As we approached the cypress we were surprised that vehicles had been stopped. We didn't know why because what we could see of the cypress was both levels intact. The support beams were standing straight up, supporting both decks. A civilian had stopped our movement and was waving cars through on the cross street. Needless to say, the bunch of us were screaming telling the guy if was our turn.
FINALLY, he started waving us through. When we got to the cypress it was the worst thing you could imagine. The cypress was intact over the street we were on. The cypress on both sides had collapsed, something we couldn't see until we were almost under it.
It finally hit us that the cars being waved through were coming down from the entrance ramp from the top deck. The other 2 passengers threw $$ at the driver and took off. After passing under the cypress, we had an opportunity to see the buildings on the other side. The majority were brick and had collapsed.
To get to my side of the city, we had to pass a BART station (commuter train) and there were hundreds of people trapped there. The trains couldn't run, no electricity. No taxis, no buses. There was a rush of bodies towards my cab. The driver said I was his last passenger because he needed to get home to his family.
He took me to daycare first. When I entered, all the kids were crying. My then 7 year old was screaming that she thought I was dead. Idiot daycare workers left the television on. Only thing on was the news and the kids had seen the fires, collapsed buildings and bridges as well as the section of the bay bridge that had hit the lower deck. She thought I still worked in SF and because I was so late, she thought I'd been killed. That cab driver dropped us off at my front steps. No charge. We all three of us were crying.
My house was in the hilly area of Oakland. From the outside it looked ok as did all the houses in my area.
We went inside and looking around, we found only one thing damaged. My husband was in the navy at the time. They'd visited Africa and he'd gotten some hand carved tribal warriors. A couple held shields and a piece of wood smaller than a toothpick was glued to the shield and the other end was slipped into a tiny hole in one of the hands. Looked like he was guarding himself with the shield. That tiny piece of wood broke and the shield was laying on the shelf of the bookcase. On another shelf I had arranged tea sets. One of the cups fell off the shelf and the little handle broke off.
We even had power and gas with no gas leaks. As we lived on a hill over looking the low sea level basin of Oakland out into SF (fabulous view, btw), the areas above and below were seen to have electricity and we were lite up like a Christmas tree. The basin area and all of the area over the bay and the west side of the bay was dark, except for the fires.
It was horrible to see the Bay Area in darkness while I was still comfortable in my home.
The best thing that happened that day was the World Series. So many people had left work early to watch the game. Looking at the bay bridge, you can see how few cars were on both decks. West bound was the upper deck and East bound the lower deck. My daughter knew I'd be on the lower deck if I worked in SF.
The cypress double deck did not have heavy traffic either because of the World Series. Too many citizens lost their lives. The bravery of first responders as well as many MD's was unbelievable. A little boy was trapped on the lower deck of the cypress inside of the family car that had been crushed by the upper deck. His foot was trapped with no way to lift the tons of weight on top of the building. A surgeon actually went in and amputated the child's foot. How incredible is that.
Phone lines were down with no way of making or getting calls. Our only way was getting updates in tv if you had power or the newspaper and radio (pretty much everyone had battery operated radios).
Very tragic event with so much loss of life (human and animal) and property.
One Funny thing. My mom had a swimming pool in her yard. When the earthquake hit, she happened to look out the side window because she felt the house move. She said ALL of the water in the pool went straight up into the air, hovered for a bit and dropped back down into the pool. No wet spots around the pool. Amazing!
There was major construction going on across the street from my office. Several levels of steel had been erected. At least 7-8 stories. As we passed by it looked like God had put his hand around the structure and twisted the beams in several different directions. Very eerie! All of it had to be removed.
The impact of earthquakes in the US tends to be much less severe than for similar-intensity earthquakes in countries with less developed infrastructure. It’s a big country. Most of the time no disasters are happening anywhere. As in most of the world, floods do the most damage.
The most severe damage and nearly all deaths from the Loma Prieta quake (you pronounced it correctly) occurred almost entirely in six relatively small areas within the 100-mile radius where the worst shaking happened (less severe shaking was felt as far as 300 miles away). Severity of shaking, damage, and injury depend on a number of factors: proximity to epicenter, type of ground (solid rock good; soft fill, like in SF’s Marina District bad), and structure (low-slung wood a-frames with flexible joints do best).
The number one cause of death and injury in quakes is being hit by falling objects. Public buildings in earthquake-prone states have to reinforce brick exteriors (very few built in recent decades) and fasten shelving to walls. Even vases; etc are rubber-cemented to shelves in restaurants.
Under table or desk, or in doorway is best place to be during shaking. Also, during shaking, if you’re indoors, stay indoors. If you’re outdoors, stay outdoors. Go in and out when shaking stops.
BTW, these days, they say not to shut off gas unless specifically ordered to. Turning all the gas back on is a major undertaking. Do be extra careful with open flames, though.
The official US Geological Survey name for this quake is Loma Prieta, because the epicenter was initially thought to be beneath Mount Loma Prieta, in the Santa Cruz mountains (where those rural house collapses in video happened) in Santa Cruz County. The actual epicenter turned out to be in a large park/wilderness preserve called the Forest of Nisene (NIE seen) Marks in Aptos (AP toss), just east of the Santa Cruz mountains, about seven miles east of Loma Prieta, and also in Santa Cruz County, which is about 70 miles south of San Francisco.
When the “Loma Prieta” quake occurred, I was renting an a-frame house on solid rock in Aptos, four miles from the epicenter. Very little damage.
During the quake, I was seven miles from the epicenter at the University of California Santa Cruz. I was in a dining commons kitchen with about a dozen co-workers. I experienced the quake as a boom, like a freight train hitting the building I was in. Then, it felt like we were marbles in a shoe box that a giant was shaking. This seemed to last about five minutes, but it was actually 15 seconds.
Over the next week, we felt hundreds of smaller aftershocks-every time we started to let our guard down, it seemed. Most life was semi-normal within days for most of us, but for the next year, it was hard to remember which businesses still existed, and much of downtown Santa Cruz was rubble.
Car radios and battery-operated portable radios provided most communication, at first. The local Santa Cruz stations alternated between recorded information from the state Office of Emergency Management and local announcers struggling to learn what they could, mainly about local damage.
About the baseball game and TV: that game was a very big deal, part of the seven-game World Series for baseball’s “world championship”, and the first time the two major-league teams from the San Francisco Bay area competed. SF-Oakland was the country’s fourth-largest media market at the time. The series resumed 13 days later, to much dampened interest. The Oakland A’s won the series over the San Francisco Giants.
