The Loma Prieta Earthquake Disaster of 1989 | Episode 85 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's the worst thing you ever saw at a sports game?
Someone throw a battery at the make a wish kid. Well,
sure if you're from Philly, but what if you were
from California? Hello, and welcome to Doomsday History is Most

(00:24):
Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the
most traumatic, bizarre, and conspiring, but largely unheard of or
forgotten disasters from throwed human history and around the world.
On today's episode, we'll talk about zombies and crucifixions and
collapsing buildings. Before we even really get into the episode,

(00:45):
we are going to watch the shortest baseball game of
all time, and we're going to cut off one of
your limbs in one of the more claustrophobic ways possible.
And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you
would hear one of the most extreme but very different
kind of arm Severing examples of self rescue in history,

(01:05):
the story of a must have close casket funeral friendly
rescue device and the absolutely brutal, very public early use
of it, And an unnecessarily dirty explanation of how earthquakes work.
This is not the show you play around kids, or
while eating or even a mixed company. But as long
as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and

(01:27):
learn something that could potentially save your life, our work
is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids
out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses,
and let's beg in. Back around two thousand and nine,
I had the opportunity to fly San Francisco with my
partners in our tiny little marketing company to visit the

(01:48):
headquarters of Capcom. You know, the video game people. We'd
come to talk about their new a zombie video game.
We're there to pitch them on the idea of bowling
in the streets with human heads to raise awareness of it,
and we ended up doing a massive booth exhibit at
E three in Los Angeles that year. Compared to other
companies handing out shirts or stickers with calm cues to

(02:09):
play their newest games, our booth was a little well,
let me explain. Along with a chance to play the
game and check out props like motorcycles with chainsaws on
them and propane tanks wrapped in dynamite, we also had
zombies in cages guarded by our own Capcom security force.
We organized a separate group of protesters who vocally abused

(02:31):
our booth and handed out flyers protesting violence against zombies
by showing a white haired friendly woman about to be
beheaded by chainsaw with the line you wouldn't do this
to your grandma. Occasionally, about twice an hour, our protesters
would release the zombies from their cages onto the convention floor,
who would then in turn attacked convention goers and had

(02:53):
to be corralled by our guards. And how were the
protesters treated? Well, you ever watch cops back in the Ege.
They would take them down as dramatically as possible, causing
a massive ruckus and all the flyers they were carrying
wood fling everywhere while these people screamed for their lives.
See the way we saw it, We were hired to
make an impression, and that is exactly what we did.

(03:17):
I'll post a video of it to Patreon. All the
neighboring booths complained bitterly to officials, including Nintendo, who claimed
we messed up the North American launch of the Nintendo
three DS. That said, we still won Best in Show
for our work that year, so it's only fair to
say we fell in love with San Francisco. I mean

(03:37):
we were nearly mugged twice. One of my partners was
almost killed by a sea lion. I'm not making that up.
And there were more homeless people than I have ever
seen before. And when I asked the desk clerk at
the hotel to just show me on a map any
areas that I had no business being in, he filled
it in like it was a children's coloring book. We
went there to talk about putting zombies in the streets,

(03:59):
and then we go there and we actually find drug
addled zombies already in the streets. The other thing we
were there for was the opening of the Millennium Tower,
a fifty eight story blue gray glass modernist condo skyscraper
designed to resemble a translucent crystal right in the heart
of downtown San Francisco. The elevators actually say it's sixty stories,

(04:22):
but for various superstitious reasons, the thirteenth and forty fourth
floor do not exist. It also weighs in at about
six hundred and eighty six million pounds, and that is
as much as an astounding one hundred and seventy one thousand,
five hundred Dodge caravans. And why do we care how
heavy it is well. The real strength of any structure

(04:45):
is in the base that it is slapped onto, and
most skyscrapers are literally bolted into the uncompressible dependability of bedrock.
It's really stern stuff, much sterner than the dense pack
sand that the Millennium Tower was built on. The well
known travel writer Bill Brison once said that his most
cherished joys of travel is the simple act of sitting

