My mom almost left work early in SF to get home to the East Bay to try and catch the game. She decided at the last minute to wait until her boss was out of a meeting. She was ultimately extremely glad she didn't as it would have likely put her on the Cypress St. Viaduct at the time the quake hit. My friend's dad was at work in a warehouse very close to the viaduct and said it sounded (and felt) like a train crashing into the building.
I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life. Those of us who grew up in California think nothing of most earthquakes. The '89 quake was the only one where I actually thought, wow, this is a big quake! and got under my desk at work. I was working near the top floor of a downtown high-rise and that building was swaying! The most famous victim of the quake was Buck Helm, who survived for days under the rubble of the freeway while people worked feverishly to free him. It was all over the news. He was finally rescued, only to die about a month later as a result of his injuries. It was heartbreaking.
Born & raised in the Bay Area, but I still become nervous when the ground begins to jiggle or bump-diddy-bump or sway (those are the worst imho.. they're so unsettling). I remember the 89 quake _very_ well, my most clear memory.. my dad was in the living room in our 2nd floor apartment. I was walking down our hallway, that's when it hit. Our downstairs neighbor Fritz was 90 or 92.. very old. I checked on her after & she was actually chuckling about it. Another neighbor was coming from the direction of the carport, and she told us she had been on the freeway heading home & began noticing cars pulling into the shoulder; other vehicles up ahead and those on the shoulder were all bouncing side to side, up & down. _Every_ quake we have in this area (we've relocated east of the area towards Stockton now) puts me on edge.. I freeze like a deer in headlights. Not sure why, but they are scary af imho.
The fact that they built a double-decker like that without thinking "what if collapses and literally squishes people underneath? That's a bad look and utterly horrific" boggles my mind.
My mother said she never used the Cypress Structure, because she never liked it. My father said you could feel that thing moving as you drove on it. He discovered that feeling years before the quake happened.
I remember getting ready to watch the World Series when the cameras started shaking and Al Micheals was like we're having an earthquake. I remember watching the rescues and praying for those trapped.
my mom was barely alive when this happened but i’ve seen recordings of the broadcast and idk how people just shrug earthquakes off. it might just be because i’m from a place where the largest earthquake ever recorded was 4.5 but i’d shit myself if i felt an earthquake large enough to feel, let alone large enough to collapse a bridge thought to be earthquake proof
@@misseselise3864 Same here. I'm in Canada and I remember (circa '84) a "tremor" in the Great Lakes area. A desk lamp on my work bench swayed enough for me look around to see who was dicking with me, but no one was there. Later I heard from a co-worker who lived on the 18th floor had water sloshed out of his aquarium. Pales by comparison, though it's weird that 33yrs later and 1000s of miles away, I can trace exactly where I was standing the minute the '89 quake hit San Fran. (see my post above ) 😉
@CraftAero That's great. We were all at my grandparents' house watching it. We lived and still live nowhere near San Francisco. A girl across the street was there when it happened. I really don't remember what she said but everything was fine. I was thinking that it was a great time to be recording video. My grandfather said "Well, I guess that's over now".
I was living in Union City when this happened. I was at my job in a liquor store, and when it hit, a lot of liquor bottles started falling off shelves. I ran straight out the front door! and was safe thank God 🙂
I'm from West Oakland 24th and Filbert. We were in the Cypress projects helping friends move. It was the loudest thing ever. With the freeway falling and as it being rt after closing time many of the alarms in the factories were blairing too. I could go on for ever...
I was 9 living in East Oakland during this earthquake. I remember being outside in the street, playing with my brother, when all of a sudden we see the street become like a liquid, undulating in huge waves. It was surreal and scary.
I was working in Palo Alto that day; I'd just left work and was sitting down at a bus stop when the bench came up and hit my ass, knocking me to the sidewalk. I watched in awe as waves rippled down the asphalt of Hanover Street...
I remember it feeling like the ground was waves of water. Most ppl, not from the Bay Area, look at me weird when I say that, as if I'm being dramatic or something... but it's true. Glad I'm not the only one. lol
Same for me, I was 13 in east side san jose, playing catch with my kid brother. And saw the street roll like waves....cars were bouncing and windows undulating in and out, thought they might break, but luckily none did.
I remember that quake. I was in 7th grade in Morgan Hill (South of San Jose). The shaking was so intense! Practically everyone in my town, and ALL of my neighborhood lost their chimneys that day. Ours fell through into our attic. I looked out the front door when everything was shaking and saw the street moving like it was a soft wave rolling
Yes! This is my most clear memory of the quake: looking out my Grandma's door and telling her the road looked like the ocean. I was 3 and we had just pulled up to her house in Alameda to watch the World Series.
It was a frightening experience that I would never forget, 😢especially for someone who has barely living in San Francisco after living in the “concrete jungle” known as Hong Kong for most of my existence back then. I was living near Ocean Beach alongside my aunt’s family back then when it happened, I was terrified and petrified by what was felt around me and my family, and I couldn’t stop crying all night and into the next day or two whenever an aftershock struck.
Yeah, I'm disappointed in the errors he keeps making in videos. It's pretty basic, but the bay Bridge is TWO bridges and the reasons the Nimitz collapsed is the same reason it was the Oakland span: no bedrock.
And horrifying situations on that bridge also. I was in my living room watching the game when the quake hit. It shook apart the old fireplace and chimney, brick by brick. I now live in another earthquake area, but there has never been anything as scary as the Loma Prieta. Not included in this broadcast were the efforts of the Ironworker's Local 2, in the rescue of those pancaked between both levels of the Cypress.
They hadn't had a significant earthquake in that area since the 1906 earthquake and, if you think earthquake science was in its infancy, earthquake engineering was all the more young in its development. Good evidence for this is that the same freeway interchange that fell in the 1971 Sylamr earthquake fell again in the Northridge earthquake of 1994. We have been trying to figure out how to keep buildings standing for sure during an earthquake here in California since the early 1930s at least and, honestly, I think most buildings will stay standing for the most part but I'm sure some won't and it will be either because they didn't retrofit or that there's yet another force we didn't realize would take down buildings and/or another fault we didn't know about until it caused a damaging earthquake. That's excusable in some way but what isn't excusable is that lots of deaths and injuries are going to occur because someone decided it was just too expensive to make something safe and this is a purely economic consideration that does not consider any moral consideration. If we change that, we'll make everything safer.
@@MikeJones-rk1un Probs they didn't have the background knowledge in 1906 to understand in any way. They didn't know about tectonic plates or EQ zones.
I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains at that time, just a short crow's fly from the epicenter. I can assure you, there were many aftershocks, just not ones that caused additional harm during the rescues. Being a native Californian, you get used to earthquakes, but like Eckersley said, "this was ridiculous." I was just a teen at the time. That was the first time I saw humanity at it's finest. I'm proud how we all came together and helped no matter what differences we had.
yeah there were tons of aftershocks and he said 1908 the big earthquake was 1906 i've never heard of the cypress structure referred to as the cypress viaduct, but it's not inaccurate nor have i ever heard the bay area bridge called the bay area bridge
@@RockyNikolashin tbh I didn't call it anything until it fell down and all over the news it was cypress structure this cypress structure that Oop aftershock PleaSe keep away
Santa Cruz was my favorite place to escape to from San Jose where I was living then. It took way way longer than other parts of the Bay Area to start to look like it was recovering over the next decades!
I live on the East Coast and was about 13 at the time. I remember I was watching Roseanne when Breaking News came up about an earthquake while a baseball game was being played. I also remember the media was being pretty gruesome with the whole viaduct collapse thing. Like, interviewing people who were still traumatized by what they had seen. People were squeezed like toothpaste, leaving some terrible sights. One guy sorta lost his cool and said something to the effect of "I saw a guy's brain laying on the pavement and quivering. Is that what you want to hear!?" It's stuck with me.
Oh I remember that kind of thing too. I was in Southern California and that was the first earthquake I remember hearing about that I didn't feel. I had been trying to watch the World Series. I was like 10 or something then. Next thing I know, a few years later, we have the fucking Landers earthquake that was the closest big earthquake to where I've been in my life and the largest earthquake I felt, which was a 7.4. That scared the crap out of me. Then we had the Northridge earthquake, which was a little scary but not enough here so that I was surprised that shit fell over in LA.
Bro!!! All these years i been telling people i saw a guy say he saw a “brain quivering on the ground…” and i was starting to believe i made it up. I saw that interview also.
I’ve lived beside 880 just half a mile north of where this collapse happened (in Emeryville) since 1986. (Also in a building built on landfill-mud). The event was shocking. I was trapped in San Francisco that evening as the Bay Bridge was out & only one lane to the Golden Gate was open, with mammoth lines to try & get through it to the bridge. (The on-ramp had cracked severely). We has double-decker freeways along the SF Bayside waterfront and some through the city (of SF) in those days. All double -decker freeways had destroyed neighborhoods & communities utterly when they were built, and when all were pulled down after the quake, whole neighborhoods sprang into life again. This was an earthquake whose duration was 8-15 seconds, & for those of us stuck in it, it was most significant. But I can’t see how well designed structures should have fallen down in it. Regarding dissemination of news, some people had those old B&W portable tvs in their cars. These had 4” screens & were really grainy. We all clustered around these cars - I mean dozens of people, but in terms of useful information, the local news networks knew very little and just kept broadcasting wild alarmist misinformation. I spent the evening with friends in SF because I couldn’t get home to Emeryville, and we dinner-picnicked high on a hill looking out of SF. The electricity was out over most of the city. Over near the Palace of Fine Arts we could see loads of fires and hear the sirens. Not a good day to be in the first-responder category - but they were excellent. It was a surreal sight though. Another surreal sight was earlier about an hour or two after the quake had hit. I had to walk at that point, so I was walking along Market Street, which is SF’s Main Street. It is lined with modern high rises. Alarms were going off in all of them, and the quake had set off their sprinkler systems. Water was cascading down the windows. Another fun fact - when a major earthquake happens in SF, the police are rapidly sent around to close all the bars. This is because so many of us barrel up to the bar to order double shots because you just can’t imagine how immensely shaken (psychologically) you get, & in this case, obviously, how your judgement leaves you. So the cops evicted my friends and I from the bar! Mostly though, and more than anything in the world, I am grateful for the World Series that evening. Because it was San Francisco vs Oakland, almost no one was on the roads. Without the World Series the death toll would have been huge.
I was living in Union City when this happened. I was at my job in a liquor store, and when it hit, a lot of liquor bottles started falling off shelves. I ran straight out the front door! and was safe thank God 🙂
They ought to just do something like they did for COVID-19 protocols where you can serve alcohol outside the building because, after an earthquake like that, yeah, we could all use a stiff drink. I didn't feel that earthquake and that was the first time ever seeing that there had been an earthquake and realizing that I hadn't felt it because I was in Southern California at the time. That was a crazy day that I remember pretty well, even though I didn't feel shit this far south. The Landers earthquake scared the shit out of me though, but I was still pretty young at this point.
Yes; I remember the initial estimates of dead in the collapse of the Cypress Structure was somewhere between 800 and 1200 killed. After a while it became clear that there were vastly fewer vehicles crushed than would have been in normal bumper-to-bumper five o'clock traffic, and we all became aware that we'd dodged a massive bullet. Not entirely, of course, but the toll was much MUCH less than it could have or should have been... all because of a baseball game.
Ha, I'd no idea about the bars in the city. @MrJest2, I recall those estimates being aired when Cypress went down. The very thought horrified me.. I was only 16.. too little seen at that juncture. Yeah, weird to consider that a baseball game may have "saved" thousands of lives.
You mean to say some ghettos returned, not "neighborhoods sprang to life"....you're talkin about Oakland bro, the s*^thole that is the East Bay, so let's be real here...
My parents lived in CA when this happened right after moving in together. They've told me countless stories of how they went through and the aftermath of it all. They said that everyone would stop before going under a bridge until it was clear for them to speed past. Everyone was in fear every overpass would suffer this same fate.
I was working for a roofing company and we were driving a bobtail truck pulling a 540 gallon kettle. We had two pallets of asphalt and three big bottles of propane and all the roofing equipment we needed for the job. It was a big repair we were going to do. The job was on a navy base. There was three of us going out there in this truck. We were going north on the Cyprus that day. We worked all day and finished the job and we were heading back and towards the south on the Cyprus and about 10 minutes before being on top of it the earthquake hit. It shook for a long time. There were a lot of car alarms going off and I saw a lot of broken windows on several buildings. We were told that the Cyprus bridge collapsed. We had to detour. The freeway was barely moving and I can remember looking towards my right and saw a big area of San Francisco on fire. It took a long time before we made it back to the shop. The next day we were working on a building in San Francisco it was called. Hills plaza it was close to the bay bridge. We didn't do much work that day and I don't know why they sent us out there. It was probably to check out and see if there were any damages on the roof or the building it self. I did buy a news paper that day and I still have it. I'll never forget that day. All that propane we had in the back of the truck and if the earthquake would of hit when we were on the bottom level we would of been crushed and the propane bottles would of exploded. You just don't know when you're time is up. We got lucky that day. It's sad that a lot of people lost their life's and the people that lost all there stuff.
On that day I was working at the Port Authority in Oakland. Our meetings routinely went past 5PM but we left early in order to get home to watch the world series. I was on the lower deck, driving north just one half hour before the collapse. I'll never forget it...