The postponed game lightened afternoon commuting that day, which is thought to have saved many lives. The bridge whose upper deck collapsed diagonally onto its lower deck is the bridge between San Francisco and Oakland. The other highway in the video is a major commute route out of both cities in the afternoon. It’s upper deck fell and crushed cars and people on the lower deck.
When the pre-game got knocked off the air, viewers around the country saw, soon after, an anchor (presenter) from ABC News in New York, reporting what he could. Other networks broke into programming at the same time. The San Francisco network affiliates carried their own local live coverage for viewers in the Bay Area, and didn’t carry the national network bulletins.
For two hours, our biggest fear in Santa Cruz was that we had gotten the least of it, and that the larger cities of San Francisco and Oakland had been leveled. We were actually relieved to find out the epicenter was near us. It was a major relief when someone with a battery operated TV got a signal from KGO-TV, channel 7, the ABC station in San Francisco. The first thing we saw was the damage on the Bay Bridge, but we were glad the big cities were largely intact.
On the few working phones (all land lines then), only long-distance calls were possible. No local calling. That’s still not unusual with land lines. Cell coverage is far less predictable. All phone systems get overwhelmed by disaster. Best to avoid non-emergency calls to/from/within affected area in first hours, days.
With no power, and buildings not yet inspected, hundreds of us slept on the university athletic fields that night.
The 1906 San Francisco quake, the 1964 Anchorage, Alaska quake, and the later Northridge quake in Los Angeles all had more severe effects than “LP”. Still, they don’t compare to what we’ve seen in Mexico, South America, Japan, China, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Italy.
The San Andreas fault is scary, but one of many. Just as frightening is the Hayward fault, running beneath most downtowns and emergency facilities just east of San Francisco Bay, the San Juan de Fuca system near Seattle and Vancouver, Canada, and the New Madrid system, which delivers rare but huge quakes to the eastern US, where almost nothing is earthquake resistant, and big quakes haven’t happened since the early 19th century.
The most dangerous spot I'd say is next to a brick wall or chimney. That's where people get killed. In California anyway. But it depends on the building code where it happens. In California, the buildings are made to withstand earthquakes better than many places.
Safest place is out in the open, but NOT near power wires. Indoors, get under table or chair or similar shelter; also in a doorway the frame protects you. But in most cases it's over before you have a chance to move, and nothing bad happens.
That was what I remember most about Loma Prieta. I just calmly sat waiting for it to stop and it just... didn’t.
Doorways are not considered safe anymore. They've found that walls and door frames tend to topple, leaving you standing with the roof coming down on your head. Under beefy tables is best in a house. Commercial buildings and apartment buildings, get out onto the street or parking lot. Open spaces.
@@richdiddens4059 WRONG. If you are inside, stay inside, if outside STAY outside, until the shaking stops. More people get killed by falling "whatever" if running in/out of buildings. This is the general rule. Situationally depending where you are standing (liquor aisle? NOT GOOD, get the hell out of the aisle.)
I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1989, just a few weeks before this quake. So it was the 1st quake I experienced. Most quakes are much smaller. I lived there for 10 years. I was driving on the lower deck of the Cypress freeway that collapsed just 20 min prior to the quake.
Wow, that's timing. I was on it the same time as the quake, but the day before.
I survived this earthquake at age 9. I remember being terrified when it got dark and we kept having aftershocks all night. But we got through ok.
My mom was about 13-14 when it happened. She remembers she was going to play in the backyard while family was home watching the game. In her words, she jumped off the porch and onto the ground. The moment she landed, the quake hit. My grandpa, her dad, told her to get inside because of the quake. This was in Alameda
I was 4 and living in San Jose. My mother said that afterwards I latched onto my dad’s side. Followed him everywhere terrified it was gonna happen again.
I was also 9 and also survived it. Of course, I live in Ohio.
I was 8 when it happened and was living in the outskirts of Watsonville, North Monterey County.
I worked at the Naval Supply Center in Oakland and lived in downtown San Francisco. Normally I got off work at 5 PM and took a portion of the Cypress Freeway to the Bay Bridge to get home. Doubtless I would have been on one or the other when it happened but I left work a bit early that day to get home in time to watch the 5 PM ballgame. I was standing in my living room when the shock hit.
I’m in the lower Haight neighborhood. While we felt the quake since we are on bedrock we didn’t have much damage. The worst hit areas were in reclaimed or landfill areas.
Kurt Anderson Yeah, those areas basically liquefy & move like crazy.
Didn't the Haight make it through 1906 too?
The fires in the video were the Mission, right? That's all on fill, I think,
I was 6 years old, we lived in the Central Valley about 150 miles away and we felt this earthquake. Our hanging lights in the living room swung back and forth and a few things fell from shelves. It was felt so far away, it kind of amazing how fast an earthquake shockwave can travel.
They travel at about the speed of sound.
Same with the hanging lights. And I lived on the Mexican border.
Where were you near? I was just outside Modesto. But I was a teenager.
The only other bad earthquake I remember was the Alaska earthquake in 1964. There's plenty of videos on that.
Alaska's was expontentially worse: a 9.something compared to this 6.something. Cracks in the earth literally swallowed people in the streets of downtown Anchorage. But there are a lot fewer people in Alaska.
That is some insane footage
I seem to recall a story about a father and son in a boat being tossed like Kleenex during that quake. Do you remember anything about that?
I don't remember that one. I remember the white tornado in the Midwest, sometimes called the Easter tornado
@@kristinetaulbut4975 that wasn't during the quake. It was a tsunami caused by a massive landslide into the bay. The Alaska quake was a 9.2 and the tsunami that followed wiped Valdez off the side of the mountain.
I was sleeping in my grandpa's house when the Northridge earthquake happened in 1994. Didn't shake me up much, but one of the neighbors' house slid down into the canyon. Crazy shit.
There are three types of tectonic plate boundaries: Convergent, Divergent, and Transform. The San Andreas is a transform fault.
The worst Earthquake in U.S. History would most likely be the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco.
Probably the worst place to be during an earthquake is near any thing that can collapse onto you. I've been told getting under somethuing sturdy, like a table, can help with that.
Worst damage, yeah, definitely 1906. But worst in power would be the 1811-1812 New Madrid quakes in the mississippi valley. I think that was an 8.2 and shook Boston. Only the fact that there were so few people there kept it from being really horrible.
that's not even the most powerful earthquake in U.S history, the most powerful was Alaska's the Great Earthquake in 1964, that was a magnitude 9.2 quake. The Cascadia Fault had an around magnitude 9 quake in 1700, the Cascadia Fault is believed to be what inspired the Native American legend of the Thunderbird.
edit: However the 1906 San Fran earthquake definitely was the most devastating in terms of damage towards property and loss of life.
