Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989

On the 17th of October, 1989, game three of the World Series of what would become known as the Battle of the Bay was about to go down in one of the greatest freeway series in baseball history. With the Oakland As leading two games to known, Al Michaels and Tim McCarver reported live from Candlestick Park, as the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were just minutes away from game time.

When did Loma Prieta Earthquake Strike?

At 5:04 P.M. on October 17th, 1989, with live cameras rolling on the field, a whopping 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked the Bay Area with devastating consequences.

The earthquake’s epicenter was near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains—60 miles south of San Francisco—67 people would lose their lives over the next 15 seconds, injuring more than 3,000 others in one of the largest quakes in Bay Area history.

Liquefaction in San Francisco

Built on reclaimed marshland for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco’s Marina district suffered some of the worse damage in the city. Known as liquefaction, the loosely-packed and water-logged soil shifted beneath buildings, sparking structural failures and ruptured gas line fires in homes built after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that destroyed nearly 500 city blocks.

Scheduled for an earthquake retrofit later the next week, one person was killed when a single span of the upper deck collapsed on the Bay Bridge, but the worst damage was reserved for a one and a quarter-mile segment of the Cypress Street Viaduct along Interstate 880, which pancaked onto the lower deck, taking the lives of 42 victims in a grizzly moment of engineering catastrophe.

Worst-Hit Watsonville

One of the worst hard-hit areas was the agricultural community of Watsonville, just miles from the quake’s epicenter, where more than one in eight homes were destroyed, at the same time leveling 30 percent of Watsonville’s downtown district and forcing hundreds of jittery residents into massive tent cities during the 20 aftershocks that followed over the next seven days.

Of the estimated $5 billion dollars in damages—more than $11 billion in today’s currency—after the dust settled on the big quake, San Francisco and other communities enacted strict retrofitting laws on all unreinforced masonry buildings in the quake-prone region, making the Loma Prieta earthquake, a massive game-changer in the history of San Francisco.