My dad was a sports writer and was at that World Series. He was way up in the press box at the ballpark, which was rather scary when the earthquake hit. He had to drive by that bridge on the way to and from the ballpark. Because it took so long to remove the bodies from beneath the rubble, my dad said you could begin to smell the decaying bodies when he would drive by there.
Yeah, he was fucking with you. While it is true that dead bodies have a peculiar smell, there is no way it could be picked up like that. But kids love gross stories, and you sure got one, so don't hate him for messing with you.
It took 14 days to find and remove all of the bodies. The last two victims were in vehicles on the lower deck that had been completely crushed by the concrete “bent caps” that supported the upper roadway.
Coincidentally the World Series helped save many lives as many who would have been commuting on I-880 were instead tuning into the game. Easily a few hundred lives would have been lost there if not for the World Series matchup of two local California teams.
The San Francisco Earthquake was in 1906, not 1908, unless you're referring to a different earthquake. The 1906 Earthquake was around 8.0 on the Richter scale.
I've felt the Coalinga quake on May 2-83, and I've felt the Loma Prieta Quake, and I've felt the Ridgecrest quake that broke most of the water mains in Trona. I've heard about the 1906 San Francisco quake, it happened around a year and a half before my grandmother was born in 1908. I don't think you get completely used to quakes in California, but the fault they have in the mid-west, I've heard is even crazier!
I'm glad you posted that. I was like...that's not when the quake happened! There's a great 'mocumentary' (not sure you can call it that when it's like a historic dramatised mini series? ) all about the 1906 earthquake. Also, the army didn't help, apparently they were using explosions to control the fires? Idk
Well Dark History. You’re bringing up a lot of terrifying memories for me. First the sun valley mall plane crash and now the Lima Prieta Earthquake. Another terrifying day and days that followed that I will never forget. I was getting ready to watch the Battle of the Bay when the earthquake hit, and I was in Oakland, attending Mills College. Awful day.
I was working in Oakland not too far from the Cypress structure-I was on my way home when the earthquake began - I was traveling on Highway 580 (commonly known as the MacArthur Freeway) when the quake started. It did feel as if my car had a flat tire. Tragically I lost a coworker who was killed while driving on the lower deck of the Cypress structure. Rest In Peace Melissa Maxwell (we also called her Big Red - she was a tall redhead). 😞
I was actually working at Alameda County Emergency Medical Services that day. I was talking to my boss in her office when the quake started. We just kind of dance-stepped under her doorframe and kept talking, but realized it was still going on. California native here, this was the only time I've ever gone under a desk. My keyboard hit me in the butt. It was eerie driving home on the 80 back up to Berkeley, where my grandmother was perfectly fine and we didn't have any damage to the house. My coworker had gone to the ball game and I had given him $5 for a program, he came back in the next day with a flourish and announced "I risked my life to get you this!" (Yes we have gallows humor in emergency services.) The Cypress Structure always scared me, and my girlfriend would always speed up and get off it as soon as possible for years, she just hated it. If it was crowded she'd take surface streets. The day after, as a county employee, I was fanned out to the Coroner's Bureau because one of the transcriptionists had left on vacation to Scotland the day before. I transcribed a lot of the collapse autopsies and saw some very gruesome and eerie photos (this was way before the net). We went to look at the structure that second evening, and they let us stand a block away. Nobody was making any noise, we were just looking, not even talking. Then a baby in a stroller just started fussing and everyone seemed to turn around and look at the baby, like we were replacing looking at death with looking at new life. I had always wanted to transcribe at the Coroner's Bureau and I did for a week. "Be careful what you wish for" is the absolute truth.
Yup. My roommate and I spent that night (in San Jose) sleeping in our cars out in the parking lot of our apartment complex, as we were on the ground floor and didn't want to wake up with the apartment above us crashing through the ceiling. As it turned out, everything was fine and the building is still a functional apartment complex to this day, but that was a scary few days there.
I agree with one stipulation. Any city begging for federal taxpayer funds should have to sign a contract stating that any cost overruns above what are agreed upon will be that city’s responsibility to pay for. Projects like the Big Dig in Boston turned into a fleecing of taxpayers by fatcat politicians and their supporters. Numerous projects have turned into greedy money grabs by politicians and their allies in the city where the construction takes place.
Julio Berumen was a child who had surgery performed on him within the bottom wreckage, where he was pinned in a crushed car by both the car and the bodies of two dead adults. It's an interesting story.
it wasn't him that needed surgery, it was his mom that was deceased and blocking the way for him to be rescued. so they had two surgeons come in to literally cut her in half. they sedated the boy so he wouldn't witness it. he's all grown up now.
As a child, I remember our car bouncing up and down with each expansion joint as we traveled the Nimitz Freeway regularly. That freeway had a pronounced dip in between each support column. It was almost like an amusement park ride. As an adult, I went down to that freeway that night to see if I could offer assistance after the quake.
I've never heard of the "Cypress Viaduct": since I moved here in the 80's, it was always just the Cypress Structure. The Embarcadero Freeway in SF was similar, but although it didn't collapse, it was compromised to the point of being torn down.
Good catch but for anyone who's running a channel called "Dark History" who cannot get the date correct for a catastrophic disaster loses all credibility in anything they ever say and only causes me to unsub!
During the late summer/early fall months (at the time) I worked at the Renaissance Faire in Novato for several years, and since I lived in San Jose I drove through the Cypress Structure on a weekly basis for 10 - 12 weeks a year. Every single damn time I drove through northbound I sweated bullets until I got out the far end past the Maze. I still don't like elevated flyways, dread double-deck roads anywhere, and get panic attacks if I have to be inside a brick building for more than a few minutes. Even though I moved away from California a few years ago, it's like living all my life in an earthquake zone has given me a weird, mild form of PTSD...
I was on this bridge 3 days before the quake. Felt the quake in LA when it happened - the sea stopped moving (it didn't but looked like it did because the ground under it was moving faster) and locals told us it was just a small local quake. No-one had any idea at first that it hit so hard further north and we were getting after shocks.
I was in downtown San Francisco in a high rise when the Loma Prieta struck. I was only on the second floor of a twenty-story modern building, but the shaking was severe enough that I took shelter for the first time during an earthquake. When I left to go home, I saw the century old Golden Gate Bank building’s brick facade laying in the street. The damage looked superficial. It wasn’t. I had to walk home to my flat in Hayes Valley and was surprised to see nothing broken, or even disturbed, in my century old wooden building. I found out latter, one of my neighbors in the building had just started to pull onto the Cypress when he realized he had forgotten a receipt, and he turn around and pulled back into a store parking lot just as the quake struck. Close call for him. SF was largely without electricity or gas for the better part of a week. I was very impressed to see that the City had almost no looting, and there were people feeding their neighbors all over town. I’m not sure that type of response would be the case in SF today.
Your neighbor definitely had an angel watching over him that day. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be in a high rise building during a strong earthquake. I'm in Southern California so I've definitely experienced the strong earthquakes we've had. I will never get used to them. I'm glad you were safe.
@@gentlespiritjw4904 Actually, modern hi-rises built to California standards are probably just about the safest places one could be in a big quake. (Well, except for SF’s Millennium Tower.) The biggest risk is falling furniture, double-hung ceilings, etc., as it is one hell of a ride. My sister and her family were in Northridge and got quite a ride also. Both of us are in the Midwest now, and I tell you, I’ll take the earthquakes over the tornadoes any day.
I remember being in Southern California trying to watch the World Series and wonder when we'd feel the earthquake. That was the first time in my life (I was on the young side) when I had heard about an earthquake that I did not feel. I remember watching all the terrible damage up there on the freeways. Our freeway bridges started to make me feel apprehensive but I wasn't old enough to drive then so there was nothing I could do. Then we had Landers and that is to this day the strongest earthquake I have ever been in and I was relatively close to it so it honestly scared the crap out of me while it was going on. Literally the only thing in our entire house that fell was my desk lamp, which also scared the crap out of me because that was during the strongest shaking and the strong part came back a couple of times. It was really scary. When Northridge happened, it was enough to wake me up but it didn't see so bad here because we were further away. I was kind of surprised to find out about all the shit that fell then but it made me realize that they hadn't fixed the collapsing freeway bridge problem and, as much time has passed and as much as I've seen them do to retrofit our freeways and all kinds of other buildings too, I'd still rather be outside during the expected Big One.
As tragic as this event was it also highlights the need to respect Mother Nature and learn from it to protect ourselves and/or be prepared for such events. A bit hard to do when Mother Nature is unpredictable, A big thumbs up to all that helped. Thats what we do in the face of "Disaster"
I did not know about this accident and earthquake until I saw this video. When I saw the picture of the collapsed bridge, it reminded me of the Great Hanshin Earthquake that happened in our country (I am Japanese) and the motorway, but when I looked it up, I found out that this accident was caused by the same thing. I was very surprised. I pray for the souls of those who died.
Oh, yes - after I went through Loma Prieta myself, I remember watching the news from Kobe just a couple years later thinking, "Oh no!!! Not again!!!" I was actually in tears watching the scenes play out on my TV that night.
@@MrJest2 I really, really think that both earthquakes and the damage they caused are very tragic and sad. I would like to remember them, as well as the lessons learnt. At the time of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, I was still a child in the early grades of primary school and living in Tokyo. I remember watching in disbelief as the devastation was shown on TV every day from morning to night. I heard that the images and photos of the highway that collapsed after the Great Hanshin Earthquake became famous all over the world, but I didn't realise that the same scene had already happened a few years ago...
I am 73 years old and I’ve lived in the Bay Area, including the Santa Cruz Mountains, since I was 13. I was always terrified having to drive on what we referred to as the “The Cypress Structure.”. There were, in fact, many aftershocks. And the people who were trying to assist those who were trapped in the collapse would have to scuttle out of there every time an aftershock happened, which makes their bravery even more remarkable. My boyfriend at the time was working in a building immediately next to the Cypress Structure. He said the earthquake jolt and the sound of the structure collapsing was terrifying. To this day I am very anxious whenever I go under an overpass, particularly if there is a light on the other side of the overpass and I end up having to stop underneath that overpass. I am always anxious that there might be an earthquake while I’m under the overpass. The city of Oakland always gets a bad rap. However, in times of crisis, the citizens of Oakland always rally and do their best to help one another.
Its weird to be so grateful to a man who died before my time. My grandmother worked as a security agent/ sharp-shooter during WWII. She was on an airplane acting as security for Admiral Nimitz when the plane started to fail. It had been sabotaged. My grandmother had a parachute and knew what to do, but for some horrible reason couldn't bring herself to jump. Admiral Nimitz pushed her out, and they both survived. And even though my Grandmother was believed to be sterile by the US government (exposure to accidents at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project) she unexpectedly conceived my mother. So I owe him big time.
Well, damn, I went to Google expecting to find nothing, but the plane sabotage you're talking about really happened. Can't seem to confirm the rest of what you're describing, but even that much is pretty neat.
@@joebauers3746 You can google the plan sabotage incident. What you can't Google are the federal documents about what she experienced at Los Alamos. If you don't want to believe what you read on the internet that's fine, but you only waste your time and mine with the 'pics or it didn't happen' style comments.
Gosh I remember seeing this on the news as an elementary school kid on the other side of the world, New Zealand. It was on the news for weeks, in fact.
I remember that earthquake! I was living in Bakersfield at the time and was watching CNN. The news anchor became obviously distracted, looking at a monitor behind him. He then regained his professional composure and exclaimed, “there has been an earthquake in the San Francisco area.” I stayed glued to CNN and I watched the story unfold.
I had just turned on the Game in New York. Having lived in California I instantly new it was a quake, I think even before the people in the stands did. I had a very close friend who had just moved to Oakland and had never experienced even a tremor. I grabbed the phone and got him on the line while it was going on. Told him (screamed it) "Get outside now GO! NOW!" A few seconds after he got out his house partially collapsed. To this day, ever since Loma Prieta, when I am in LA I will not drive on an elevated freeway or stop under a bridge. Let 'em honk. That should be State Law. Unless you are able to proceed quickly under a bridge, any bridge, stop until you can. In '94 I was in Hollywood for the deadly Northridge Quake. You haven't seen anything until you have seen Sunset Boulevard undulate like the ocean. I was on the first plane headed East as soon as LAX reopened.
Northridge didn't feel that bad here compared with Landers. That one was the only earthquake that has ever truly scared me. Loma Prieta was the first earthquake I heard about on TV that I didn't feel so I thought that was very odd at the time, which is part of why I remember that day. Northridge had to have been so scary in Hollywood though! I was in a thrust earthquake in South America and they seem scarier than our usually side to side strike slip ones here in California. Loma Prieta also had a significant thrusting motion along with the side to side motion. That shit is a different beast.
"America had just won the Second World War" is possibly the most stereotypically USA sentence I've ever heard! It's not just factually incorrect, but also delusionally America-centric and ignorant of the sacrifices made by hundreds of millions of non-Americans around the world. Hilarious. Otherwise, a good video though. A very tragic event
I wrote my comment before reading yours and you say it much better than I . This I'd supposedly a fact channel , which it is it's a Change the fact channel gotta keep that Narrative going.