The worst spot to be is outside next to a house with a brick chimney.
Or on the street under Macy's
Or inside by the fireplace. A lot of people die or get injured when unreinforced chimneys fall through the roof into the interior.
Or outside between skyscrapers with falling glass from broken windows.
Basically there's not really a good place.
@@CortexNewsService Yeah but there are places that are worse than others. Most jurisdictions with high earthquake zones have maps online that show older building with unreinforced masonry or that were built using outdated building codes. This gives a person a reasonable ability to judge if they work or live in one or walk by one each day.
Here is one for Seattle for reference
www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=0489a95dad4e42148dbef571076f9b5b
I was living on the East Coast when this happened, watching the game. For some reason, as soon as I saw the feed go out, I knew it was an earthquake. I live in the SF Bay Area now. When I moved here, they were still dismantling the Cyprus freeway. That connection was replaced with single span freeway. No, not the worst in US. 1906 Earthquake was a 7.6 and it killed 3k plus. The 1964 Alaska earthquake was 9.2. It was brutal. Not a lot of casualties, thank goodness, but it wiped out towns.
The movie San Andreas made me sick. I can't imagine how I would cope with that happening, even if I'm not living there.
The 1906 San Fransico Earthquake was insane too. I've read all of the I Survived books by Lauren Tarshis. Absolutely terrifying.
That movie did a surprisingly decent job of depicting the destruction a major quake can do. Yeah, it took liberties for story telling, but overall, it wasn't bad.
That movie was crap and all Hollywood. I live directly on top of the San Andreas Fault and all houses have to have pillars 60-100plus feet in the ground. We have earthquakes all the time, they are just small and the house doesn't even move. We are trained in school at a very young age, to duck and cover under tables or get into door wells. Yes, there can be a lot of damage, but our buildings are built to withstand major earthquakes. A tsunami of that size is ridiculous and would probably only happen if a meteor hit Earth right outside San Francisco. An entertaining but stupid movie.
@@bbette00 Yeah, entertainment... it wasn't a fucking documentary.
@@bbette00 Right. I worked in commercial real estate in downtown SF-all those buildings are built to withstand an 8.0 earthquake, and there are a ton of building regs to ensure shit don’t just fall over even inside those buildings. Could the catastrophe depicted in San Andreas happen? Sure, but at that point, it’s an end of the world type of scenario where the earthquake is probably the least of your worries. Lol.
@@Rose-yt5hi LOL I'm on the fault so I'd probably fall in a massive canyon caused by the quake. LOL I'm more worried about fires.
The scene where guys in shorts and t-shirts were helping run out the fire lines? Those were all guys that had been in a local bar and jumped in to help the fire crew!
Also, when it comes to the magnitude, this wasn’t even a severe earthquake in that sense. It was only a magnitude 6.9. The reason it was so severe as far as damage goes is because areas of the SF Bay Area(especially the marina district) are built on landfill. They literally filled in part of the bay with a bunch of crap so they could build on it.. So when the shaking started, it experienced severe liquefaction. Basically the ground acted like a liquid sludge, and obliterated everything. And if it weren’t for the battle of the bay(both our local teams in the World Series that happened to both be playing each other) at that very time, the death toll would have been much higher. This happened during peak rush hour traffic time. The cypress structure that collapsed was supposed to be jam packed at that time, but everyone was home watching the game. There’s a crazy story about a family that was trapped under the rubble. A car carrying A lady, her friend and her 2 kids was crushed under the cypress bridge. The 2 occupants in the front seat died on impact. The 2 little kids in the back seat survived. The the rescue of the little boy was anything but normal. They had to cut off on of the deceased’s limbs to free him, and even after that, they still couldn’t remove him and they had to have a surgeon climb down there with a rescue team and perform and amputation on the little boy to remove him, and he survived..and this was when there were still aftershocks happening and it was in danger of collapsing further. They made a movie about it. If you want any other video ideas you should watch a segment about that. It was unbelievable! And the kids dad was watching the rescue live on tv and didn’t realize it was his children that were being rescued.
There are earthquake building codes in California so most newer buildings, etc. are built to move -- with flexibility to survive the shaking.
There's some really creepy video from Japan up in some big buildings and you can see the neighboring buildings swaying a not insignificant amount. It's not all that comforting knowing they build them to do that on purpose. lol.
historic buildings have been fortified to be earthquake resistant, if there’s another like this, sf would fare a lot begter
This is my first memory of watching the News. I was about 4 years old, we live in Los Angeles. I remember seeing the highway collapsed and them trying to dig the people out.
This video made me hit the bell icon, not because because its about the US I'm not even American I'm Greek (thought I like the US as you can tell), but I love how genuine these videos are, and honestly I learn some things too
i live in the bay area, and all my life we've had earthquake drills in school to prepare for stuff like this. It's crazy to me that everyone doesn't know what to do in an earthquake
LUKA WE NEED A GAME 4 REACTION!! I dont even like baseball like that but i watch the playoffs, and it was insane. check it out
Fr I think he is posting too much non sports related now. I don’t mind these but he needs to get back into game reactions
He also said he won’t react to things he’s seen. Not saying he has seen it, but most likely why if he handy sene it yet. Also I think he’s posting these type of reaction for views. He’s gained SO MANY new subs in the past month or so from these types of videos
One of the craziest World Series games I’ve ever watched
I ran outside of my friends house and I remember seeing full sized vans bouncing off the ground. I didn't sleep that night, I was 9.
Even in illinois where we don't get major earthquakes, we had earthquake drills in school where you hide under your desk. Otherwise we had intruder drills as well as tornado drills and fire drills
I understand from my son who lives in San Francisco, the safest place is in a doorway. Most people just run outside.
Luka, you mentioned getting info without power/internet. In an emergency, the local radio usually has lots of information. Even without a smartphone, if you have a radio you'll be somewhat informed. You can buy hand-cranked flashlight/weather radios to prepare for it really hitting the fan.
Yep at that point in time if you were safe and had power in your home then the TV was likely your source of information, if you didn't have power you could listen to it on your car's radio or a Walkman. If all that failed the newspapers usually made every effort to get an edition printed with important information even if it was printed by the next town over and brought in... that same year my hometown on the east coast was hit by the tailend of hurricane Hugo alot of people had no power for +2weeks... but we happened to have an old 12v black &white color TV and my dad got the newspaper from the local gas station. Now we'd probably just need to curl up in the fetal position and suck our thumbs until the cell towers and internet providers came back online...😱🙂
My dad was like 10 miles from the epicenter of the quake when it went off, as were others in my family. The stories I’ve heard.....
