Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [78]
“Major earthquake in San Francisco!” she proclaimed, breathlessly.
At 5:04 p.m. Pacific time, during the warm-up for a baseball game in Candlestick Park, a segment of the San Andreas fault broke near the coast deep under a mountain called Loma Prieta, about nine miles (15 km) northeast of the seaside resort of Santa Cruz. For about fifteen seconds the ground shook violently. The crowd in Candlestick Park knew immediately what it was and started moving toward the exits, their barely suppressed panic captured live on network television.
It was game three of the World Series, featuring, ironically, two local teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. The first major California temblor covered live on television became known briefly as the World Series quake; geologists would later officially name it the Loma Prieta earthquake. When contact with San Francisco was reestablished, the pictures were disturbing.
Freeways and bridges had collapsed, killing dozens of people. Because the quake happened at rush hour, a traffic helicopter was already in the air and over the water with its camera rolling when a car drifted helplessly in what looked like slow motion over the edge of a fifty-foot (15 m) section of the double-decker Bay Bridge that had dropped like a trap door onto the span below. Because two local teams were playing in the Series, thousands of people had either gone to the stadium or stayed downtown after work to watch the game in bars with friends. As a result, rush hour traffic was lighter than normal. The death toll could have been much higher.
In Oakland things were worse. A mile-long (1.6 km) section of the Nimitz Freeway—built on former marshland—collapsed, crushing cars on the lower level, instantly killing forty-two people and injuring many more. Some cars on the upper deck were tossed around and flipped; others were left dangling over the side as the freeway bucked and twisted during the temblor. Nearby residents and factory workers rushed onto the bridge with ladders, tools, and forklifts and began digging survivors from the rubble. The volunteer rescuers were at it round the clock for the next four days. It would take eleven years to rebuild the freeway.
High-priced houses and condos built on landfill in San Francisco’s upscale Marina District shifted on their liquefied foundations. Seven buildings collapsed outright, another sixty-three were damaged beyond repair. Water and gas mains broke, creating hellacious fires. The Embarcadero Freeway, another two-level roadway, was damaged and would have to be torn down. Golden Gate Bridge survived but would need a $75 million retrofit. A six-block stretch of downtown Santa Cruz’s historic business district was reduced to rubble.
At magnitude 7.1 this was the largest and most damaging rupture on the San Andreas since 1906. All told, 63 people died that night, 3,757 were injured, and more than 38,000 needed emergency housing. The damage toll topped $6 billion. Once again the world’s attention was focused on California’s most famous fault.
Meantime, although hardly anyone paid them heed, a small squad of quake hunters continued digging in the mud and turning over rocks from Cape Mendocino to Vancouver Island. While San Andreas dominated the headlines, Cascadia’s smoking gun—final convincing evidence of a much larger quake—would soon be found. Quietly and with little fanfare. In tight little rings of western red cedar, in the voices of Native elders who told of a dark and violent night many generations ago, and in sacks of rice destroyed in a shogun’s warehouse on the far side of the Pacific.
CHAPTER 14
Digital Water: Catching Waves in a Computer
On a mild spring morning just before lunch, with plenty of California sunshine and a respectable crowd lining the main drag to watch, several normally docile horses spooked as a parade ended. At first the marshals thought it was just flags snapping in the breeze that set them off, but it was more than that. They reined their mounts. A heartbeat later the humans felt it