I lived near the epicenter. We couldn’t sleep inside for a couple days because of the after shocks. Wish I still had the VHS tapes of the neighborhood walking around checking on each other and the sound of radios in the background updating everyone. Sad it takes something like this to bring everyone back together.
As a Chilean, I find it incredible frustrating that officials prioritized money and cost over earthquake safety. It is more expensive, but there's a reason we haven't had a deadly earthquake in over 60 years. (Not counting tsunami deaths).
@@MelissaJulie64 Oh sure...only in America this Bad country does this happen. Thanks Mellissa for the Marxist view. You KNOW Stalin really cared about "human lives!" I'm sure you do too! (maybe propaganda more)
@@Thurston86 because even though there's corruption, we take building infrastructure very seriously. There's a reason for the last over 8.0 Richter earthquakes not doing any critical damage to our infrastructures.
I lived in the area for 4 years. We left the area and I was 13 and moved to Washington. We moved 2 months before the earthquake. And I remember being driven over that bridge all the time. Creepy.
Context: Liquefaction and seismic amplification are major problems wherever the natural wetlands were filled in to make the piers and ports. For instance there are buried sailing ships under the financial district in SF where the shoreline once was. The reason that particular area of land in Oakland was occupied by an impoverished dock-worker/industrial community before the Cypress freeway was because it was red lined and environmentally hazardous from being so close to dock and train pollution and reclamation materials. Tldr: officials knew what type of land they were building on but did it anyway because it was cheaper and easier to remove poor minorities and cut them off from the rest of the city. The plan then backfired and lives were lost along with billions of dollars
After the Loma Prieta quake, the news, science museums, everybody in San Francisco (including me) was obsessed with why the Nimitz pancaked and what caused the houses in the Marina District to sink into the ground and what's the deal with just one little section the Bay Bridge being damaged? RE: The Nimitz freeway (and I'm frustrated you didn't include this information) it was discovered that the columns along the West side vibrated in a different way than the columns on the East side, increasing the amplitude of shaking as the vibrations traveled up the up the columns to the upper deck. California no longer builds freeway with columns on both sides, but rather a single very thick one in the middle.
A lot of the damage in the Marina district was attributed to soil liquefaction, as it was apparently built on landfill. I’m surmising that the soft mud referred to in the vid had much the same effect on the collapse of the Nimitz freeway. As for the section of the Bay Bridge that dropped out, you can see that it was directly above a support tower, which transferred the shock from the ground below to the roadway
Yes....horrible, and the "ripple affects" continued. My father was brutally murdered by a crack cocaine addict a several months before this earthquake. The jury was in deliberation precisely when the earthquake struck......and they IMMEDIATELY declared a "hung jury" and went home to see if they still has a home. The murderer eventually struck a plea bargain to second degree manslaughter.....and got 7 years imprisonment for premeditated murder (a receipt for a brand new hammer--the killing weapon---was found in his house, but not the hammer!). In California the prisoners get 1/2 time off for good behavior......so since he had already been in jail for over a year.....he was back out on the streets in a few months for killing another human being for that man's gold and diamond ring!!!! "America, Love it or leave it".....and I said goodbye, moved to Asia and never looked back!!! And look at what our beloved country has become nowadays!!! OMG.....I never thought it could get this bad....but it has! D
I was riding my skateboard when I seen the street signs twisting. I looked back and seen the asphalt ripple toward me like an oceanic wave. I ran to hide under the massive Spanish arches in front of our house. The neighbors came out and said the bay bridge and cypress structure fell. We went two days later and you could smell the strong odor of blood coming from the crushed freeway.
I'm from Nebraska and remember this all over the news. Met a girl in the Navy who had been this road 20 minutes before the quake. Still wonder about my friend, Pam Devoe
I was watching the World Series and the game was at Candlestick Park. Al Micheals was on the mic when the quake hit. We watched the camera shake and flicker and could hear the rumble. He came BACK on the mic and said, "I'm not sure we're still on the air and I'm not even sure I care! We just had an earthquake!" It was an 'I'll never forget it' moment.
My mom drove on the Nimitiz Freeway that day in 1989, 5 minutes before it collapsed. My mom arrived to pick me up from school early from the Day Care and I hadn't wanted to leave yet but, it was mom's last day to pay insurance on our house. This meant she had to cross another bridge city (it wasn't a double decker Freeway), to pay it. When leaving driving along the 880 sometimes mom drove on The 580 this day because where we needed to go so mom could pay the insurance on the house we had too go by way of the 880. The atmosphere felt off somehow and mom at first wanted too go on to San Francisco to visit Japan Town but, then it was like something said No, get off the Freeway Now. Mom right in the middle of driving slams on the breaks right there and people familiar with the 880 it's frenetic as best to describe my mom tried getting to area where we'd get off the Freeway. Then these 3 diesel Trucks come barreling by that's when mom put the car in reverse and actually back's off the Freeway and mom uses the backstreets to get on home. 5 minutes later mom's talking to this colleague at her second job who mentions how quiet it's been over there. An the rumble starts where She is barely escaping getting killed due to a typewriter up on a shelf crashing down. Then my cat who's been bouncing off the wall since we came through the door goes nuts mom calls me, I scramble under the Table but, let's not forget The World Series is going on at the same time as The Earthquake. The aftershocks were the biggest problem while San Francisco was busy with collapsed Apartment buildings and Fire's. All the power was out save for kiddie Fisher Price Radio I got for my 5th Birthday in 89, I was 8/9 year's old. I was in 3rd grade. Then while checking our garage we had our garage door open can't remember why Mom decided to do that (anyone familiar with West, Oakland going pass Acorn/Lower Bottoms? Towards the Old Amtrak Station before it got moved to Jack London?) Better yet Prescott Elementary? Cole School? Martin Luther King. Jr School? St. Patrick's Catholic School? How about Lowell Middle School when I attended the school there was only 7th & 8th grade now it's 6th, 7th, 8th. A few women checked on mom and I then which touched mom to know end the Physically & Mentally wounded that coped with Drug use and Alcohol checked on all the Single mother's raising children on their own. My mom says in the wake of the Cypress Freeway collapsing it was like Vietnam helicopters flying over all the time the 3rd & 4th day you could smell the bodies. The weird part I don't remember smelling the bodies I probably would if we'd lived across the street from where the Freeway collapsed I could. As a child I struggled with Allergies and the biggest place I was most affected my nose I mean you'd think, I'd been punched in the nose are something because I couldn't smell much. Once the power came back on and we'd could see the T.V. The Double Decker Cypress Freeway apart of the Nimitz. Mom thought we'd be alright with those 3 diesel Trucks that wouldn't let Us through on the Freeway. We saw how wrong we actually were they were crushed. Now the best part of that day in 1989, and was considered rather ironic but revealed by The News Outlet, not sure if that part was true what they said is that most of the people in the neighborhood who were searching for and trying to help survivors. They brought their own tools and ladders supposedly they were The Theives and burglars. I suspect it was said because they're was nearly a Riot between West Oakland and East Oakland FEMA arrived they handed out Bologna and cheese sandwiches while The People in the Oakland Hills past Naval Hospital & Oakland Known and Zoo Got Hot Meals big dinners. It took forever before they went and finally built the Newer Cypress Freeway, it took forever for them to tear down the whole collapsed Freeway too. Not forever with the Bay Bridge. If anyone is reading this 2022 anyone saw The Godzilla Movie 2014? Because even though I no longer in The State of California, I enjoyed seeing Franklin Street, the tower Parking Lot, Lake Merritt, 19th Street Bart Station just as Blue as Ever. AC-Transit looked Healthy with its Green coloring though I wonder if the Green has been changed yet. Is The Oakland Public Main Library still open around Lake Shore. Even when one moves Nobody Forget's The City of Their Birth Oakland, CA.
I the 10th generation of my family to be born and raised here in San Jose, Ca, and I was a sophomore in high school when this quake occurred...in fact, we were in the middle of tackling drills so when I saw the field heaving up and down, I thought I just got my bell rung when I tackled our RB... my teammates were literally falling over like felled trees, it was crazy...what the narrator of this vid didn't mention was the saddest story to come out of the Cypress tragedy, and that was when firefighters had to remove the legs of a dead woman in order to rescue her daughter from their crushed vehicle...that's how bad it was in the freeway structure that day....
We were living in LA and I was taking a bath, when all the water in the tub suddenly turned into a wave! We were in a very old, small apt. bldg. which swayed horribly. I jumped out and we could watch the news while trying to get hold of family. My dad took the freeway every day for 20 years, and had retired the year before, so he was not commuting anymore, thank goodness, saved his life.
All I remember was seeing the World Series game on TV here in Ontario (Canada, not California), and the announcer saying "we're having a qua...." then getting cut off. That was terrifying to watch as a teenager. I can't even imagine what it was like living through the Loma Prieta earthquake.
My friend who had grown up in the Bay Area (along with me and the rest of our friends) had recently moved to Florida and had a similar experience to yours - he saw that, and then the screen went to test pattern as the signal cut off, and he immediately feared that all his friends had just been killed. He couldn't imagine a quake so powerful it would cut off the television broadcast from the friggin' World Series (!) and was petrified with terror... for the minute or two it took to re-align the satellite dishes and pick up the signal again. He said that was the longest minute of his life...
My family were on our way to my dad's wake service. I just drove that section earlier as I was commuting from San Jose. The earthquake hit just before we were leaving for the chapel. We still had the service, I remember seeing smoke from S.F. We lived in El Cerrito so we had a great view. Memories.
Very interesting and the photos are amazing. Just one point. America did not win the 2nd World War, it was won by the Allies of which America was a part.
I’m from Santa Cruz. I was 3 years old when the earthquake happened. I have a few spotty memories mostly of the aftershocks. I was in the bathroom and all these bottles were falling out of the cabinet. I told my parents and they said not to worry about it and we went out to the street where the whole neighborhood was. Everyone congregating, trying to get out of their houses and onto the shaking road.
It measures the transmissions output shaft speed which is translated to mph. While she was in the air the engine would have revved up spinning the wheels faster. Kind of like being on ice.
@@ThatGuy-sd3zl Right. So it _doesn't_ measure air speed, which was my question. It renders shaft rotations into an estimated land speed. There is no way a person falling in a car would apply consistently increasing pressure to the accelerator up to the equivalent of roughly twice their original land speed, and remain unaware they were falling. Especially not quickly enough for all of that to register consciously. Basically what I'm saying is that it was a narrative conceit. And it scanned as a bit silly. 🤣
@@naporeon It does sound odd to me as well considering all this would have happened within 2-3 seconds. More likely the driver would have noticed being airborne and instinctively hit the brakes. Later recalling that the engine revved up for a split second and the brakes did nothing. Recalling the story makes more sense than trying to portray the story in real time as though it took like 15 seconds.
@@ThatGuy-sd3zl I bet you're exactly right with your impression, including the 2-3 second estimation. As a fun thought exercise, a freefall of 15 seconds--while no doubt more narratively compelling--would indicate, what, a 3,600+ foot drop? Air speed would probably have been a bit more than 100mph in that scenario, haha.
I grew up in San Francisco. In October of '89, I was living and working in the city. My buddies and I had left work early, to gather at my place, to watch the game. I lived on a hill that was bedrock. So, we didn't feel the quake as intensely (though it was still scary). A coworker of mine, lived over in Hayward. He took that Cypress Viaduct every day. At the moment of the quake, he just happened to be on that section (upper deck). He said that he thought that he had a flat tire. Wanting to pull over, he looked in his rearview mirror, only to see that the freeway behind him was GONE! There was nothing but a huge cloud of yellow dust.
Though I was born in Vallejo in 1995, my mom told me stories about her & her then bf at the time sneaking into areas that were taped off around the collapsed parts of the bridges & said she could smell all the decomposing bodies 😞 Very somber day for the SF Bay Area & should serve as a reminder to never take advantage of lax building codes/cost cutting..
When it started shaking, I was at Van Ness &Geary, with my g'friend. We thought a friend was jokingly shaking our car. As frenchies, absolutely not aware of what to do in such cases, we ran at the middle of the crossing, where she fainted. In the middle of a busy street with a sack of marshmallow to hold.
The 'no aftershocks' line was kinda odd. There were many, many aftershocks, just not large enough to do substantially more damage. Maybe that's what you meant? I lived there at the time so I clearly remember the aftershocks in the days after this. Other than that, this is another interesting and informative video. Thanks for making it.
I was working in Berkeley that day and was about 1/4 mile from the Cypress structure when the quake struck. I was listening to the Giants/As game on the radio. This was a LONG quake, I’ve lived in California my whole life and so I’m used to them, but this one felt different. The street signs ahead of me started undulating and my car felt like it was rocking both forward and backward and up and down at the same time. It was the weirdest sensation, I remember feeling dizzy and nauseated. I had my window rolled down and heard an ominous sound, a roaring similar to a train moving at high speed. It got louder and louder. Later I learned that that sound was the Nimitz collapsing onto itself. I was very surprised that more people weren’t killed that day, the baseball game was a really important factor. There was one guy who survived the collapse only to die a month later in the hospital. The Oakland Hills firestorm a few years later was even more terrifying. I love the Bay Area but I’m glad I now live in the Tahoe area, we have quakes here too but they are much milder. Now it’s wildfires I fear the most.