I was working a graveyard shift in 1989, so I was asleep when the earthquake hit in the late afternoon. It definitely woke me up, and was the only time I've ever gotten under anything during an earthquake (we have them fairly regularly in California). I could tell that it was the biggest earthquake I've ever experienced even without the scientists telling me so, though I was also surprised about the extent of the damage. It didn't seem to be strong enough to do all of that, but on the other hand, I might have slept through more of it than I realize. I seem to remember the World Series resuming about a week and a half later, with the rationale being that the people of the Bay Area could use something to take their minds off the tragedy for a few hours.
As far as the Bay Bridge goes the section that fell down is just a section that is placed into the actual Bridge structure. That's why it was okay to go on to the bridge even after that section fell down. Imagine if one plank fell out of your stairs. The overall structure of the stairs is still sound but that one plank is missing
I think the bridge was actually designed that way because of the chance of quakes. Better for a section than the whole structure.
The bay bridge was still closed for so many months...
It wasnt a quick fix.too scared to go under the bay on bart, so had to go through vallejo and marin to get sf, san mateo, etc
I still remember watching the live feed of this on television, realizing even before the reporters and first responders did that a whole section of the road deck had collapsed onto cars in the lower section, squishing them. We were kids yelling at the TV that people were trapped in there. It was the most helpless I had ever felt in my life until 9/11 happened...
Worst is a subjective thing when it comes to earthquakes. There was a series of earthquakes in my county last year that measured 6.4, 5.4, and 7.1. Since they hit an area that wasn't built up like Los Angeles or San Fransisco, there was no deaths. If they did hit those places, you would see billions in damages and dozens to hundreds of deaths.
My ex was hit by an 6.5 in Northridge, California. She was trapped in her upstairs apartment for two days.
8:04 That was a double decker freeway that ran through most of the city of Oakland and after it collapsed it was torn down and a new freeway built to replace it. Most who died in that quake, died on that freeway. And most of those were the ones unlucky enough to be under the thick support structures holding the top deck in place. And had the World Series not been taking place in SF at the time with Oakland (a city just on the other side of SF bay) the other team, the traffic would have been much, much heavier, and the resulting death toll correspondingly higher. As a result of that double decker freeway collapse, a double decker freeway named the Embarcadero Freeway in SF city proper was torn down in 1991.
Everyone in the Bay Area who was alive back then remembers what they were doing this day
My mom had just picked me up from school and we were driving home when all the cars looked like they were jumping around. We pulled over and everyone started coming out of their homes. We rushed home and turned on the news. My dad was on the Bay Bridge and you could see his truck. He had a ham radio and was able to call my mom and let her know he was ok. I lived on a street with 170 plus kids and our parents put tents up and we all slept outside. We got to have a few days off school, which we thought was the coolest thing ever. I remember well! We loved watching the pool as the aftershocks turned it into a wave pool.
Yep. Was just outside Modesto. I was a teenager. My dad was working an awful schedule, and had just snuck into bed for his afternoon nap. The quake hit and threw dad out of bed. Our safety spot was under our oak table, and I dove under it. I remember the reflection of the chandelier hanging over the table (and me!) swinging so high it nearly hit the ceiling
Completely. It was crazy.
I was 5 and in the bathtub with my 7-year-old sister. It was really hard to get out because it was so slick and the ground was shaking so much. We spent the rest of the day outside with our neighbors watching the news on a tiny tv that one of my neighbors plugged into their car. I kept wondering when dad would get home from work, it was very late when he arrived because he had to go around the devastation.
I lived through this. We didn’t have power for 19 hours. The videos make it look the whole area was in fire but it was these specific areas that had the worse damage. My mom skinned her knee trying to get my little brother and they only lost a light bulb. I remember the floor moving. We had a psychologist come to our school after they felt it was safe. We were less than 20 miles from the epicenter and my husband and his family felt it 300 miles away in Los Angeles area. It warps you I was in the DC earthquake in 2013 and that was nothing. The marina district was on fire because it is built on landfill and the earth under them liquified.
I'll never forget this. I was at my grandparents house in New Jersey, watching the World Series pre game when the camera started shaking. Later when they showed the bridge collapse, I was so shook, I couldn't bare to open my eyes whenever we took the George Washington Bridge into New York. I'm still a little uneasy crossing large bridges.
Damn I've suggested this. Thanks bro!
You pronounced loma prieta better than most of the people living around there
Wasnt the world series going on during this??
Yes. I had the tv on, it was just starting up when the quake hit.
kennashan Yep. I was in the army at the time. I had the day off & was going to watch the game.
yep Conseaco puked on the field...
Yep. My friend was there. She said at some point the movement put a gap in between the stadium level she was on and the wall, and she got a glimpse of the parking lot.
@@maddonut621 That’s an appropriate reaction.
I learn SO MUCH from your videos! These are things I would never research on my own and you have brought it to me. Thank you!
I was there. I was 16 and that first night was one of the scariest of my life. Most of the City was blacked out, parts of it were burning, it was hard to get solid info, and when people said the Bay Bridge had collapsed we were imagining the worst. And we, I mean my family and I, still didn't know about the poor bastards on the Cypress.
You should react to the Iowa Derecho from August this year
I agree. I just saw the videos of this and thought that he would be floored by it, I know that I was.
So were the 60 foot oak trees in my yard.
@@Nakturnal_1 , I went to college in CR and haven't been back since a couple years before the big flood and I was so annoyed at how under-reported the derecho devastation was. Didn't they say every single part of the city suffered heavy damage?
@@kendalchen ya. Pretty much all over the state. Des Moines, iowa city, quad cities, cedar rapids.. Power was out for almost a week.
Watch the 30 for 30 for this event
He watched jon bois tho
Yeah ik
The 30 for 30 would be great but it's probably too long. 😕
I remember this quake; I was a kid, and grew up in Berkeley, CA. Luckily the worst my family got was losing power for a while. I wasn't scared back then, but I think that's only because I didn't understand the magnitude of what was happening since I was only about 8 years old. I also remember the Oakland firestorm in '92; that one scared my mom because my dad was right near there at the time.
I was in my first year of college when this happened. I live on the other side of the country but regardless of geographic location, things like this brings us together. I remember us sitting by the TV just watching and hoping that they keep pulling people that were alive in the highway collapse. the big San Andreas fault runs through california and there was another big quake there after this one called the Northridge quake which happened outside of los angeles. I have only been through one earth quake (the one in virginia that happened about 8 years ago) and it really rattles the nerves especially in older buildings that aren't built for earthquakes. I would just rather be out in the open than being stuck in a building. you just never know what could collapse.