(05:07):
in a foreign coffee shop and reading a local newspaper.
I wonder what he would have thought if he had
traveled to San Francisco, opened a newspaper and found out
that the city's newest six hundred and forty five foot
tall architectural achievement, the tallest concrete building in the city,
was falling over. This was the tallest residential building west

(05:29):
of the Mississippi River, and the thing was tilting. The
code book said that buildings like this were allowed to
sink five and a half inches over twenty years. This
building sank ten inches before they'd even smashed a champagne
bottle into it. The people who called it home paid
through the nose to live there. So long story short,
you can imagine the lawsuits and screaming matches that have

(05:52):
gone on for the last sixteen years, especially once the
wall started cracking and the windows started popping out. Today,
the building's northwest corner tilts about two and a half feet.
I'm sure the residents loved the hundred million dollar bump
in their condo fees. When the engineers started fixing the problem,
they were shoring it up from underneath, and did it

(06:15):
work well. One hundred million dollars later, the building straightened
up by one inch and all they can do now
is wait to see how long that lasts. And listeners
of the show Joe Montana and Kevin Durant lived there
since way before I was a kid. There's been a
persistent belief in non Californians like myself that it's only

(06:38):
a matter of time before it either broke off and
floated away or sunk into the ocean and became the
new Atlantis. All we knew was there was a fault
line named Santa Dreas, And even though we didn't really
know what fault lines did or were, we knew that
if an earthquake hit, it was going to be all
its fault. Did you know there are over five hundred

(07:00):
fault lines crisscrossing the state. Only a handful of them
are serious enough to ever land a mansion in anyone's obituary.
And this one is named after Saint Andrew. And if
you are a long enough listener of the show, you
know that there are a few things I enjoy more
than talking about the deaths of saints. And in what
inventive and sickening way was Saint Andrew sent to his death? Well,

(07:23):
don't get too excited. Andrew was one of Jesus's twelve disciples,
and when he was trying to spread the word of
Christianity in Greece, they were all, hey, coime, here, we
want to show you something. And what they showed him
was the business end of a whip and a hammer
and some nails and an ex shaped wooden crucifix. It
whipped them silly and nailed them to it upside down.

(07:46):
Arguably this was a more painful way for him to
die than traditional crucifixes. You should also know that during
his life he healed a blind man, converted cannibals into
culinary law abiding citizens, and once brought a kid back
to life. And today that x that he was nailed
to is called the Saint Andrew's Cross or in Spanish

(08:10):
San Andreas, and if you bonger fish or suffer from gout,
he's the one that you call. Now you know more.
But back to the fall line. So the San Andreas
was destined to kill everyone in California, while people as
far as Nevada stand slackshot watching as the tide rolls in.
But we're not gonna let that stop us from making

(08:31):
a visit today. I hope you brought your appetite for Riserni,
some analgiza cream for your calves, and enough money to
afford stadium beer. We are going to be spending our
time today in San Francisco. Yep, surprise. We haven't been
here since our Big Game Disaster of nineteen hundred episode,
so it's only fitting that we take our minds off

(08:53):
all of the zombies and crucifixions and collapsing buildings by
going to a baseball game. Our story takes place October seventeenth,
nineteen eighty nine. It was late on a beautiful sunny
autumn day. The sky was cloudless and blue, and the
sun was gloriously golden in the late afternoon. Across the

(09:15):
Bay Area, millions of people were going about their day,
finishing up their random tasks while the sun set the
sky ablaze with fiery colors all melting together. I only
pointed out because as I am recording this, I have
been watching a sky with the palette of concrete slowly
fart itself dark. Most residents had already taken off early

(09:39):
from work and carjacked their way home to take in
Game three of the World Series. This one was a
literal cross town match up between the San Francisco Giants
and the Oakland Athletics. They called it the Battle of
the Bay, and people love those. Over sixty thousand baseball
fans packed into Candlestick Park, home to the San Francisco

(10:01):
Giants and the forty nine Ers. Of all the historic
little moments at Candlestick Park, my favorite was July the
twenty ninth, nineteen sixty six. The Beatles played there right
on the field. This was the same year that John
Maids were bigger than Jesus' comment, and of course there
had been some backlash and radio stations banned them, and