I was driving on hwy 24 heading west towards the caldacott tunnel when it hit. KFOG suddenly went off the air and my car swerved as if I had two flat tires. I slowed down and realized it was a earthquake. I kept going and went through the tunnel. By the time I popped out KFOG was back on and they announced we just had a big quake. There was a fire at a towing company off in the distance in Berkeley. It was surreal driving through Oakland to get to my friends home. Chimneys had crumbled and crushed cars. We set up a black and white TV at my friends because his Sony had fallen off its stand and was broken. We watched everything on "bunny ears". When they showed the Bay Bridge it was truly horrifying to see in real time. Not everyone was rushing to help the trapped victims either. They were there for other reasons unfortunately. Sad but true.
I was five years old at the time, and my parents were getting me and my brother (nine at the time) ready to go visit our cousins across the bay. My mom was putting my shoes on, when she screamed EARTHQUAKE! and grabbed me and ran into the hallway to cower against the closet. I just remember being smothered. Apparently my mom felt it before anyone else in the house, because my brother thought she was crazy until the real shaking began. The next thing I remember if walking out of the house, holding my mom's hand, having only ONE SHOE ON (I just remember being very upset about this) and asking, "what happened, Mommy?" over and over again. I also remember all our other neighbors walking out of their own houses, just as confused and dazed as we were. I also remember driving around later that day to try and find a place to have dinner (we didn't have anything at home because we were going to our cousins but now we couldn't) and everything was closed.
I felt my first earthquake around the same along, although several years before this and in Southern California. My mom had already told me about the fact that there were earthquakes so, when I felt shaking and looked around to see that everything was shaking, I remarked to my playmate that this must be an earthquake, so we went into the hall. I thought it was interesting and nothing fell in that one so it seemed fine to me. I think it was like a 5 or something so not that bad for California building codes at the time. I had some relatives who were there in San Fransisco, both for the Loma Prieta and even the 1906 Big One, and she said that shit shook around in the house terribly so maybe the shaking is different because of the soil composition in some parts there. I remember that we used to get a lot of bright blue lights flashing out of the ground back in the late 80s and early 90s around here and that no one would believe me at the time. They happened so often that I used to look out my window for them when I was forced to go to bed but couldn't sleep. Then I didn't see them for like a decade until the late 2010s and then we started having a few significant earthquakes here again.
This happened when I was 13 and living in the Sacramento area. My mom worked in the Bay (Hayward) and took that freeway every day. She was supposed to be on it heading home but switched shifts with a buddy, which I didn't find out until hours later when she was finally able to get through on the clogged phone lines. Her buddy said he basically watched it happen in his rearview mirror. He cleared the chunk that collapsed, heard a crazy sound a few seconds later, and then looked up to his rearview just in time to see a bunch of cars get squished. This was pretty much the beginning of my disaster documentary obsession.
I was 19 when this quake hit. I was in Concord in a friend's apartment. Years later I met a woman, maybe 8 years younger than me. She was in the back seat of the car when the freeway fell on them. Her mother and her mother's friend were both killed, but she was nit hurt. She was trapped though, and when emergency workers finally found her they could only get her out but cutting her mother's body to pieces so she could escape.
Wasn't her brother also trapped b his mom's body & in addtion, the 1st responders, they had to cut not only the mom's body apart but had to remove his leg, if I remember correctly?
@@irulanfoucher2183 I do remember a couple of people who had to go through on site amputations. There was more than one if I remember correctly. I was on the phone with a friend when an after shock hit. She was in Concord and I was in Benicia about 20 miles north. She screamed then a few seconds later I felt the quake. It was small, but having just experienced the big one, it was scary. You don't know how much it's going to shake.
Dang. All I remember at 5 years old of the earthquake is how annoyed my family was from all the extra traffic it caused over the next year or so. We own a business in SF and live in Danville. Thank god they were not on the freeways at that hour AND thank god they were ok. So heartbreaking to hear the stories of the deaths.
Does anyone really expect Politicans especially Californian politicians to make good decisions for the people. When it comes to spending our taxpayer money they always make the wrong decisions. Because paying back their donors is priority and our safty is last.
I had recently relocated to Southern Oregon from LA. I was tired from all the work and had just stretched out on the couch and put my feet up. The moment I did that, I felt the rumble and roar of an earthquake! Yes, even in Oregon you could feel those terrifying things. Will never forget that day. So much destruction (that should not have happened) and loss of life. I was both afraid and oh so sad......
We were about 1 hour or 2 outside of San Fran when this happened. We were driving in to run a booth at a Harvest Festival. It was totally insane living there for 5 or 6 days. Every window seemed to be broken, we had a hotel room, but no water. Thank god for a close by Burger King open near our hotel, without it we could not eat or use the bathroom. I am so glad we were not in the city when it hit. Oh, the road was super trippy. It looked more like water than concrete. Somewhere I have a survived the quake of '89 t-shirt I got then. Crazy how someone could crank out shirts then.
I am a native San Franciscan who lived in Santa Rosa at the time (About 60 miles north of S.F.) We felt the earthquake as well. Having lived through several earthquakes growing up, I was very surprised how strong it was in Santa Rosa.
I was 7 when the earthquake hit, and living in the South Bay. We were riding bikes on our street and the parents did a great job keeping us kids from panicking. Watching the news afterwards was surreal, and I still get anxious when I have to drive on layered roads/bridges because the image of the freeway pancaking is so vivid in my mind. My aunt worked at a news station in Berkeley at the time and recently she told me about how the damage took them off the air, and how frantically they worked to put out the fires and get the broadcast up again
I remember it well. We were visiting family at the time. At the end of the day we were on that stretch of roadway. The next morning we caught an early flight to LA for a connecting flight to Tahiti. When we landed in Papeete, Tahiti we saw it on the news. I think my "Guardian Angels" all the time.
Many, many things that happened on the Nimitz are reported as wrong. First, it wasn't built upon "Soft Soil." The ground was compacted. Which is a very safe alternative to drilling to bedrock. Hell, the Brooklyn Bridge is partially built on, (as you say) soft soil. Bad construction caused the Nimitiz to collapse, nt bad dirt. BTW, there is an elevated subway (BART) the runs along the same dirt as the Nimitiz Freeway. It didn't fall during the earthquake !! Because it was built to code, not to some dudes hunch. Also, every school in the East Bay and 90% of the population in the San Francisco Bay Area lives on soft soil. Schools, freeways, subways, water mains, sewer mains ... you name it, it's on an earthquake prone area. Why ?? Because the land was cheap. I live in the City, in a high-rise and it is totally safe. I'm safer up here than the rabble down on the streets. Get over yourself if you think that you or anyone can build something that is completely safe from a natural disaster. It is impossible. Mexico City had a large quake that destroyed buildings that were poorly built. The properly built ones still stand. The same everywhere. It's because of poor construction. Don't believe me ?? Just look at India or China or Bangladesh or in any 3rd world nation. Poor construction equals more death. That's it.
@@JillC2 You're so right. It was a bit damaged, but it held up. Talk about soft soil, the old Oakland Coliseum is built on mud. It's actually under sea level. All of the BART system is built on that same dirt. BART survived with no damage. Because the buildings that stood up were built correctly. It's not the soil, it's the way you build something.
@@petermontoya1796 Agreed. The soil is factor you can and should consider during construction, but that is what partially determines whether or not something is built well and to code. If something isn't built well, and isn't designed to withstand the environment, it'll fall down.
If it wasn't for the World Series and my brother leaving work early to watch the game, he might have been on that stretch of freeway. By the way, the freeway isn't so free anymore.
@@daystar4909 Well, certain times and certain lanes are now toll roads in the Bay Area. In the 60's, 70's and 80's all freeways in the Bay Area were free. Only tolls were our bridges. In the Midwest and East coast their "Freeways" are not called Freeways, there called Expressways. Even groceries bags are no longer free in this society. Everything cost. My long decease mother would be astonishing at this generation. GodBlessU!
@@characterunderconstruction5891 Thank you very much for explaining. and it is so sad how greedy society has become. waiting for Jesus to return really.
@@characterunderconstruction5891 I agree, although the bags costing money is to try to deter people using single-use bags. I got into the habit of bringing my own canvas bags and I think it's a good idea, personally. :)
Search parties found pancaked piles of meat inside the flattened cars. The top deck fell so hard and fast that drivers simply exploded from the impact. My buddy had a father who was NTSB investigator. The story from him was chilling.
I was 10 years old when this happened. I was upstairs, goofing off, when I was supposed to be doing bible study. And I heard rumbling. I thought somehow my mom found out I was goofing off, and was stomping up the stairs to come and punish me. But it didn't stop. Suddenly, there she was, she scooped me up and held me under the door frame in the hallway. Our dog, trying to be with us, slipped and fell down the stairs, breaking its back. We were in Tracy, CA at the time of this Earthquake. Tracy was/is more than an hour away from San Francisco by the most direct route. To not even be anywhere close to San Francisco and to feel it that strongly still... That quake was bad, real bad.
I was watching the baseball game that day, I live in Ontario Canada, so I was in total shock what was happening, except for a tiny movement on very rare occasions we have no idea what an earthquake is like, it was awhile before we realized just how horrific the situation was..
I found one of the points to be quite peculiar… you mention the post WW2 era boom of individual automobile purchases while saying that public transport was poor/minimal for the area… ironically however, the United States actually had a rather robust public transport system in years past before auto-manufacturer lobbyists in Washington D.C put a stop to that. They convinced many folks that public transport was ineffective, inefficient, unnecessary, etc. in order to guide them towards making decisions that would ultimately benefit many greedy pockets.
My mom almost left work early in SF to get home to the East Bay to try and catch the game. She decided at the last minute to wait until her boss was out of a meeting. She was ultimately extremely glad she didn't as it would have likely put her on the Cypress St. Viaduct at the time the quake hit. My friend's dad was at work in a warehouse very close to the viaduct and said it sounded (and felt) like a train crashing into the building.
I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life. Those of us who grew up in California think nothing of most earthquakes. The '89 quake was the only one where I actually thought, wow, this is a big quake! and got under my desk at work. I was working near the top floor of a downtown high-rise and that building was swaying! The most famous victim of the quake was Buck Helm, who survived for days under the rubble of the freeway while people worked feverishly to free him. It was all over the news. He was finally rescued, only to die about a month later as a result of his injuries. It was heartbreaking.
Born & raised in the Bay Area, but I still become nervous when the ground begins to jiggle or bump-diddy-bump or sway (those are the worst imho.. they're so unsettling). I remember the 89 quake _very_ well, my most clear memory.. my dad was in the living room in our 2nd floor apartment. I was walking down our hallway, that's when it hit.
Our downstairs neighbor Fritz was 90 or 92.. very old. I checked on her after & she was actually chuckling about it.
Another neighbor was coming from the direction of the carport, and she told us she had been on the freeway heading home & began noticing cars pulling into the shoulder; other vehicles up ahead and those on the shoulder were all bouncing side to side, up & down.
_Every_ quake we have in this area (we've relocated east of the area towards Stockton now) puts me on edge.. I freeze like a deer in headlights. Not sure why, but they are scary af imho.
@@St.Linguini_of_Pesto Very cool you told us all that!
aww i didn't know he didn't survive
He was in our hospital system, but his injuries were so bad, that his kidneys failed. How well we remember one man out of the many.
@@sidstovell2177 that's awful
The fact that they built a double-decker like that without thinking "what if collapses and literally squishes people underneath? That's a bad look and utterly horrific" boggles my mind.
Even as a kid the few times I can remember going on the bottom deck I remember thinking "this is ridiculous". It felt SUPER SKETCHY!
My mother said she never used the Cypress Structure, because she never liked it. My father said you could feel that thing moving as you drove on it. He discovered that feeling years before the quake happened.
@@joebauers3746 That's what I thought as a kid. I remember thinking," what if the top deck falls on us..."
The simple fact that double decker roads exist is just idiotic.
Specially since the whole region was known tp have quakes well over a century before.
I remember getting ready to watch the World Series when the cameras started shaking and Al Micheals was like we're having an earthquake. I remember watching the rescues and praying for those trapped.
I had the game on. Went for a piss and came back to static on the channel.
Me too!
my mom was barely alive when this happened but i’ve seen recordings of the broadcast and idk how people just shrug earthquakes off. it might just be because i’m from a place where the largest earthquake ever recorded was 4.5 but i’d shit myself if i felt an earthquake large enough to feel, let alone large enough to collapse a bridge thought to be earthquake proof
@@misseselise3864 Same here. I'm in Canada and I remember (circa '84) a "tremor" in the Great Lakes area.
A desk lamp on my work bench swayed enough for me look around to see who was dicking with me, but no one was there. Later I heard from a co-worker who lived on the 18th floor had water sloshed out of his aquarium.
Pales by comparison, though it's weird that 33yrs later and 1000s of miles away, I can trace exactly where I was standing the minute the '89 quake hit San Fran. (see my post above ) 😉
@CraftAero That's great. We were all at my grandparents' house watching it. We lived and still live nowhere near San Francisco. A girl across the street was there when it happened. I really don't remember what she said but everything was fine. I was thinking that it was a great time to be recording video. My grandfather said "Well, I guess that's over now".