React to the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, there's a lot of great footage from it.
React to the Hillsborough Disaster. Maybe you have heard of it as you are from England.
I lived halfway across the country when this happened, but the visual of that red Pontiac LeMans teetering on the deck of that collapsed freeway is an image I will never forget.
And then within a month, the Berlin Wall fell. If you're looking for something to react to on Nov 9th, I recommend that as a topic. November 9th was also a terrible day for Germans (think Kristallnacht), but in 1989 it was a history-making moment.
Another great video. You can tell you have real compassion for others. Really enjoy your videos!! Suggestion: do a Q&A video where we submit questions and you answer them. Would love to know more about you as a person!!
When tragedy strikes Americans are tough as nails and generally refuse to be defeated. And we forget our political squabbles during times like these and we unite to help our neighbors. Every state sends aid and volunteers to help in the clean up. We can be divided over many issues. After all we are a huge place with much diversity of ideas and beliefs. But when one of us is injured or attacked we become one America in a flash.
the san francisco in 1906 is arguably the worst earthquake in the us
New Madrid was worse than that
@@anthonylong9067 I’m talking about in the us
@@rileyganger4217 yeah. New madrid quakes were here in the US. Shook half the nation
Alaska in the 60s was way worse.
I was watching it live. My Mom had been living in San Francisco for about a year. I was terrified! She was safe at work downtown.
I live right on top of the San Andreas Fault line. I feel little ones all the time. Just kinda feels like a small vibration in your feet or maybe a low rumbling sound and you're like "ooooo you guys feel that?" but then you get those crazy ones every once in a while where the whole damn house starts shaking and you're just counting the seconds until it stops and hoping its not the "big one".
We just had a 7.4 earthquake a couple years ago and boy that was interesting however I don’t believe there was much footage to react to.
In the state of Alaska
There are a couple of videos on CZcams, it’s crazy
It was crazy, I was in my bed at the time and that bed was a rockin’ however I was by myself. 😁
I was in L.A. and weirdly didn’t feel them. There were two a couple days apart. Everyone else was like this is the biggest earthquake we’ve had in a decade. I have experienced a few smaller ones though.
@@carrie-leehurzeler7413 I follow some sled doggers on twitter and they were in Alaska for that. It was scary just to follow their updates as they tried to drive home!
You probably got blocked for the extended James Taylor song they played.
That's probably true because the news footage and the broadcast footage from the game have been used in lots of documentaries but none of them included that lengthy song
I have lived all my life in the Bay Area, and I was at work in Emeryville (a small city across the bay from San Francisco) when the earthquake hit. I've experienced a lot of quakes, but this is the only one that ever scared me.
The shaking went on for about 15 seconds. It seemed like a lot longer than that. Time seems to stand still when you're in the middle of a crisis.
I went out to my car to drive home after the shaking stopped. I noticed a pillar of smoke to the northeast - I learned later that the quake had set off a fire in a mechanic's garage in Berkeley. I thought of the damage done by the fire due to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Fortunately, the Berkeley fire department got this one out pretty quickly.
The first thing I did when I got in my car was turn on my radio to try to find some news. I couldn't find anything. All of the stations were off the air. Even when I put my radio in search mode to find a station, it didn't come up with anything.
I decided to stay off the freeways on my way home. Most of the traffic lights were out as I drove through the city streets. Ordinary citizens were out in the intersections directing traffic.
When I got home I discovered that my neighborhood had never lost power. I'd set up my VCR to record the World Series, and what I got instead was the news reports from the local ABC station. I still have the tape, but haven't watched it in years. Someday I should have it transferred to DVD.
The company I worked for was holding a user association meeting at a hotel near the San Francisco Airport. A fellow employee was giving a talk in the hotel ballroom when the quake hit. The shaking caused a big chandelier to fall to the floor (fortunately, it didn't hit anyone). Some of our customers said they'd never come back to San Francisco again.
To fill in some details on the disaster: the San Francisco city government had allocated funds to reinforce Candlestick Park, and the work was completed only a couple of years prior to the quake. If this hadn't happened, the scene at the ballpark would have been a lot worse.
I'm not sure you could tell from the video, but the Cypress structure was a double-decker elevated freeway. It was the first elevated freeway ever built in California. When it collapsed, the upper deck fell onto the lower deck, crushing the cars below and killing many. One thing that was under-reported was that people who lived in that neighborhood climbed onto the collapsed freeway to rescue whoever they could. This was very dangerous, as I'm sure they knew. They were heroes, and no one today knows their names.
Others have mentioned, but I'll say it, too: the World Series saved lives, because a lot of people had already gone home to watch it when the quake happened. The Cypress structure was usually jammed with cars at that hour, but that day the traffic wasn't so heavy.
BTW, it was called the Cypress structure because it followed the same path as Cypress Street in Oakland. The freeway was rebuilt along a different route (not double-decker this time), and Cypress Street was renamed Nelson Mandela Parkway.
The morning after the quake, Dave Stewart (the A's pitcher who was slated to start game 3) went to the Cypress structure and handed out doughnuts and coffee to rescue workers.
There was talk of cancelling the rest of the World Series, and also of moving it to some neutral site. They did neither. Game 3 was played on October 27, only ten days after the quake. This was a good thing for everyone in the Bay Area. We needed something positive to happen after 10 days of fear and worry. It's because of this that I understood how important the 2001 World Series was to the people of New York (and, yes, I know that 9/11 was a worse disaster than the Loma Prieta Earthquake).
BTW, it's notable that both teams are from the Bay Area. San Francisco and Oakland are on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay.
The worst fires happened in the Marina District of San Francisco. This is a pretty rich neighborhood, but the soil there isn't stable. Many houses were knocked off their foundations, which broke a lot of gas lines, making the fires much worse than they'd have been otherwise.
The Bay Bridge is actually two bridges that meet at Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. It was the eastern span, between Oakland and Yerba Buena, that broke. That span was a cantilever bridge, and it's been replaced with a suspension bridge.
There was a lot of damage outside the central Bay Area that didn't get much national or international attention. The town of Watsonville was particularly hard hit. Most people care a lot more about a famous city like San Francisco than about an obscure farming community.
That was really interesting; thank you for posting it.