(10:23):
giant piles of Beatle albums and memorabilia were steamrolled and
publicly burned. Even the KKK had an opinion. Anyways, they
had to sneak out of Candlestick in an armored truck
while the rest of the crowd was still in the
stadium for their own safety. But before they left, John, Paul, George,
and Ringo all stopped to take photos of the crowd

(10:44):
from the stage, which was kind of weird for them,
but it would turn out that this was the last
time that they ever performed a live concert together. John
Leonard apologized, saying he didn't mean it literally and if
not for this whole scandal in America, the Beat wouldn't
have switched over to their more psychedelic studio albums. So

(11:04):
if you like Sergeant Pepper's I guess that you should
thank the clan. Oh and Jesus was unavailable for comment
on the whole popularity dusktop. Anyways, I was gonna say
that Candlestick Park was nestled along the shoreline of the bay,
but in calling it nestled, you have to take into
consideration the parking lot. One one hundred and thirty acres

(11:27):
of parking made the stadium look like a tic tac.
That is, over half a million square meters of cars
just sitting there doing nothing. Can you imagine forgetting where
you parked in a lot designed to hold ten thousand vehicles.
For comparison, the entire Disney Magic Kingdom in Florida has

(11:49):
just over twelve thousand spaces. The Oakland Athletics, on the
other hand, played across the bay at the Oakland Alameda
County Coliseum, which I believe is now the ring Dorcam Coliseum. Anyway,
the two stadiums were only about ten miles or sixteen
kilometers apart. Just a quick trip across the San Francisco

(12:12):
Oakland Bay Bridge, which we're just going to call the
Bay Bridge. It opened in nineteen thirty six and was
one of the longest and most complex bridge projects in
the world. This thing spans four and a half miles
that's seven point two kilometers across San Francisco Bay with
a double decker design. And it's not as famous as

(12:36):
the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's actually longer and busier
and not without its charms. I mean, say, isn't that Alcatraz. Well,
on this day, traffic was way lighter than normal because
of the game. In fact, oddly, the actual trip to
see the game in person would take less time than
it would to park no matter where you drove from.

(13:00):
This was the first crosstown World Series since the New
York Yankees swept the Brooklyn Dodgers thirty three years earlier
in nineteen fifty six. So yeah, people were stoked. Game
three was scheduled to begin at Candlestick Park at five
thirty five, and the ABC pregame show began at five o'clock.

(13:22):
Al Michaels began the broadcast, narrating over slowed down taped
highlights from games one and two to a kind of
sexy saxophone music. And so you know, al Michaels is
equally beloved for his days as an American sportscaster as
he was for famously never having willingly eaten a vegetable
in his life. In Game one, Dave Stewart of the

(13:46):
A's had thrown a shutout and Mike Moore swept in
the second, and because of this, the A's were halfway
to their first World Series win since nineteen seventy four.
And for reference, at this point in their career, the
A's were still thirteen years from their moneyball years. And
I'm not saying ABC Television was biased against the Giants,

(14:06):
but when they were talking about them, they were showing
this collage of sad Giants fans and asking the question
why the long face. They went on to describe changes
to the A's lineup, then congratulated the Giants for being
able to find the park unassisted and for wearing their
uniforms facing the right way. Tim McCarver joined the broadcast

(14:28):
to talk about Terry Kennedy dropping a throw at the
plate and kind of giggling at the Giants' chances of
pulling out four winds in a row to clinch the title.
You might think that's a bit of a bad look,
but not as bad as the picture. Only four and
a half minutes into the pregame show and the signal
started to get a little weird. Back then, TVs did

(14:49):
that kind of thing. You just needed to give them
a good whack. Actually, until the nineteen nineties, the key
to fixing almost anything was turning it on and off again.
But before that you had to hit things to fix them.
You could hear McCarver talking about Jose Canseco and Dave
Parker beating up at second base when the signal broke
up and cut out after a few seconds, the picture