I was living in the Bay Area on that afternoon - that was a scary moment for me and my family even for Californians.
I was living in Union City when this happened. I was at my job in a liquor store, and when it hit, a lot of liquor bottles started falling off shelves. I ran straight out the front door! and was safe thank God 🙂
Why didn’t you stop it?
Glad you were safe. Was it possible to rescue remaining bottles? Any survivors?
I was in San Jose that day, what a wild earthquake. I still remember the pavement on our street rolling like waves in the ocean.
I'm from West Oakland 24th and Filbert. We were in the Cypress projects helping friends move. It was the loudest thing ever. With the freeway falling and as it being rt after closing time many of the alarms in the factories were blairing too. I could go on for ever...
I was 9 living in East Oakland during this earthquake. I remember being outside in the street, playing with my brother, when all of a sudden we see the street become like a liquid, undulating in huge waves. It was surreal and scary.
I was working in Palo Alto that day; I'd just left work and was sitting down at a bus stop when the bench came up and hit my ass, knocking me to the sidewalk. I watched in awe as waves rippled down the asphalt of Hanover Street...
I remember it feeling like the ground was waves of water. Most ppl, not from the Bay Area, look at me weird when I say that, as if I'm being dramatic or something... but it's true. Glad I'm not the only one. lol
Same for me, I was 13 in east side san jose, playing catch with my kid brother. And saw the street roll like waves....cars were bouncing and windows undulating in and out, thought they might break, but luckily none did.
😳 whoa
Yeah, the road was super trippy. I first thought it was a heat effect, not an earthquake.
I remember that quake. I was in 7th grade in Morgan Hill (South of San Jose). The shaking was so intense! Practically everyone in my town, and ALL of my neighborhood lost their chimneys that day. Ours fell through into our attic.
I looked out the front door when everything was shaking and saw the street moving like it was a soft wave rolling
One of my brothers was on the 280,
above Los Altos, when this earthquake
hit. EVERYBODY pulled over, thinking
they had 4 flat tires.
steve
Yes! This is my most clear memory of the quake: looking out my Grandma's door and telling her the road looked like the ocean. I was 3 and we had just pulled up to her house in Alameda to watch the World Series.
That's why LA roads are ass, cause the asphalt degrades from cars rolling over it, but it flexes like rubber when shaken by a quake
It was a frightening experience that I would never forget, 😢especially for someone who has barely living in San Francisco after living in the “concrete jungle” known as Hong Kong for most of my existence back then. I was living near Ocean Beach alongside my aunt’s family back then when it happened, I was terrified and petrified by what was felt around me and my family, and I couldn’t stop crying all night and into the next day or two whenever an aftershock struck.
I was the same age and living inland in Davis. We could see the road rolling a little bit even there. I can only imagine how bad it was in your area.
The bridge from Oakland to San Francisco is NOT the Golden Gate Bridge, it is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Missed on the "1908" earthquake. you think
he knows what the bridges are?
Simply, a BUFFOON!
CHECK YOUR "FACTS."
steve
He also gives the year of the BIG quake as 1908.
Yeah, I'm disappointed in the errors he keeps making in videos. It's pretty basic, but the bay Bridge is TWO bridges and the reasons the Nimitz collapsed is the same reason it was the Oakland span: no bedrock.
And horrifying situations on that bridge also.
I was in my living room watching the game when the quake hit. It shook apart the old fireplace and chimney, brick by brick.
I now live in another earthquake area, but there has never been anything as scary as the Loma Prieta.
Not included in this broadcast were the efforts of the Ironworker's Local 2, in the rescue of those pancaked between both levels of the Cypress.
Hi Dean. And the earthquake of the early 20th century was in 1906, not 1908.
I’ll never understand why anyone would build a two tiered highway in an earthquake prone area. 🤦🏽♀️
Poor planning dear.
Because we think we can control nature but we can't.
They hadn't had a significant earthquake in that area since the 1906 earthquake and, if you think earthquake science was in its infancy, earthquake engineering was all the more young in its development. Good evidence for this is that the same freeway interchange that fell in the 1971 Sylamr earthquake fell again in the Northridge earthquake of 1994. We have been trying to figure out how to keep buildings standing for sure during an earthquake here in California since the early 1930s at least and, honestly, I think most buildings will stay standing for the most part but I'm sure some won't and it will be either because they didn't retrofit or that there's yet another force we didn't realize would take down buildings and/or another fault we didn't know about until it caused a damaging earthquake. That's excusable in some way but what isn't excusable is that lots of deaths and injuries are going to occur because someone decided it was just too expensive to make something safe and this is a purely economic consideration that does not consider any moral consideration. If we change that, we'll make everything safer.
@@whoever6458 It seems odd mentioning the 1906 quake as if the time past meant it wasn't likely to happen. It makes it MORE likely.
@@MikeJones-rk1un Probs they didn't have the background knowledge in 1906 to understand in any way. They didn't know about tectonic plates or EQ zones.
I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains at that time, just a short crow's fly from the epicenter. I can assure you, there were many aftershocks, just not ones that caused additional harm during the rescues. Being a native Californian, you get used to earthquakes, but like Eckersley said, "this was ridiculous." I was just a teen at the time. That was the first time I saw humanity at it's finest. I'm proud how we all came together and helped no matter what differences we had.
yeah there were tons of aftershocks
and he said 1908 the big earthquake was 1906
i've never heard of the cypress structure referred to as the cypress viaduct, but it's not inaccurate
nor have i ever heard the bay area bridge called the bay area bridge
@@melmoland988 yea, I called it Cypress Freeway and Bay bridge. i must've missed the 1908 date. my brain probably added 06 out of habit.
@@RockyNikolashin tbh I didn't call it anything until it fell down and all over the news it was cypress structure this cypress structure that
Oop aftershock
PleaSe keep away
Santa Cruz was my favorite place to escape to from San Jose where I was living then. It took way way longer than other parts of the Bay Area to start to look like it was recovering over the next decades!
@@melmoland988 I caught that too. What the heck? BTW, my first name is Melody...How strange. LOL right glad tameetcha!
I live on the East Coast and was about 13 at the time. I remember I was watching Roseanne when Breaking News came up about an earthquake while a baseball game was being played. I also remember the media was being pretty gruesome with the whole viaduct collapse thing. Like, interviewing people who were still traumatized by what they had seen. People were squeezed like toothpaste, leaving some terrible sights. One guy sorta lost his cool and said something to the effect of "I saw a guy's brain laying on the pavement and quivering. Is that what you want to hear!?" It's stuck with me.
Oh I remember that kind of thing too. I was in Southern California and that was the first earthquake I remember hearing about that I didn't feel. I had been trying to watch the World Series. I was like 10 or something then. Next thing I know, a few years later, we have the fucking Landers earthquake that was the closest big earthquake to where I've been in my life and the largest earthquake I felt, which was a 7.4. That scared the crap out of me. Then we had the Northridge earthquake, which was a little scary but not enough here so that I was surprised that shit fell over in LA.
Bro!!! All these years i been telling people i saw a guy say he saw a “brain quivering on the ground…” and i was starting to believe i made it up. I saw that interview also.
Even as a kid here in Alberta, I remember this being covered heavily at the time! Scary!
Were you there for the Edmonton tornado in 1987? I remember thinking, after that, there there was nowhere safe from natural disasters.
I’ve lived beside 880 just half a mile north of where this collapse happened (in Emeryville) since 1986. (Also in a building built on landfill-mud). The event was shocking. I was trapped in San Francisco that evening as the Bay Bridge was out & only one lane to the Golden Gate was open, with mammoth lines to try & get through it to the bridge. (The on-ramp had cracked severely). We has double-decker freeways along the SF Bayside waterfront and some through the city (of SF) in those days. All double -decker freeways had destroyed neighborhoods & communities utterly when they were built, and when all were pulled down after the quake, whole neighborhoods sprang into life again. This was an earthquake whose duration was 8-15 seconds, & for those of us stuck in it, it was most significant. But I can’t see how well designed structures should have fallen down in it. Regarding dissemination of news, some people had those old B&W portable tvs in their cars. These had 4” screens & were really grainy. We all clustered around these cars - I mean dozens of people, but in terms of useful information, the local news networks knew very little and just kept broadcasting wild alarmist misinformation. I spent the evening with friends in SF because I couldn’t get home to Emeryville, and we dinner-picnicked high on a hill looking out of SF. The electricity was out over most of the city. Over near the Palace of Fine Arts we could see loads of fires and hear the sirens. Not a good day to be in the first-responder category - but they were excellent. It was a surreal sight though. Another surreal sight was earlier about an hour or two after the quake had hit. I had to walk at that point, so I was walking along Market Street, which is SF’s Main Street. It is lined with modern high rises. Alarms were going off in all of them, and the quake had set off their sprinkler systems. Water was cascading down the windows. Another fun fact - when a major earthquake happens in SF, the police are rapidly sent around to close all the bars. This is because so many of us barrel up to the bar to order double shots because you just can’t imagine how immensely shaken (psychologically) you get, & in this case, obviously, how your judgement leaves you. So the cops evicted my friends and I from the bar! Mostly though, and more than anything in the world, I am grateful for the World Series that evening. Because it was San Francisco vs Oakland, almost no one was on the roads. Without the World Series the death toll would have been huge.
I was living in Union City when this happened. I was at my job in a liquor store, and when it hit, a lot of liquor bottles started falling off shelves. I ran straight out the front door! and was safe thank God 🙂
They ought to just do something like they did for COVID-19 protocols where you can serve alcohol outside the building because, after an earthquake like that, yeah, we could all use a stiff drink.
I didn't feel that earthquake and that was the first time ever seeing that there had been an earthquake and realizing that I hadn't felt it because I was in Southern California at the time. That was a crazy day that I remember pretty well, even though I didn't feel shit this far south. The Landers earthquake scared the shit out of me though, but I was still pretty young at this point.
Yes; I remember the initial estimates of dead in the collapse of the Cypress Structure was somewhere between 800 and 1200 killed. After a while it became clear that there were vastly fewer vehicles crushed than would have been in normal bumper-to-bumper five o'clock traffic, and we all became aware that we'd dodged a massive bullet. Not entirely, of course, but the toll was much MUCH less than it could have or should have been... all because of a baseball game.
Ha, I'd no idea about the bars in the city. @MrJest2, I recall those estimates being aired when Cypress went down. The very thought horrified me.. I was only 16.. too little seen at that juncture.
Yeah, weird to consider that a baseball game may have "saved" thousands of lives.
You mean to say some ghettos returned, not "neighborhoods sprang to life"....you're talkin about Oakland bro, the s*^thole that is the East Bay, so let's be real here...
0:56 - the narrator says ‘on that faithful day’ - it should be ‘….fateful day’ !
As I reflect on my past usage of that phrase. Oof.
lmao I mentally corrected that too.
My parents lived in CA when this happened right after moving in together. They've told me countless stories of how they went through and the aftermath of it all. They said that everyone would stop before going under a bridge until it was clear for them to speed past. Everyone was in fear every overpass would suffer this same fate.
I was working for a roofing company and we were driving a bobtail truck pulling a 540 gallon kettle. We had two pallets of asphalt and three big bottles of propane and all the roofing equipment we needed for the job. It was a big repair we were going to do. The job was on a navy base. There was three of us going out there in this truck. We were going north on the Cyprus that day. We worked all day and finished the job and we were heading back and towards the south on the Cyprus and about 10 minutes before being on top of it the earthquake hit. It shook for a long time. There were a lot of car alarms going off and I saw a lot of broken windows on several buildings. We were told that the Cyprus bridge collapsed. We had to detour. The freeway was barely moving and I can remember looking towards my right and saw a big area of San Francisco on fire. It took a long time before we made it back to the shop. The next day we were working on a building in San Francisco it was called. Hills plaza it was close to the bay bridge. We didn't do much work that day and I don't know why they sent us out there. It was probably to check out and see if there were any damages on the roof or the building it self. I did buy a news paper that day and I still have it. I'll never forget that day. All that propane we had in the back of the truck and if the earthquake would of hit when we were on the bottom level we would of been crushed and the propane bottles would of exploded. You just don't know when you're time is up. We got lucky that day. It's sad that a lot of people lost their life's and the people that lost all there stuff.
On that day I was working at the Port Authority in Oakland. Our meetings routinely went past 5PM but we left early in order to get home to watch the world series. I was on the lower deck, driving north just one half hour before the collapse. I'll never forget it...
My dad was a sports writer and was at that World Series. He was way up in the press box at the ballpark, which was rather scary when the earthquake hit. He had to drive by that bridge on the way to and from the ballpark. Because it took so long to remove the bodies from beneath the rubble, my dad said you could begin to smell the decaying bodies when he would drive by there.
Yeah, he was fucking with you. While it is true that dead bodies have a peculiar smell, there is no way it could be picked up like that. But kids love gross stories, and you sure got one, so don't hate him for messing with you.
It took 14 days to find and remove all of the bodies. The last two victims were in vehicles on the lower deck that had been completely crushed by the concrete “bent caps” that supported the upper roadway.
Coincidentally the World Series helped save many lives as many who would have been commuting on I-880 were instead tuning into the game. Easily a few hundred lives would have been lost there if not for the World Series matchup of two local California teams.