I was living in San Jose at the time (closer to the epicenter). I remember it well. Just settling in to watch the World Series. Felt it here first. My parrot flew to me freaked out. My kids were very small 3 year old and 1 year old. The 3 year old was worried about the TV which came crashing to the ground - not realizing they can be replaced. The local gas station had its roof over the pumps collapse. My house had no damage. We gathered with neighbors in our driveway. My neighbor was to scared to be inside. Took my husband hours to get home from work. We bought a little TV for the kitchen so I could watch the news and not expose the kiddos to too much trauma. It was like nothing you can imagine but actually for me it was over in a matter or seconds. It is interesting to watch you experience these videos. Thanks
React to games 3, 4, and 5 of the world series!!
bruh and I live here. California is a ticking time bomb that is always on fire.
Yeah, it sucked almost being crushed by toppling shelves in the library. And then getting out only to have the huge glass windows explode outward from the aftershocks. I still have a 2-inch scar from being tossed 3 feet into a concrete pillar by the first big shake. I'm still only 4 miles from the epicenter. SF and Oakland were 70 miles from the epicenter.
Remember, there were no cell phones, internet, or social media in 1989. It was so chaotic.
At least for me, the first sense of a quake is a feeling like you're in an elevator (lift) that drops unexpectedly, and then come the jolt that rattles everything about you. Most of the time, that first jolt or two is all you'll get, kind of like an "earth burp" and then things are back to normal. With Loma Prieta, the first jolt was really big (like a car running hard over a bump), and the succeeding jolts just kept coming and didn't stop for almost a minute. All you can do is get under a doorway and hope your house doesn't fall down (some bookcases did fall, and our fig tree in the front yard whipped back and forth as if it was caught in a windstorm). I was about to watch the game, and the power went out as the first temblor hit, so I could only get news on the radio for the next several hours.
The Marina district in San Francisco has a lot of buildings dating back to the 1920s, usually with unsupported walls on the ground floor for garages. Add to this the fact that the Marina is built on sandy landfill that turns to watery mush in a quake, and these buildings partly or completely collapsed to their foundations.
One thing is that it was VERY fortunate that the baseball world series that year was being played between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics (Oakland is adjacent to that.) Precisely BECAUSE of that a lot of businesses closed early, to let people go home so they could see the game. On a normal work day that bridge would have much more crowded and likely many more deaths, particularly on the bottom deck.
I was working in SF when the earthquake happened. A co-worker drove me home in the evening. Going through SF streets to Hayward Bridge to cross over to the Bay Area was something I will never forget. One thing I would say is SF people came together to help everyone and helped with the traffic so there would be no car accidents. My daughter was playing volleyball in the gym at St. Elizabeth High School and when the building started to shake she ran out with the rest of the students. It took a very long time get a new bridge built.
I was in this Quake, I was 12 years old, I lived with My Dad at the time, He was stationed on Treasure Island(Which is a 10 min drive from downtown San Francisco, off of the Bay Bridge), Luckily he was out for surgery that day, or he would have been on the Bay Bridge. It was like Riding a rollercoaster, I literally saw the ground doing the wave, I moved in with my mom in Seattle after this quake, and haven't went back to California.
We had to park at NAS, then ride MWB's to TI and then to the SF south piers where our ship tied up to make water for the city.
There is a dirt road out in the central valley where you not only cross over the fault line but drive inside of it.
Tectonic plates are in constant motion, so California gets earthquakes on a fairly regular basis. Most of them, however, just cause you to feel a little bit of shaking, if that. An earthquake this strong in San Francisco comes maybe once every 30 years, and buildings in San Francisco are required by law to conform to building codes which reduce risk for people inside in case of an earthquake.
But no, this is not even the worst earthquake in San Francisco's recorded history (that would be 1906), never mind the entire United States. They can be a lot more destructive than that.
Moreover, you can't predict when an earthquake is about to happen. To do that, we would have to be able to see exactly when tectonic plates would shift, which we don't know how to do. You can only say which places are more likely to be at risk.
Each number on the Richter scale, which measures earthquake shaking, represents a 10-fold increase in the strength of the quake: 2 is ten times stronger than 1, 3 ten times stronger than 2, etc.
It generally takes to about a 3 where you may start to feel the shakes. 5 is a fairly strong earthquake. The Loma Prieta was around a 6.9, which (as you see) will definitely cause structures to collapse and people to get hurt and die.
But for context and perspective, the earthquake that hit northeastern Japan in 2011 as well as the 2004 Sumatra earthquake that caused the tsunami was about a 9. You've seen how much damage a 6.9 can do. Imagine an earthquake more than 100 times stronger than that.
I've lived in California all my life, and at this point it's just kind of an interesting thing that "shakes up the monotony" every once in awhile...lol
Currently I live in NorCal, and I'm between Mt Shasta and Mt Lassen.....I feel a few weak earthquakes a month here (maybe 0.5 to 1.5 on the Richter scale), but then again it's just kind of an interesting thing that makes me stop and go "huh."
In an earthquake, you try to find the sturdiest spot like the doorway, near support beams, away from gas, water pipes, and glass, also anything that could fall on you. No Warnings. Alaska Fairbanks earthquake was really bad too. Aftershocks can be very dangerous. This happens in just a few seconds, like 30 sec's or something.
Americans are proud but we help each other, we come together when we need to.
OMG!!! Recently started watching your channel (subscribed after watching just one) and saw this one and had to watch it. Brought back lots and lots of memories.
I was at work in Oakland, anxious to leave so as to catch the 3rd game of the series, when the quake hit.
Since quakes are so random, everyone goes through safety drills so you know what to do when one hits. You asked if there are any "good" places to be/go when it happens. Inside, get away from windows and stand in a doorway. One of most supported area in a house/building. If can't get to a door, get as much of your body under a sturdy desk or table and cover your head.
I was on the 16th floor of my building when it hit. Seemed to last forever. We had a large floor plan and a couple of folks couldn't make it to a safe place. Luckily it happened when most people had left work early to go to or watch the series on TV.
We had no electricity and had to evacuate down 16 flights of stairs. During the quake the stairways became detached from their wall supports and were swaying during the aftershocks. Women in heels couldn't remove their shoes because of all the debris falling from the walls and ceilings. My car was in the building's garage so I had no way to get home. The cars were taken up to the garage area by elevator. No electricity, no way to get your car.
I was lucky to get into the last taxi at the taxi stand with 4 other random folks. The taxi was stopped by a citizen directing traffic at the cypress double deck freeway. From our vantage point it looked intact. After what seemed like hours, he let us go and as we approached the Cypress, it was collapsed on both sides of the street. In retrospect, going under the still standing section could have killed us, if it too collapsed.