(15:11):
intermittently flashed between colors and static and blackness, and then
the sound went and then they put up an illustration
of a monkey operating a TV camera with the caption Oops,
something went wrong. About thirty seconds later, the audio returned,
and they could be heard questioning whether they were on
the air, until Al Michael said, well, folks, that's the

(15:33):
greatest open in the history of television, bar none. And
when the picture returned, there was a police car now
on the field, and before we could get an explanation
of what happened, the signal cuts to a five minute
parade of commercials before eventually changing over to an episode
of Roseanne, and then the following announcement, due to an

(15:53):
earthquake in the San Francisco area, we have lost our
feed from the world series Truck. We will keep you
informed of the situation. And the time was five four pm.
And in those first moments, a deep rumbling vibration was
felt underfoot, and within seconds it transformed from a low
murmur into something violent and convulsive. The ground wasn't just shaking,

(16:17):
it was rolling and twisting and buckling. Inside homes and
offices across the Bay Area windows shattered and people ran
for the doors. Books and shelves and pantries all emptied
and fell with a cacophony of sound. The shaking was
so fierce it felt impossible to move without stumbling. Imagine

(16:38):
trying to stay upright while all of your furniture dances
around you. People outside could see buildings bending and swaying,
and many residents wouldn't have seen anything like this since
back in their hate Ashbury Summer of Acid days. The
situation was even worse on the roads. Traffic signals blinked
out and cars lurched and slid as the pavement crod

(17:00):
and heaved beneath them. Grans in the port of Oakland
swung dangerously, and there were even warehouses that crumbled while
workers ran for cover. For fifteen seconds, people struggled to
keep their balance as the pavement beneath them seemed to
come to life and rebel against them, like being on
a boat in rough seas. And in your imagination, the

(17:21):
sound of an earthquake is just that, a loud rumbling
offset by the occasional panic scream. But the reality is
much different between the sound of grinding concrete, glass shattering
and the eerie grown of steel structures straining and bending.
The sound was deafening. Roads buckled and bridges cracked, and

(17:44):
entire sections of highways crumbled. Then, just as quickly as
it had begun, the shaking stopped. A brief moment of
silence followed, immediately replaced with a building chorus of screams
and sirens and calls for help. Ted Copple eventually interrupted
Rozanne with helicopter footage of a massive building fire and

(18:06):
described an earthquake that caused what he called considerable damage
across the Bay area. Most local TV stations were still
knocked off the air, and Copple explained that there was
a fire singular lightly caused by the quake, and there
may have been some injuries at Candlestick Park. No, it
didn't seem so bad. Over the next ten minutes or so,

(18:30):
the story began to coalesce. The news choppers were definitely
seeing more than one fire erupting, but they didn't care
about that anymore as they raced along the east shore
of the Bay towards the bridge and hovered in disbelief.
The Bay Bridge as a double decker roadway up top
roadway below, while a span of the roadway on the

(18:51):
eastern cantilever side, five lanes wide, measuring seventy six by
fifty feet and weighing as much as one hundred and
twenty five times us, collapsed onto the lower deck like
a ramp like a pancake. Thankfully, traffic skidded to a halt,
some stopping just inches from the gaping hole. Several had

(19:12):
been injured as their vehicles became trapped beneath the collapse span,
and it narrowly missed hitting a city bus. People grabbed
their keys and bolted back towards land. That was a
two hundred foot drop into the bay that no one
wanted to make. The lower span was not loose, but
it did not collapse into the bay. The span broke

(19:32):
directly over a support pier, which held its weight and
distributed into the foundation, and the point being that if
the bridge had failed at any other point along it,
it would have taken both levels down into the bait below,
which is cold and full of sharks. There was one
vehicle on the upper span that had no reason to

(19:52):
believe that they weren't safe and weren't able to stop
in time when they were proven wrong. Twenty three year
old Angela Chow in her red nineteen eighty nine UGO
plunged off the broken section of the upper deck, and
by the time she understood where gravity had fallen out to,
she was dead. And we will come back to her.

