EARTHQUAKE!

While at Monterey at the Defense Language Institute, we had an interesting occurance. I was sitting in my family room watching t.v. after work. i then thought that a military tank was coming down the road. i soon found that is was much worse. Before long, I was grabbing pictures coming off the wall and yelling for my family. The following is my edited version of the Wickepedia story on the earthquake. i thought it was interesting. All i know is i spent hours in lines trying to get supplies for my family. i even fought a guy for diapers for amber.

The Quake of '89 or the World Series Quake, was a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. The earthquake caused major damage as far away as the Marina District in San Francisco, 95 km (60 miles) away from the epicenter. It caused severe damage throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, most notably in San Francisco and Oakland, but also in many other communities throughout the region, including Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Benito County, Santa Cruz, and Monterey Counties. Major property damage that occurred in the areas more distant from the epicenter resulted from liquefaction of soil used to fill waterfront properties. Other effects included sand volcanoes, landslides, and ground ruptures.

Caused by a slip along the San Andreas Fault, the earthquake lasted approximately 15 seconds and measured 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale. The quake killed 67 people throughout northern California, injured 3,757 people and left more than 12,000 people homeless. This was the first major earthquake in America to be broadcast on live television.

Much of the damage and most of the fatalities occurred in the San Francisco/Oakland area.

67 deaths were directly caused by the earthquake, but six further deaths were ruled to be caused indirectly. In addition, there were 3,757 injuries as a result of the earthquake. The highest concentration of fatalities, 42 occurred in the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct on the Nimitz Freeway, where a double-decker portion of the freeway collapsed, crushing the cars on the lower deck.


One 50-foot (15 m) section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge also collapsed, causing two cars to fall to the deck below, leading to the single fatality on the bridge. When the earthquake hit, the 1989 World Series baseball championship was just starting and many people had left work early or were staying late to participate in after-work group viewings and parties.

18,306 homes and 2,575 businesses were damaged. In the area close to the epicentre, 40 buildings collapsed in Santa Cruz (killing at least six people). Given the distance between the quake's epicenter and the Bay Area, geologists were surprised at the severity of the resulting damage.

The quake caused an estimated $6 billion in property damage, becoming the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history at the time. It was the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas Fault since the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Private donations poured in to aid relief efforts and on October 26, President George H.W. Bush signed a $3.45 billion earthquake relief package for California.

Car crushed by the third floor of a collapsed apartment building. In San Francisco's Marina District, several apartment buildings and other multi-story homes were damaged heavily. Because the land the Marina neighborhood sat on was filled land, the earthquake's shockwaves rippled the ground with more severity. The mixture of sand, dirt, rubble, and other materials used to make up the artificial ground contained a high percentage of groundwater which resulted earthquake liquefaction. Multi-story buildings shook violently and many that had inadequately reinforced garages on the first floor experienced their heavy upper stories falling onto that floor. In some instances, only the top floor was left intact, having spilled into the road, crushing parked cars, trees, and light poles.

At the intersection of San Francisco's Beach and Divisadero Streets, there was a major structure fire, due to a gas main rupture. Bystanders were selected by the fire department to help run fire hoses from a distance because the nearby hydrant system failed. Water from the bay was shot at the burning buildings by fireboats similar to those used to put out fires caused by the 1906 earthquake. In collapsed buildings that did not catch fire, rescue teams searched the fallen buildings thoroughly, pulling out various survivors from underneath splintered wood and other debris. Most of the apartment structures that collapsed were corner units, with garage doors lined up on the exposed corners. Not originally part of the buildings, the garage doors that were installed quite some time after the buildings' initial construction weakened the first-story walls, causing the stiff, wood-frame buildings to buckle, crack, and crash into the streets. There were about five deaths that occurred from Marina District apartment fires and collapses. One family lost their baby boy who was trapped underneath their collapsed apartment.

Santa Cruz's historic Pacific Garden Mall suffered severe damage in the quake. Deaths in downtown Santa Cruz occurred when brick storefronts and sidewalls in the historic downtown (what was then called the Pacific Garden Mall) tumbled down on people exiting the buildings. There was significant structural damage to beachfront villas of Capitola Village, when the fireplaces and end-walls of a landmark row-style hotel collapsed onto the sidewalks. The quake claimed a number of lives in Watsonville. Many older wooden structures were knocked off of their foundations and collapsed. Many residents were displaced from their homes. The earthquake also destroyed several buildings in the Old Town district of Salinas. In Monterey, windows were shattered in many homes and businesses and several historical structures were damaged.

In Santa Cruz, the Pacific Garden Mall was irreparably damaged, with falling debris killing three people. When the earthquake struck, the brick facades of the historic buildings poured into the streets, while buildings self-destructed by slamming against one another in reaction to the lengthy temblor. During the first several days, the power was out and some areas had no water. The historic streets all over coastal Santa Cruz county were filled with debris, rescue workers, and concerned evacuees. Modern downtown Santa Cruz was effectively rebuilt from scratch, much as San Francisco was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge suffered relatively minor damage, as a 50-foot (15 meter) section of the upper deck on the eastern side crashed onto the deck below. The quake caused the Oakland side of the bridge to shift 18 centimeters (7 inches) to the east, and caused the bolts of one section to shear off, sending the small part of the roadbed crashing down like a trapdoor. When that part of the bridge collapsed, a few upper deck motorists drove into the hole but landed safely on the lower deck. Traffic on both decks came to a halt, blocked by the section of roadbed. Police began unsnarling the traffic jam, telling drivers to turn their cars around and drive back the way they had come. Eastbound drivers stuck on the lower deck between the collapse and Yerba Buena Island were routed up to the upper deck and westward back to San Francisco. A miscommunication made by police at Yerba Buena Island directed some of the drivers in the wrong direction; they were directed to the upper deck driving east toward the collapse site. One of the drivers didn't see the gap in time; the car plunged over the ledge and smashed onto the collapsed roadbed. The driver died and the passenger was seriously injured. On November 18, the collapsed section was removed and replaced, and the bridge was re-opened.

The worst disaster of the earthquake was the collapse of the Cypress Viaduct in West Oakland. 40 people died and many more were injured. Built in the late 1950s, the Cypress Viaduct (a small stretch of the I-880 Nimitz Freeway) was a double-decker freeway system that was relatively innovative when it was first constructed. Because little attention had been paid to strengthening it in case of a major earthquake, the freeway was changed very little from when it was built. Like the Marina District, the land the Cypress Viaduct was built on was simply filled marshland. When the earthquake hit, the shaking was amplified in those areas, causing more damage than would have normally occurred if the land were bedrock.

With the combination of outdated earthquake standards and unstable ground, the freeway buckled and twisted to its limits before the support columns failed and sent the upper deck crashing to the lower deck. In an instant, over forty people were crushed in their cars. Cars on the upper deck were tossed around violently, some of them flipped sideways and some of them dangling at the edge of the highway. Appearing as though a "bomb had been exploded on the structure," the gigantic freeway was in ruins, with chunks of concrete in the streets below, steel rebar twisting out, and thick smoke coming out from in between the pancaked roadbeds. Nearby residents and factory workers came to the rescue, climbing onto the wreckage and pulling trapped people out of their mangled cars from under a four-foot gap in some sections. Employees from Pacific Pipe (a now-shuttered factory adjoining the freeway) drove heavy lift equipment to the scene and started using it to raise sections of fallen freeway enough to allow further rescue. Hard-hatted factory workers continued their volunteer operation without stopping night and day until October 21, 1989 when they were forced to halt as President George H. W. Bush and Governor George Deukmejian viewed the damage.