But for the World Series, there would have been bumper to number traffic on both the Cypress freeway and Bay Bridge as it was scheduled during or usual rush hours. Hundreds might have been killed or injured. Another miracle that day was when they discovered a boy trapped in a car between the decks of the Cypress. I was lucky that I still had electricity at my house in Oakland. We watched as a safety team and doctors extracted the child. Unfortunately they had to amputate a portion of his leg to get him out. That team was amazing.
The fires in SF were caused when the gas mains broke. Water heaters had gas pilot lights that caused the gas to blow up.
Damage would have been much worse if the newer buildings hadn't been built with earthquakes in mind. The older brick buildings totally collapsed. Other buildings collapsed into themselves. My office building was built to sway when the earth moved. The top floor of my building tipped towards the building across the street and just when it felt it would topple, it reversed direction, like a pendulum. The worst place to be was outside on the street near Highrisers. The windows in many cases popped out of their frames and were designed to pop outward, not inward. But for the amazing architecture, the damage would have been in the multi-billions and loss of life much higher.
Of note, the Oakland A's won the series in 4 games. 7 games are scheduled, best 4 out of 7 wins. Game 2 was played on October 16, Game 3 cancelled because of the quake and was later played on October 27. Final game was October 28. My team ended up as the winners.
It was one of the top 3 worst days of my life.
I recall this earthquake. I was only 5 years old, but I recall being terrified at the time.
We had just been at a museum, and were down by San Jose when the earthquake struck. One thing I remember is my grandpa driving us slowly through a neighborhood in an effort to get back to my grandparents home in Aptos. I was looking out the back window of the 1987 BMW 325i sedan my grandparents owned. There were cracks along the residential roads, and there were ruptured gas lines. Flames were erupting from the cracks in the road.
It was dusk by this time, and I remember just tons of smoke from countless fires.
Weather can be crazy. Here in Minnesota last week we had temperature fluctuations of 30 degrees and one day I got 6” of snow, a hail storm, and a thunder storm...all in one day.
Also a suggestion, the Hwy 35W bridge collapse in Minnesota. I believe it was the largest in the US.
At minimum, it was one of the most recorded. The video is scary to watch.
I lived in San Francisco during this time and was in kindergarten. I'm 37 now but still remember everything vividly and it's still one of the craziest things I ever experienced. I was lucky enough to be outside at the time but it was so violent it tossed me to the ground. BTW, one of the best places to be during an earthquake is under a door because the door frame is strong. That's at least what I was told when I lived there at the time. Things may have changed.
My parents and sisters lived in the Bay Area at the time. I was working on an assignment in Virginia. I was able to call them from Virginia to hear how they were doing, but they couldn't call each other.
The New Madrid, Missouri earthquake in 1811 was so powerful, it changed the course of the Mississippi River, and made church bells ring as far away as Baltimore, almost half way across the country.
We forget that there are fault lines that run through other parts of the country.
I remember this quake. I was 11 when it hit. My family and I had just come home from my school’s carnival fundraiser. The tv was on one of the local channels which we expected would have the 1989 World Series on. Instead we walked in to live special reporting by the national broadcaster of the earthquake. As my family has family in Northern California, my dad immediately went to call his parents who lived in a nearby small town here in Oklahoma to inquire if they had heard what had happened in San Francisco and if they had heard from any of our family in Modesto, Turlock, Stockton, or Oakland. They had heard about it, but couldn’t get through to any of the family members living in northern or southern California. I remember my sister and I just watching the news reports and seeing the images. The most vivid thing I remember is the collapsed highway because I remember as a kid looking at it and thinking it was like an elevated highway here in Oklahoma in one of our big cities. When I found out via the news reports that it was a double decked/multi-story highway with the different directions in traffic being on each section and that the upper section had collapsed on to the lower section I was horrified!! Thankfully before we went to bed that evening one of our great aunts called to let us know everyone there was okay, just had property to damages to their homes snd businesses. The only other times I’ve ever felt that anxious in my life and had it linger for soooo long is the 1995 OKC Murrah Bombing and 9-11-2001. When the Murrah bombing happened here in Oklahoma, it was after Easter and during a time of the year where lots of student organizations have their state conventions in Oklahoma City. Many of my classmates were expected to be downtown and when news first broke it was thought that it was just a gas main explosion....until we saw the video images come in from the news. Suddenly we knew it was something much bigger! But then I remember the rest of the day we took turns with different folks to go to the A/V room to watch the tv news coverage while teachers were busy trying to reach the locations our classmates from the different student organizations were supposed to be at to find out if they were safe. Just the week prior I myself had been in OKC downtown just blocks away at one of my student organization’s state convention. Indeed, I was supposed to go with another student organization that day, but I had had to cancel because I had a doctor’s appointment that morning and was going to be late to school. Eventually the bus drivers and faculty advisors were able to contact the school to let it be known they were fine and that they had hadn’t made it downtown when the explosion occurred, but were actually still several miles from the site. They had trouble because at first they didn’t know what had even happened, only that downtown was off limits. They saw smoke and just thought it was a fire in the distance. They had to get turned around and then find a place to go to. Then once the found a spot, the phone lines were busy. With 9/11, my cousin actually worked in the Pentagon. It had been her new assignment from earlier that year. When I learned that a plane had hit the Pentagon, I called my parents to let them know (they were at work; I was off work that day and had no classes at the college on that day of the week). When they grounded planes, I was able to reach a friend that’s a pilot to learn if he was okay...which he was, though he hadn’t heard about everything that had happened yet. It was really late that night when my cousin called us to let us know she was okay, but shaken up. She had actually been across the street in the parking lot of another facility getting ready to leave that facility to head over to her office when the plane hit. Otherwise thankfully as technology has improved I get to learn that family and friends throughout the world are safe via social media on all our smart phones. Definitely haven’t had that level of anxiety in a long while now!!!!
BTW: I find it oddly coincidental that I should be watching and writing this while I’m currently sitting in an ice-storm warning until Wednesday of this week (I often joke that my state doesn’t get pretty winters with lovely snow, we get freezing rain and ice storms that look almost as pretty as snow, but deadlier since it’s really slick and heavy accumulation on power lines and tree limbs near power lines often cuts the power to everything).
Another event you might want to react to is the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire. I haven't checked to see what videos there are on this, but I'm sure you can find something.
We were in the 'yards in China Basin. We watched the fires from the main deck, the ash came down like snow on the SF side of the bay. I had to drive up 80 past Berkeley to get to Concord NWS (24 was closed), thick smoke like SF fog, massive fires with flames maybe 50 feet high along the freeway, it was insane!