The San Francisco Earthquake was in 1906, not 1908, unless you're referring to a different earthquake. The 1906 Earthquake was around 8.0 on the Richter scale.
I believe he was still quoting the baseball man. He does say 1906 later in the video.
And it was the fires after that did the most damage.
I've felt the Coalinga quake on May 2-83, and I've felt the Loma Prieta Quake, and I've felt the Ridgecrest quake that broke most of the water mains in Trona. I've heard about the 1906 San Francisco quake, it happened around a year and a half before my grandmother was born in 1908. I don't think you get completely used to quakes in California, but the fault they have in the mid-west, I've heard is even crazier!
See you at the party Richter!
I'm glad you posted that. I was like...that's not when the quake happened! There's a great 'mocumentary' (not sure you can call it that when it's like a historic dramatised mini series? ) all about the 1906 earthquake. Also, the army didn't help, apparently they were using explosions to control the fires? Idk
Well Dark History. You’re bringing up a lot of terrifying memories for me. First the sun valley mall plane crash and now the Lima Prieta Earthquake. Another terrifying day and days that followed that I will never forget. I was getting ready to watch the Battle of the Bay when the earthquake hit, and I was in Oakland, attending Mills College. Awful day.
I was working in Oakland not too far from the Cypress structure-I was on my way home when the earthquake began - I was traveling on Highway 580 (commonly known as the MacArthur Freeway) when the quake started. It did feel as if my car had a flat tire. Tragically I lost a coworker who was killed while driving on the lower deck of the Cypress structure. Rest In Peace Melissa Maxwell (we also called her Big Red - she was a tall redhead). 😞
I was actually working at Alameda County Emergency Medical Services that day. I was talking to my boss in her office when the quake started. We just kind of dance-stepped under her doorframe and kept talking, but realized it was still going on. California native here, this was the only time I've ever gone under a desk. My keyboard hit me in the butt. It was eerie driving home on the 80 back up to Berkeley, where my grandmother was perfectly fine and we didn't have any damage to the house. My coworker had gone to the ball game and I had given him $5 for a program, he came back in the next day with a flourish and announced "I risked my life to get you this!" (Yes we have gallows humor in emergency services.) The Cypress Structure always scared me, and my girlfriend would always speed up and get off it as soon as possible for years, she just hated it. If it was crowded she'd take surface streets. The day after, as a county employee, I was fanned out to the Coroner's Bureau because one of the transcriptionists had left on vacation to Scotland the day before. I transcribed a lot of the collapse autopsies and saw some very gruesome and eerie photos (this was way before the net). We went to look at the structure that second evening, and they let us stand a block away. Nobody was making any noise, we were just looking, not even talking. Then a baby in a stroller just started fussing and everyone seemed to turn around and look at the baby, like we were replacing looking at death with looking at new life. I had always wanted to transcribe at the Coroner's Bureau and I did for a week. "Be careful what you wish for" is the absolute truth.
There were tons of aftershocks for weeks after that quake, they started hitting less than 15 minutes after the main quake
Yup. My roommate and I spent that night (in San Jose) sleeping in our cars out in the parking lot of our apartment complex, as we were on the ground floor and didn't want to wake up with the apartment above us crashing through the ceiling. As it turned out, everything was fine and the building is still a functional apartment complex to this day, but that was a scary few days there.
I remember there were many after shocks for like a month. I was down in San Jose east side by evergreen college.
The aftershocks were brutal.
Spending on infrastructure is not sexy but we need it
👆👆 this!!
I agree with one stipulation. Any city begging for federal taxpayer funds should have to sign a contract stating that any cost overruns above what are agreed upon will be that city’s responsibility to pay for. Projects like the Big Dig in Boston turned into a fleecing of taxpayers by fatcat politicians and their supporters. Numerous projects have turned into greedy money grabs by politicians and their allies in the city where the construction takes place.
Infrastructure IS sexy.
Julio Berumen was a child who had surgery performed on him within the bottom wreckage, where he was pinned in a crushed car by both the car and the bodies of two dead adults. It's an interesting story.
That's incredible
I saw that one in a movie about it. They had to use a chainsaw to get him out.
It that the one where they had to cut the dead woman jn the seat in front of him in half to get him out?
@@julienielsen3746 yeah.
it wasn't him that needed surgery, it was his mom that was deceased and blocking the way for him to be rescued. so they had two surgeons come in to literally cut her in half. they sedated the boy so he wouldn't witness it. he's all grown up now.
As a child, I remember our car bouncing up and down with each expansion joint as we traveled the Nimitz Freeway regularly. That freeway had a pronounced dip in between each support column. It was almost like an amusement park ride. As an adult, I went down to that freeway that night to see if I could offer assistance after the quake.
I've never heard of the "Cypress Viaduct": since I moved here in the 80's, it was always just the Cypress Structure. The Embarcadero Freeway in SF was similar, but although it didn't collapse, it was compromised to the point of being torn down.
Yes - absolutely the “Cypress Structure” was its common name in the 1980s
The 7.9 you mention was in 1906, not 1908.
Good catch but for anyone who's running a channel called "Dark History" who cannot get the date correct for a catastrophic disaster loses all credibility in anything they ever say and only causes me to unsub!
@@isabellind1292 Who cares ,get lost then.
Yes it shows you that hell can truly be in a very narrow, compact, very small place.
Absolutely.
I drove on that a couple of days before it happened. When this happened it really freaked me out.
During the late summer/early fall months (at the time) I worked at the Renaissance Faire in Novato for several years, and since I lived in San Jose I drove through the Cypress Structure on a weekly basis for 10 - 12 weeks a year. Every single damn time I drove through northbound I sweated bullets until I got out the far end past the Maze. I still don't like elevated flyways, dread double-deck roads anywhere, and get panic attacks if I have to be inside a brick building for more than a few minutes.
Even though I moved away from California a few years ago, it's like living all my life in an earthquake zone has given me a weird, mild form of PTSD...
I was on this bridge 3 days before the quake. Felt the quake in LA when it happened - the sea stopped moving (it didn't but looked like it did because the ground under it was moving faster) and locals told us it was just a small local quake. No-one had any idea at first that it hit so hard further north and we were getting after shocks.
I was in downtown San Francisco in a high rise when the Loma Prieta struck. I was only on the second floor of a twenty-story modern building, but the shaking was severe enough that I took shelter for the first time during an earthquake. When I left to go home, I saw the century old Golden Gate Bank building’s brick facade laying in the street. The damage looked superficial. It wasn’t. I had to walk home to my flat in Hayes Valley and was surprised to see nothing broken, or even disturbed, in my century old wooden building. I found out latter, one of my neighbors in the building had just started to pull onto the Cypress when he realized he had forgotten a receipt, and he turn around and pulled back into a store parking lot just as the quake struck. Close call for him. SF was largely without electricity or gas for the better part of a week. I was very impressed to see that the City had almost no looting, and there were people feeding their neighbors all over town. I’m not sure that type of response would be the case in SF today.
Less BLM then
Your neighbor definitely had an angel watching over him that day. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be in a high rise building during a strong earthquake. I'm in Southern California so I've definitely experienced the strong earthquakes we've had. I will never get used to them. I'm glad you were safe.
@@gentlespiritjw4904 Actually, modern hi-rises built to California standards are probably just about the safest places one could be in a big quake. (Well, except for SF’s Millennium Tower.) The biggest risk is falling furniture, double-hung ceilings, etc., as it is one hell of a ride. My sister and her family were in Northridge and got quite a ride also. Both of us are in the Midwest now, and I tell you, I’ll take the earthquakes over the tornadoes any day.
I remember being in Southern California trying to watch the World Series and wonder when we'd feel the earthquake. That was the first time in my life (I was on the young side) when I had heard about an earthquake that I did not feel. I remember watching all the terrible damage up there on the freeways. Our freeway bridges started to make me feel apprehensive but I wasn't old enough to drive then so there was nothing I could do.
Then we had Landers and that is to this day the strongest earthquake I have ever been in and I was relatively close to it so it honestly scared the crap out of me while it was going on. Literally the only thing in our entire house that fell was my desk lamp, which also scared the crap out of me because that was during the strongest shaking and the strong part came back a couple of times. It was really scary.
When Northridge happened, it was enough to wake me up but it didn't see so bad here because we were further away. I was kind of surprised to find out about all the shit that fell then but it made me realize that they hadn't fixed the collapsing freeway bridge problem and, as much time has passed and as much as I've seen them do to retrofit our freeways and all kinds of other buildings too, I'd still rather be outside during the expected Big One.
That type of response wouldn't happen anywhere in the U.S. today.
As tragic as this event was it also highlights the need to respect Mother Nature and learn from it to protect ourselves and/or be prepared for such events. A bit hard to do when Mother Nature is unpredictable, A big thumbs up to all that helped. Thats what we do in the face of "Disaster"
My now sister-in-law was a student at Mills College in Oakland. She remembers this night well.
I did not know about this accident and earthquake until I saw this video.
When I saw the picture of the collapsed bridge, it reminded me of the Great Hanshin Earthquake that happened in our country (I am Japanese) and the motorway, but when I looked it up, I found out that this accident was caused by the same thing.
I was very surprised.
I pray for the souls of those who died.
Oh, yes - after I went through Loma Prieta myself, I remember watching the news from Kobe just a couple years later thinking, "Oh no!!! Not again!!!" I was actually in tears watching the scenes play out on my TV that night.
@@MrJest2
I really, really think that both earthquakes and the damage they caused are very tragic and sad. I would like to remember them, as well as the lessons learnt. At the time of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, I was still a child in the early grades of primary school and living in Tokyo. I remember watching in disbelief as the devastation was shown on TV every day from morning to night.
I heard that the images and photos of the highway that collapsed after the Great Hanshin Earthquake became famous all over the world, but I didn't realise that the same scene had already happened a few years ago...
me too😢😢😢😢
I am 73 years old and I’ve lived in the Bay Area, including the Santa Cruz Mountains, since I was 13. I was always terrified having to drive on what we referred to as the “The Cypress Structure.”. There were, in fact, many aftershocks. And the people who were trying to assist those who were trapped in the collapse would have to scuttle out of there every time an aftershock happened, which makes their bravery even more remarkable. My boyfriend at the time was working in a building immediately next to the Cypress Structure. He said the earthquake jolt and the sound of the structure collapsing was terrifying. To this day I am very anxious whenever I go under an overpass, particularly if there is a light on the other side of the overpass and I end up having to stop underneath that overpass. I am always anxious that there might be an earthquake while I’m under the overpass. The city of Oakland always gets a bad rap. However, in times of crisis, the citizens of Oakland always rally and do their best to help one another.
Its weird to be so grateful to a man who died before my time. My grandmother worked as a security agent/ sharp-shooter during WWII. She was on an airplane acting as security for Admiral Nimitz when the plane started to fail. It had been sabotaged. My grandmother had a parachute and knew what to do, but for some horrible reason couldn't bring herself to jump. Admiral Nimitz pushed her out, and they both survived. And even though my Grandmother was believed to be sterile by the US government (exposure to accidents at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project) she unexpectedly conceived my mother. So I owe him big time.
Well, damn, I went to Google expecting to find nothing, but the plane sabotage you're talking about really happened. Can't seem to confirm the rest of what you're describing, but even that much is pretty neat.
What a great story--thanks for sharing! Gramma was a sharpshooter! I think I can guess the horrible reason she couldn't bring herself to jump--YIKES!
Your grandma was a sharp shooter during WWII??? What does that even mean? Did she even see any action? Tall tales abound...
@@joebauers3746 You can google the plan sabotage incident. What you can't Google are the federal documents about what she experienced at Los Alamos.
If you don't want to believe what you read on the internet that's fine, but you only waste your time and mine with the 'pics or it didn't happen' style comments.
Nice family story!
Gosh I remember seeing this on the news as an elementary school kid on the other side of the world, New Zealand. It was on the news for weeks, in fact.
I remember that earthquake! I was living in Bakersfield at the time and was watching CNN. The news anchor became obviously distracted, looking at a monitor behind him. He then regained his professional composure and exclaimed, “there has been an earthquake in the San Francisco area.” I stayed glued to CNN and I watched the story unfold.
I had just turned on the Game in New York. Having lived in California I instantly new it was a quake, I think even before the people in the stands did. I had a very close friend who had just moved to Oakland and had never experienced even a tremor. I grabbed the phone and got him on the line while it was going on. Told him (screamed it) "Get outside now GO! NOW!" A few seconds after he got out his house partially collapsed. To this day, ever since Loma Prieta, when I am in LA I will not drive on an elevated freeway or stop under a bridge. Let 'em honk. That should be State Law. Unless you are able to proceed quickly under a bridge, any bridge, stop until you can. In '94 I was in Hollywood for the deadly Northridge Quake. You haven't seen anything until you have seen Sunset Boulevard undulate like the ocean. I was on the first plane headed East as soon as LAX reopened.
Northridge didn't feel that bad here compared with Landers. That one was the only earthquake that has ever truly scared me. Loma Prieta was the first earthquake I heard about on TV that I didn't feel so I thought that was very odd at the time, which is part of why I remember that day. Northridge had to have been so scary in Hollywood though! I was in a thrust earthquake in South America and they seem scarier than our usually side to side strike slip ones here in California. Loma Prieta also had a significant thrusting motion along with the side to side motion. That shit is a different beast.