(20:13):
You know how I say, never say worse. Well, let's
follow those news choppers and the blimp. I forgot to say.
You know who else was helping with the aerial reconnaissance.
It was one of the Goodyear blimps. You're going to
remember them from our Goodyear Blimp Disaster of nineteen nineteen episode. Anyway,
let's follow these eyes in the skies as they draw

(20:35):
us to a scene of less imaginable horror. You might
remember the name Nimts from our US Navy Versus Typhoon
Cobra episode. The California Nimts Highway starts at the I
eight eighty by the two eighty in San Jose and
heads northeast all the way to the one oh one.
But we don't care about that. We only care about

(20:55):
a very small section of the Nimets running through Oakland
called the Cyper Street Viaduct. The highway at this point
was also a four lane double deck or freeway for
about one and a half miles or two and a
half kilometers When the earthquake peered up and slapped two
the freeway buckled and twisted before the support columns twisted

(21:16):
and failed, causing the upper deck to lean and fall
onto the lower deck. Cars on the upper deck were
tossed around violently, some of them flipped on their side,
some of them dangling off the edge of the freeway.
The last thing those on the lower level of the
freeway would have remembered would have been the sudden bloom
of dust eating the tail lights ahead of them before

(21:37):
there was a jolt, and the incredible snapping sound of
steel and concrete before everything went dark. After your senses returned,
the first thing you'd probably notice would be the pressure
of something heavy on your legs or and this is
an and, or maybe you're screaming yourself horse because they're
bent forwards, you know, more like the way a horse's

(21:59):
legs is supposed to bend, which is kind of backwards
to the way we'd like to wear them. Either way,
you're probably pinned between the center console, your dash, and
your doors, which are now all crushed inwards. Lord knows
where the steering wheel goes, and if it weren't hard
enough to catch your breath, the air would become about

(22:20):
one part oxygen twelve parts cement dust. Maybe you're even
coughing up up little blood. Oh and it would be dark,
like so so very very dark. Because of the fluke
of your choice to take the lower level of the
Cypress Viaduct this morning, you are now pancaked under a

(22:41):
massive slab of concrete, entombed in your vehicle, beneath the
endless span and bulk of the entire upper deck. Everything
you knew ten seconds ago is gone. We all hate commuting,
but we'll all agree our long, boring commute is one
thousand times better than a load bearing commute. And after

(23:03):
an eternity, because at this point you are completely intellectually
incapable of telling time since this all began, you start
to hear voices, and maybe you see a beam of
flashlight dancing around your car. Let me point out when
I said an eternity, it's because you are completely trapped
against your will in a situation you can't begin to

(23:24):
believe just happened to you, and you have no reason
to believe that all this cement won't continue to drop
and finish you off at literally any second. This is
an exhausting amount of things to have to worry about,
all at the same time and for hours beyond hours.
Hopefully whoever it is is a professional dragging the jaws

(23:47):
of life behind them to cut you out of your car,
instead of some guy in a dead Kennedy's T shirt
who jumped off his bike to climb in here with
a crowbar to try to save you. And I'm not complaining.
You wouldn't be either on you'd be overjoyed to see
anyone after that much time spent convinced that you were
about to die a terrible and irretrievably awful death. Irretrievably

(24:10):
meaning after they cremate your remains, they'll screen your creamines
for any dental work or implants or car parts or
anything that helps identify your corpse. Dozens of drivers had
been killed instantly, while many others found themselves pinned and
claustrophobically trapped inside their vehicles in the dark, with millions
of pounds of concrete pressed against their faces. They could

(24:34):
only wait and hope and pray that someone would save them.
Before it all slipped, and that would be bad. This
is already the most two dimensional you have ever felt.
Local ems systems were utterly overwhelmed, so nearby residents and
factory workers rushed into cover and cover they did, climbing

(24:54):
and crawling over the wreckage with ladders and power tools
and barking out orders and g getting the job done
as best they could. Cars have been crushed to only
a few feet tall, so the rescuers had to crawl
in their stomachs and push themselves into complete darkness with
their toes, with no expectation of finding anyone alive or
necessarily being able to help anyone if they did, and