I grew up in central California. I was living outside Modesto when this earthquake hit. I was about 15 at the time. As children, we had earthquake drills, and every family I knew had a plan for where to go during one. For us, it was under our heavy, oak dining table. I remember crouching there, alone. I watched the reflection in the window of the chandelier swinging wildly over the table that I hid under.
I’m in So. Cal. and remember this. That freeway that fell was a double-decker. The traffic on the top level went one direction and the lower level went the other direction. It’s hard to see, but the top level pancaked down on top of the lower level and flattened cars. Some people survived.
I lived in Millbrae (near San Francisco International Airport) during the quake. Our house was fine, but the house at the top of our cul-de-sac fell sideways off its foundation. There was an amazing rescue of a little boy who was trapped in his car (parents both dead). They had to bring in a volunteer surgeon to amputate one of his legs that had been pinned by rebar and concrete. The kid survived. There was also the rescue several days later of a man who had been pinned in his car, they found him just in the nick of time.
Checking in again from Dallas. Keep it up buddy!
FYI cellphone towers could easily be knocked out in an earthquake (those in quake prone areas need to have a hand crank powered or battery powered radio with a stockpile of batteries to get info following a quake).
My cousin worked at SFO for one of the airlines. She was driving home when it happened and usually took the Bay Bridge to her home in Walnut Creek. She usually would have been on the bridge at that time, but was running a bit late leaving work. Fortunately she just was approaching the bridge and the traffic was stopped. She said it took her four hours to get off the freeway and then go south to the Dumbarton Bridge (which was packed). I was in Fresno and didn't feel the quake since I was driving at the time. Pretty wild - I avoided going the San Francisco for quite a while after that just to give them time to fix the bridges and highways.
I am from SF and I was there when this happened. I had just turned 19 5 days before. It hit at 5:04 PM. The phones were all jammed and my parents thought I might be dead. My Dad got through to someone on ham radio who eventually found out i was alive. We were told we had to stay out of our buildings all night because the asbestos had fallen (I was in college on campus at SFSU at the time). Everything was on fire and the freeway offramp (Fell Steet) where I lived was decimated. I was in a creative writng class on campus when it hit and we all just dove under our desks. We thought it was kind of fun at first but it kept going and watching this brings it all back.
That was a double decker freeway... the entire top half collapsed onto lower deck traffic.
Yep, that was my way home when I was stationed there. We were at sea at the time, very lucky for myself and many other sailors who lived in housing in the north bay.
We were in NC excited to watch the game when the feed went out. I was confused and my fiancé said in his announcer -type voice, “It’s an earthquake.” It took me awhile to catch onto that reality. Surreal experience!
My uncle had just driven down 880 about 20 min before... that was his route to and from work every day. I was 5 years old at the time and we felt it about 2 hours south of S.F. Our town was just a couple miles off the fault line.
Long post warning:
You got Loma Prieta pronounced right. It's local to me. Loma Prieta well south of San Franciso; I'm in Silicon Valley 50 miles south, and the epicenter at the Forest of Nisene Marks is another 10-15 miles south of where I am. I was at work when it hit.
Trust me; watching a vid on a quake is NOTHING like living through it. How do you deal with it? You buck up, get a stiff upper lip, flex whatever muscles you have, and live with it. Been there. Literally
That opening shot is a University of Santa Cruz, about 3-4 miles from epicenter. When one hits, get under a table or desk, or in a doorway and hang onto the door jamb.
Earthquakes are NOT predictable.
Company I worked at at the time, a semiconductor company in San Jose, had some engineers visiting from their southeast US design center (Mississippi, I believe), and when we talked in the parking lot after evacuating, one of them told us that his boss had been trying to convince him to move from Mississippi to California. He told us, "Uh, no way. At least with hurricanes and tornados, you get advance warning." I was on 2nd floor of a 2 story open floor tiltup; the floors were slabs suspended from equal spaced pillars through the building. It was like riding a trampoline. I was in the aisle between cubicles and I grabbed on to the walls either side of me and rode it out. I do remember the plate glass windows that surrounded us bowing in and out in waves, like ripples in a lake. And things like the rings around fire sprinkler heads in the ceiling falling and bouncing off desks.
The Cypress structure, was a double-decker structure. Just so you know, the reason the death toll wasn't as bad as it could have been because game 3 of baseball's World Series was just starting, so a lot of people were either at the baseball game, or, if not working, were at home watching the game. If the baseball game hadn't been on, the death toll would have been a lot worse, because it hit at 5;04pm, right at the peak of rush hour.
The 3rd game of the series took place about a week later, at the Oakland Coliseum, as of the 2 stadiums, it's the one that suffered the least damage from the quake.
Minor trivia note: The department i worked in at my company, I maintained the laser printer used by our department in my cubicle. I even had a vertical file set up on my lateral file cabinet to put other folks' print jobs, so they could just pick them up. But we'd had an issue with people not replacing toner when it got low, or not refilling the paper tray, so I wrote a memo earlier that day about being responsible for any supplies you used up for the printer. Sent copies to everyone else in the group, and taped a copy to a shelf above the printer.
One of my good buddies told me, when he looked at the memo the next day, mentioned that only then did he notice the date of my memo (October 19, 1989, time approx 3:00 PM, 2 hrs before the quake). Said to me, "YOU caused the quake!"
Yes, a morbid sense of humor helps in situations like this.
About 15 minutes before it happened, my two cats yowled loudly, bashed a hole in my screen door, and disappeared.This was my FIRST quake after moving to California and I was living just a few miles south of the epicenter when it happened. I drove (I shouldn't have but didn't know any better at the time.) to my boyfriend's parents' house and the aftershocks felt like I was in a boat with large waves passing underneath. My boyfriend had recently left to perform in a play in Arizona and it was 3 days before he could get a call through to find out if we were ok.
I’ve found that animals can predict things that humans just really can’t. That’s why there is a phenomenon called “Calm before the storm.” A few animals like Weather Loaches can predict storms days ahead of time which is amazing.
Earthquakes strike without warning and are over quickly. I lived in SF during that time, and there were minor EQs a couple of times a year. The earthquake and volcano zones run all the way down the Pacific coast in North and South America, and also in the Caribbean. Modern structures are built to withstand them, especially in the US, Canada, and Chile. They tie the whole structure together with lots of steel or plywood to add stiffness. The SF earthquake and fire of 1906 leveled the city. This one was minor in comparison due to the lessons learned and the weaker strength of the quake. There have been massive quakes in the last few decades in Mexico City and Chile. Whole tall buildings have toppled over in one piece. A quake provides quite an adrenaline rush and shakes you to your core!