To quote George LopezThem guys in Northridge need to stop worshipping there false gods and recognize.
no you didnt
"America had just won the Second World War" is possibly the most stereotypically USA sentence I've ever heard! It's not just factually incorrect, but also delusionally America-centric and ignorant of the sacrifices made by hundreds of millions of non-Americans around the world. Hilarious. Otherwise, a good video though. A very tragic event
I wrote my comment before reading yours and you say it much better than I . This I'd supposedly a fact channel , which it is it's a Change the fact channel gotta keep that Narrative going.
I was going to say the same thing but you beat me to it
America had just won the Second World War, Bille.
Don’t be mad that we won the war and your country didn’t
“The English Army had just won the war”
There are several countries who rightfully can claim to have won that conflict; the USA is one of them
Why there is the date of the January 7th 2012 in the first seconds written when the date said is October 17th, 1989?
It is an error, the date refers to the last video about an air balloon crash in New Zealand on January 7th 2012
@@paolof Yep that's what I think too.
Error.
removing that part, thx
I lived near the epicenter. We couldn’t sleep inside for a couple days because of the after shocks. Wish I still had the VHS tapes of the neighborhood walking around checking on each other and the sound of radios in the background updating everyone.
Sad it takes something like this to bring everyone back together.
I remember this vividly. So very scary and sad
Why on earth they would ever think a Double-Decker bridge in an earthquake prone zone would be a good idea is beyond belief.
The costs, and lengthy legal battles to build size by side would have ensured that the project would have never been completed.
I was watching Rescue 911 on the tv, when they broke in to announce this had just happened. Remember it like it was yesterday.
As a Chilean, I find it incredible frustrating that officials prioritized money and cost over earthquake safety. It is more expensive, but there's a reason we haven't had a deadly earthquake in over 60 years. (Not counting tsunami deaths).
Welcome to american capitalism, where profits come before everything, even human lives
@@MelissaJulie64 Oh sure...only in America this Bad country does this happen. Thanks Mellissa for the Marxist view. You KNOW Stalin really cared about "human lives!" I'm sure you do too! (maybe propaganda more)
Why did you add “As a Chilean”?
@@Thurston86 because even though there's corruption, we take building infrastructure very seriously. There's a reason for the last over 8.0 Richter earthquakes not doing any critical damage to our infrastructures.
I lived in the area for 4 years. We left the area and I was 13 and moved to Washington. We moved 2 months before the earthquake. And I remember being driven over that bridge all the time. Creepy.
RIP to all those people who lost There lives in this earthquake Its really sad.
Context: Liquefaction and seismic amplification are major problems wherever the natural wetlands were filled in to make the piers and ports. For instance there are buried sailing ships under the financial district in SF where the shoreline once was. The reason that particular area of land in Oakland was occupied by an impoverished dock-worker/industrial community before the Cypress freeway was because it was red lined and environmentally hazardous from being so close to dock and train pollution and reclamation materials.
Tldr: officials knew what type of land they were building on but did it anyway because it was cheaper and easier to remove poor minorities and cut them off from the rest of the city. The plan then backfired and lives were lost along with billions of dollars
After the Loma Prieta quake, the news, science museums, everybody in San Francisco (including me) was obsessed with why the Nimitz pancaked and what caused the houses in the Marina District to sink into the ground and what's the deal with just one little section the Bay Bridge being damaged? RE: The Nimitz freeway (and I'm frustrated you didn't include this information) it was discovered that the columns along the West side vibrated in a different way than the columns on the East side, increasing the amplitude of shaking as the vibrations traveled up the up the columns to the upper deck. California no longer builds freeway with columns on both sides, but rather a single very thick one in the middle.
A lot of the damage in the Marina district was attributed to soil liquefaction, as it was apparently built on landfill. I’m surmising that the soft mud referred to in the vid had much the same effect on the collapse of the Nimitz freeway. As for the section of the Bay Bridge that dropped out, you can see that it was directly above a support tower, which transferred the shock from the ground below to the roadway
Yes....horrible, and the "ripple affects" continued. My father was brutally murdered by a crack cocaine addict a several months before this earthquake. The jury was in deliberation precisely when the earthquake struck......and they IMMEDIATELY declared a "hung jury" and went home to see if they still has a home. The murderer eventually struck a plea bargain to second degree manslaughter.....and got 7 years imprisonment for premeditated murder (a receipt for a brand new hammer--the killing weapon---was found in his house, but not the hammer!). In California the prisoners get 1/2 time off for good behavior......so since he had already been in jail for over a year.....he was back out on the streets in a few months for killing another human being for that man's gold and diamond ring!!!! "America, Love it or leave it".....and I said goodbye, moved to Asia and never looked back!!! And look at what our beloved country has become nowadays!!! OMG.....I never thought it could get this bad....but it has! D
From sea to shining sea
You can thank the Democrats for their soft on crime stance because according to them " criminals can be rehabilitated ".
I remember watching the World Series game when it happened. I also remember It took awhile before people started to understand the scale of damage.
I was riding my skateboard when I seen the street signs twisting. I looked back and seen the asphalt ripple toward me like an oceanic wave. I ran to hide under the massive Spanish arches in front of our house. The neighbors came out and said the bay bridge and cypress structure fell.
We went two days later and you could smell the strong odor of blood coming from the crushed freeway.
This was big news even in Canada at the times. I can't even imagine the horror of that day.
I'm from Nebraska and remember this all over the news. Met a girl in the Navy who had been this road 20 minutes before the quake. Still wonder about my friend, Pam Devoe
I was watching the World Series and the game was at Candlestick Park. Al Micheals was on the mic when the quake hit. We watched the camera shake and flicker and could hear the rumble. He came BACK on the mic and said, "I'm not sure we're still on the air and I'm not even sure I care! We just had an earthquake!" It was an 'I'll never forget it' moment.
Little known fact the Oakland Athletics swept the Giants in that World Series. Great interesting video by the way.
My mom drove on the Nimitiz Freeway that day in 1989, 5 minutes before it collapsed.
My mom arrived to pick me up from school early from the Day Care and I hadn't wanted to leave yet but, it was mom's last day to pay insurance on our house.
This meant she had to cross another bridge city (it wasn't a double decker Freeway), to pay it.
When leaving driving along the 880 sometimes mom drove on The 580 this day because where we needed to go so mom could pay the insurance on the house we had too go by way of the 880.
The atmosphere felt off somehow and mom at first wanted too go on to San Francisco to visit Japan Town but, then it was like something said No, get off the Freeway Now.
Mom right in the middle of driving slams on the breaks right there and people familiar with the 880 it's frenetic as best to describe my mom tried getting to area where we'd get off the Freeway.
Then these 3 diesel Trucks come barreling by that's when mom put the car in reverse and actually back's off the Freeway and mom uses the backstreets to get on home.
5 minutes later mom's talking to this colleague at her second job who mentions how quiet it's been over there.
An the rumble starts where She is barely escaping getting killed due to a typewriter up on a shelf crashing down.
Then my cat who's been bouncing off the wall since we came through the door goes nuts mom calls me, I scramble under the Table but, let's not forget The World Series is going on at the same time as The Earthquake.
The aftershocks were the biggest problem while San Francisco was busy with collapsed Apartment buildings and Fire's.
All the power was out save for kiddie Fisher Price Radio I got for my 5th Birthday in 89, I was 8/9 year's old.
I was in 3rd grade.
Then while checking our garage we had our garage door open can't remember why Mom decided to do that (anyone familiar with West, Oakland going pass Acorn/Lower Bottoms? Towards the Old Amtrak Station before it got moved to Jack London?)
Better yet Prescott Elementary? Cole School? Martin Luther King. Jr School? St. Patrick's Catholic School?
How about Lowell Middle School when I attended the school there was only 7th & 8th grade now it's 6th, 7th, 8th.
A few women checked on mom and I then which touched mom to know end the Physically & Mentally wounded that coped with Drug use and Alcohol checked on all the Single mother's raising children on their own.
My mom says in the wake of the Cypress Freeway collapsing it was like Vietnam helicopters flying over all the time the 3rd & 4th day you could smell the bodies.
The weird part I don't remember smelling the bodies I probably would if we'd lived across the street from where the Freeway collapsed I could.
As a child I struggled with Allergies and the biggest place I was most affected my nose I mean you'd think, I'd been punched in the nose are something because I couldn't smell much.
Once the power came back on and we'd could see the T.V. The Double Decker Cypress Freeway apart of the Nimitz.
Mom thought we'd be alright with those 3 diesel Trucks that wouldn't let Us through on the Freeway.
We saw how wrong we actually were they were crushed.
Now the best part of that day in 1989, and was considered rather ironic but revealed by The News Outlet, not sure if that part was true what they said is that most of the people in the neighborhood who were searching for and trying to help survivors.
They brought their own tools and ladders supposedly they were The Theives and burglars.
I suspect it was said because they're was nearly a Riot between West Oakland and East Oakland FEMA arrived they handed out Bologna and cheese sandwiches while The People in the Oakland Hills past Naval Hospital & Oakland Known and Zoo Got Hot Meals big dinners.
It took forever before they went and finally built the Newer Cypress Freeway, it took forever for them to tear down the whole collapsed Freeway too.
Not forever with the Bay Bridge.
If anyone is reading this 2022 anyone saw The Godzilla Movie 2014?
Because even though I no longer in The State of California, I enjoyed seeing Franklin Street, the tower Parking Lot, Lake Merritt, 19th Street Bart Station just as Blue as Ever.
AC-Transit looked Healthy with its Green coloring though I wonder if the Green has been changed yet.
Is The Oakland Public Main Library still open around Lake Shore. Even when one moves Nobody Forget's The City of Their Birth Oakland, CA.
I the 10th generation of my family to be born and raised here in San Jose, Ca, and I was a sophomore in high school when this quake occurred...in fact, we were in the middle of tackling drills so when I saw the field heaving up and down, I thought I just got my bell rung when I tackled our RB... my teammates were literally falling over like felled trees, it was crazy...what the narrator of this vid didn't mention was the saddest story to come out of the Cypress tragedy, and that was when firefighters had to remove the legs of a dead woman in order to rescue her daughter from their crushed vehicle...that's how bad it was in the freeway structure that day....
We were living in LA and I was taking a bath, when all the water in the tub suddenly turned into a wave! We were in a very old, small apt. bldg. which swayed horribly. I jumped out and we could watch the news while trying to get hold of family. My dad took the freeway every day for 20 years, and had retired the year before, so he was not commuting anymore, thank goodness, saved his life.
All I remember was seeing the World Series game on TV here in Ontario (Canada, not California), and the announcer saying "we're having a qua...." then getting cut off. That was terrifying to watch as a teenager. I can't even imagine what it was like living through the Loma Prieta earthquake.
My friend who had grown up in the Bay Area (along with me and the rest of our friends) had recently moved to Florida and had a similar experience to yours - he saw that, and then the screen went to test pattern as the signal cut off, and he immediately feared that all his friends had just been killed. He couldn't imagine a quake so powerful it would cut off the television broadcast from the friggin' World Series (!) and was petrified with terror... for the minute or two it took to re-align the satellite dishes and pick up the signal again.
He said that was the longest minute of his life...
My family were on our way to my dad's wake service. I just drove that section earlier as I was commuting from San Jose. The earthquake hit just before we were leaving for the chapel.
We still had the service, I remember seeing smoke from S.F. We lived in El Cerrito so we had a great view. Memories.
I was in Richmond.
Very interesting and the photos are amazing. Just one point. America did not win the 2nd World War, it was won by the Allies of which America was a part.
I’m from Santa Cruz. I was 3 years old when the earthquake happened. I have a few spotty memories mostly of the aftershocks. I was in the bathroom and all these bottles were falling out of the cabinet. I told my parents and they said not to worry about it and we went out to the street where the whole neighborhood was. Everyone congregating, trying to get out of their houses and onto the shaking road.
How exactly did that woman's speedometer measure her speed in the AIR?
It measures the transmissions output shaft speed which is translated to mph. While she was in the air the engine would have revved up spinning the wheels faster. Kind of like being on ice.
@@ThatGuy-sd3zl Exactly!
@@ThatGuy-sd3zl Right. So it _doesn't_ measure air speed, which was my question. It renders shaft rotations into an estimated land speed. There is no way a person falling in a car would apply consistently increasing pressure to the accelerator up to the equivalent of roughly twice their original land speed, and remain unaware they were falling. Especially not quickly enough for all of that to register consciously.
Basically what I'm saying is that it was a narrative conceit. And it scanned as a bit silly. 🤣
@@naporeon It does sound odd to me as well considering all this would have happened within 2-3 seconds.
More likely the driver would have noticed being airborne and instinctively hit the brakes. Later recalling that the engine revved up for a split second and the brakes did nothing.
Recalling the story makes more sense than trying to portray the story in real time as though it took like 15 seconds.
@@ThatGuy-sd3zl I bet you're exactly right with your impression, including the 2-3 second estimation.
As a fun thought exercise, a freefall of 15 seconds--while no doubt more narratively compelling--would indicate, what, a 3,600+ foot drop? Air speed would probably have been a bit more than 100mph in that scenario, haha.
I grew up in San Francisco. In October of '89, I was living and working in the city. My buddies and I had left work early, to gather at my place, to watch the game. I lived on a hill that was bedrock. So, we didn't feel the quake as intensely (though it was still scary). A coworker of mine, lived over in Hayward. He took that Cypress Viaduct every day. At the moment of the quake, he just happened to be on that section (upper deck). He said that he thought that he had a flat tire. Wanting to pull over, he looked in his rearview mirror, only to see that the freeway behind him was GONE! There was nothing but a huge cloud of yellow dust.
A friend told me she had just exited the lower deck about 20 minutes prior to the quake.
Well, maybe if those in charge of these projects didn't skimp on the cost and knew what the hell they were doing, this type of thing wouldn't happen.
Though I was born in Vallejo in 1995, my mom told me stories about her & her then bf at the time sneaking into areas that were taped off around the collapsed parts of the bridges & said she could smell all the decomposing bodies 😞 Very somber day for the SF Bay Area & should serve as a reminder to never take advantage of lax building codes/cost cutting..
When it started shaking, I was at Van Ness &Geary, with my g'friend. We thought a friend was jokingly shaking our car. As frenchies, absolutely not aware of what to do in such cases, we ran at the middle of the crossing, where she fainted. In the middle of a busy street with a sack of marshmallow to hold.
OMG, this is so weird...I was literally A BLOCK AWAY FROM YOU,, stopped at a red light at Geary and Polk! What a trip!
@@teptime yup, it felt like walking on a carpet with giant bowling balls dancing under out feet.
The 'no aftershocks' line was kinda odd. There were many, many aftershocks, just not large enough to do substantially more damage. Maybe that's what you meant? I lived there at the time so I clearly remember the aftershocks in the days after this.
Other than that, this is another interesting and informative video. Thanks for making it.
“America just won WW2 “ wow all by yourselves! Well done guys!
I remember this Earthquake, my grandpa would have been on that thing, if didn't leave work early.
I was working in Berkeley that day and was about 1/4 mile from the Cypress structure when the quake struck. I was listening to the Giants/As game on the radio. This was a LONG quake, I’ve lived in California my whole life and so I’m used to them, but this one felt different. The street signs ahead of me started undulating and my car felt like it was rocking both forward and backward and up and down at the same time. It was the weirdest sensation, I remember feeling dizzy and nauseated. I had my window rolled down and heard an ominous sound, a roaring similar to a train moving at high speed. It got louder and louder. Later I learned that that sound was the Nimitz collapsing onto itself. I was very surprised that more people weren’t killed that day, the baseball game was a really important factor. There was one guy who survived the collapse only to die a month later in the hospital.
The Oakland Hills firestorm a few years later was even more terrifying. I love the Bay Area but I’m glad I now live in the Tahoe area, we have quakes here too but they are much milder. Now it’s wildfires I fear the most.
I was driving on hwy 24 heading west towards the caldacott tunnel when it hit. KFOG suddenly went off the air and my car swerved as if I had two flat tires. I slowed down and realized it was a earthquake. I kept going and went through the tunnel. By the time I popped out KFOG was back on and they announced we just had a big quake. There was a fire at a towing company off in the distance in Berkeley. It was surreal driving through Oakland to get to my friends home. Chimneys had crumbled and crushed cars. We set up a black and white TV at my friends because his Sony had fallen off its stand and was broken. We watched everything on "bunny ears".
When they showed the Bay Bridge it was truly horrifying to see in real time. Not everyone was rushing to help the trapped victims either. They were there for other reasons unfortunately. Sad but true.
I was five years old at the time, and my parents were getting me and my brother (nine at the time) ready to go visit our cousins across the bay. My mom was putting my shoes on, when she screamed EARTHQUAKE! and grabbed me and ran into the hallway to cower against the closet. I just remember being smothered. Apparently my mom felt it before anyone else in the house, because my brother thought she was crazy until the real shaking began.
The next thing I remember if walking out of the house, holding my mom's hand, having only ONE SHOE ON (I just remember being very upset about this) and asking, "what happened, Mommy?" over and over again. I also remember all our other neighbors walking out of their own houses, just as confused and dazed as we were.
I also remember driving around later that day to try and find a place to have dinner (we didn't have anything at home because we were going to our cousins but now we couldn't) and everything was closed.
I felt my first earthquake around the same along, although several years before this and in Southern California. My mom had already told me about the fact that there were earthquakes so, when I felt shaking and looked around to see that everything was shaking, I remarked to my playmate that this must be an earthquake, so we went into the hall. I thought it was interesting and nothing fell in that one so it seemed fine to me. I think it was like a 5 or something so not that bad for California building codes at the time. I had some relatives who were there in San Fransisco, both for the Loma Prieta and even the 1906 Big One, and she said that shit shook around in the house terribly so maybe the shaking is different because of the soil composition in some parts there. I remember that we used to get a lot of bright blue lights flashing out of the ground back in the late 80s and early 90s around here and that no one would believe me at the time. They happened so often that I used to look out my window for them when I was forced to go to bed but couldn't sleep. Then I didn't see them for like a decade until the late 2010s and then we started having a few significant earthquakes here again.
I remember seeing this all over the news when it happened. Formative disaster to my childhood, along with the Challenger disaster.
This happened when I was 13 and living in the Sacramento area. My mom worked in the Bay (Hayward) and took that freeway every day. She was supposed to be on it heading home but switched shifts with a buddy, which I didn't find out until hours later when she was finally able to get through on the clogged phone lines. Her buddy said he basically watched it happen in his rearview mirror. He cleared the chunk that collapsed, heard a crazy sound a few seconds later, and then looked up to his rearview just in time to see a bunch of cars get squished.
This was pretty much the beginning of my disaster documentary obsession.
I love history and I'm so glad that I found this channel
I was 19 when this quake hit. I was in Concord in a friend's apartment.
Years later I met a woman, maybe 8 years younger than me. She was in the back seat of the car when the freeway fell on them. Her mother and her mother's friend were both killed, but she was nit hurt. She was trapped though, and when emergency workers finally found her they could only get her out but cutting her mother's body to pieces so she could escape.
Wasn't her brother also trapped b his mom's body & in addtion, the 1st responders, they had to cut not only the mom's body apart but had to remove his leg, if I remember correctly?
@@irulanfoucher2183 I do remember a couple of people who had to go through on site amputations. There was more than one if I remember correctly.
I was on the phone with a friend when an after shock hit. She was in Concord and I was in Benicia about 20 miles north. She screamed then a few seconds later I felt the quake. It was small, but having just experienced the big one, it was scary.
You don't know how much it's going to shake.
Damn
Dang. All I remember at 5 years old of the earthquake is how annoyed my family was from all the extra traffic it caused over the next year or so. We own a business in SF and live in Danville. Thank god they were not on the freeways at that hour AND thank god they were ok. So heartbreaking to hear the stories of the deaths.
Does anyone really expect Politicans especially Californian politicians to make good decisions for the people. When it comes to spending our taxpayer money they always make the wrong decisions. Because paying back their donors is priority and our safty is last.
You should know by now, that the __g_o_v___ernment dont give a "F" about people.
I had recently relocated to Southern Oregon from LA. I was tired from all the work and had just stretched out on the couch and put my feet up. The moment I did that, I felt the rumble and roar of an earthquake! Yes, even in Oregon you could feel those terrifying things. Will never forget that day. So much destruction (that should not have happened) and loss of life. I was both afraid and oh so sad......
We were about 1 hour or 2 outside of San Fran when this happened. We were driving in to run a booth at a Harvest Festival. It was totally insane living there for 5 or 6 days. Every window seemed to be broken, we had a hotel room, but no water. Thank god for a close by Burger King open near our hotel, without it we could not eat or use the bathroom. I am so glad we were not in the city when it hit. Oh, the road was super trippy. It looked more like water than concrete. Somewhere I have a survived the quake of '89 t-shirt I got then. Crazy how someone could crank out shirts then.
I lived, and still live, about 8 miles away from the epicenter in Nisene Marks Forest. I remember every second to this day.
I am a native San Franciscan who lived in Santa Rosa at the time (About 60 miles north of S.F.) We felt the earthquake as well. Having lived through several earthquakes growing up, I was very surprised how strong it was in Santa Rosa.
I was 7 when the earthquake hit, and living in the South Bay. We were riding bikes on our street and the parents did a great job keeping us kids from panicking. Watching the news afterwards was surreal, and I still get anxious when I have to drive on layered roads/bridges because the image of the freeway pancaking is so vivid in my mind.
My aunt worked at a news station in Berkeley at the time and recently she told me about how the damage took them off the air, and how frantically they worked to put out the fires and get the broadcast up again
I remember it well. We were visiting family at the time. At the end of the day we were on that stretch of roadway. The next morning we caught an early flight to LA for a connecting flight to Tahiti. When we landed in Papeete, Tahiti we saw it on the news. I think my "Guardian Angels" all the time.
My dad was stationed there in the marines in 1989 when it happened. Years later he told me about the destruction and the Nimitz freeway.
Many, many things that happened on the Nimitz are reported as wrong. First, it wasn't built upon "Soft Soil." The ground was compacted. Which is a very safe alternative to drilling to bedrock. Hell, the Brooklyn Bridge is partially built on, (as you say) soft soil. Bad construction caused the Nimitiz to collapse, nt bad dirt. BTW, there is an elevated subway (BART) the runs along the same dirt as the Nimitiz Freeway. It didn't fall during the earthquake !! Because it was built to code, not to some dudes hunch. Also, every school in the East Bay and 90% of the population in the San Francisco Bay Area lives on soft soil. Schools, freeways, subways, water mains, sewer mains ... you name it, it's on an earthquake prone area. Why ?? Because the land was cheap. I live in the City, in a high-rise and it is totally safe. I'm safer up here than the rabble down on the streets. Get over yourself if you think that you or anyone can build something that is completely safe from a natural disaster. It is impossible. Mexico City had a large quake that destroyed buildings that were poorly built. The properly built ones still stand. The same everywhere. It's because of poor construction. Don't believe me ?? Just look at India or China or Bangladesh or in any 3rd world nation. Poor construction equals more death. That's it.
I agree the Alaskan Way Viduct in Seattle built on simular soil withstood the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually Earthquake on February 28, 2001
The Embarcadero, across the bay in SF, didn't come down either - and part of that was on fill.
@@JillC2 You're so right. It was a bit damaged, but it held up. Talk about soft soil, the old Oakland Coliseum is built on mud. It's actually under sea level. All of the BART system is built on that same dirt. BART survived with no damage. Because the buildings that stood up were built correctly. It's not the soil, it's the way you build something.
@@petermontoya1796 Agreed. The soil is factor you can and should consider during construction, but that is what partially determines whether or not something is built well and to code. If something isn't built well, and isn't designed to withstand the environment, it'll fall down.
The collapsed apts in the Marina District. Built in sand, we were informed.
I was 19 at the time and was on the phone chatting and the game was on so I will never forget this.
If it wasn't for the World Series and my brother leaving work early to watch the game, he might have been on that stretch of freeway.
By the way, the freeway isn't so free anymore.
Not free? please explain!
@@daystar4909 Well, certain times and certain lanes are now toll roads in the Bay Area.
In the 60's, 70's and 80's all freeways in the Bay Area were free. Only tolls were our bridges.
In the Midwest and East coast their "Freeways" are not called Freeways, there called Expressways.
Even groceries bags are no longer free in this society. Everything cost.
My long decease mother would be astonishing at this generation.
GodBlessU!
@@characterunderconstruction5891 Thank you very much for explaining. and it is so sad how greedy society has become. waiting for Jesus to return really.
@@characterunderconstruction5891 I agree, although the bags costing money is to try to deter people using single-use bags. I got into the habit of bringing my own canvas bags and I think it's a good idea, personally. :)
Search parties found pancaked piles of meat inside the flattened cars. The top deck fell so hard and fast that drivers simply exploded from the impact. My buddy had a father who was NTSB investigator. The story from him was chilling.
I was 10 years old when this happened. I was upstairs, goofing off, when I was supposed to be doing bible study. And I heard rumbling. I thought somehow my mom found out I was goofing off, and was stomping up the stairs to come and punish me. But it didn't stop. Suddenly, there she was, she scooped me up and held me under the door frame in the hallway. Our dog, trying to be with us, slipped and fell down the stairs, breaking its back. We were in Tracy, CA at the time of this Earthquake. Tracy was/is more than an hour away from San Francisco by the most direct route. To not even be anywhere close to San Francisco and to feel it that strongly still... That quake was bad, real bad.
I was watching the baseball game that day, I live in Ontario Canada, so I was in total shock what was happening, except for a tiny movement on very rare occasions we have no idea what an earthquake is like, it was awhile before we realized just how horrific the situation was..
I remember when that happened I just turned 18 that June
I found one of the points to be quite peculiar… you mention the post WW2 era boom of individual automobile purchases while saying that public transport was poor/minimal for the area… ironically however, the United States actually had a rather robust public transport system in years past before auto-manufacturer lobbyists in Washington D.C put a stop to that. They convinced many folks that public transport was ineffective, inefficient, unnecessary, etc. in order to guide them towards making decisions that would ultimately benefit many greedy pockets.
My mother was on the Bay Bridge when this hit.
Just wanted to say, very professional video. You've earned a sub