(25:17):
more than likely seeing the kind of thing that would
make sure that they never slept again. And these people,
they all went anyways, thankfully, but not easily. They were
able to pull many trap people out of their cars
and out of the collapse through these small gaps that
appeared in some sections of the bridge. It's kind of

(25:38):
hard to describe, but there are sections of the roadway
that look like alligator teeth or something, with huge chunks
of it sloping up or mangled down. These sections sagged terribly,
but they were at least partially intact, which is what
gave people hope for those trapped within. You ever watched
videos of people crawling and shimmying through caves for fun, Well,

(26:00):
it was almost exactly like that, but with a soundtrack
of fear and pain and the ever present threat that
the ceiling could collapse at any moment. I know I've
said that a lot, but it bears repeating because for
everyone in this situation, including the rescuers, they are thinking
about it every three seconds. So you were on your

(26:22):
way to work when everything got shaky and loud and dark,
and now you're trapped in some kind of cave and
your car is only about two feet tall, and there's
a guy there, and he says he can help you.
But then you hear a chainsaw. Would you know what
to do? What's the worst you've ever screamed? Losing a

(26:43):
limb can bring a kind of psychological horror that few
of us will ever understand. It's a kind of thing
that can shake your whole sense of reality or identity
in a lot of different ways, for a lot of
different people. Limbs define us. They're how we interact with
the world. Imagine reaching for something with a hand that
no longer exists, only to feel the sensation of your

(27:05):
fingers closing around an empty space. Phantom limbs are a thing,
a painful and frustrating thing, and you must be asking yourself,
how do I get myself one of these amputations. Well,
I'm going to tell you, and it's bad enough in
a hospital setting, but we're doing this in the guts
of some mangled vehicle, because sometimes removing a limb may

(27:28):
be the only option to save your life. If you
were ever facing this situation, fear, grief, and even anger
are entirely expected. I'm about to say something that may
sound glib, but it is not. Please take it in
the spirit that is intended. If you have to eat
a sandwich, take big bites. We are squishy and fragile,

(27:51):
and there are things that can happen to us we
have no control over. We eat the ship anyways. You
might not always feel it, but we are genetically programmed
to survive, and we'll survive this. Let's start with if
your limb is stuck, you're gonna try everything you can
to free it first before you call it trapped. But
because it's a show, let's assume that that's not going

(28:13):
to work here, Just close your eyes and picture yourself
with your arm or your leg trapped under a giant boulder.
It doesn't matter what limb you choose, listener's choice, it's
pretty much the same rules for armor leg. So let
me first ask if it's bleeding, and if it is,
your first priority for survival is to put that on pause,

(28:34):
figure out where exactly you're bleeding from, and put pressure
on it. If you're able to rip up your clothes,
that's helpful. Just use the cleanest stuff you've got to
bandage it up or tie it off gently but not tightly.
Don't go choking into deathlight in some movie. We have
talked about DIY tourniquetting before, so just go back to
any episode where people got squished and give that a
re Listen. If blood flow is cut off from a limb,

(28:57):
that is going to be a whole different issue. In
a controlled setting like an emergency room, surgeons plural will
carefully plan an amputation, ensuring enough skin and muscle remain
to close the wound properly and prepare the location for
a future prosthetic. They'll smooth out the bone to prevent
any sharp edges, and carefully handle nerves to avoid any

(29:17):
long term pain issues, But in the front seat of
a Ford fair Lane, it's going to be a little
more brutal. Amputation for survival must be done quickly and decisively.
That means using whatever improvised tool is available, cutting through
skin and muscle and bone and immediately stopping the resulting
bleeding however possible. It sounds awful and it is, but

(29:41):
history shows that people have survived incredibly unsanitary things. You
ever see one hundred and twenty seven hours that guy
cut off his own arm with a pocket knife, And
if you had been listening to this episode on Patreon,
you would have just heard the gouvernching details from that story,
and you, like all my Patreons, would be pausing the

(30:03):
show to go and settle yourselves. Infection is always a
major risk, so you got to keep that wound clean
and get thee to a hospital for some antibiotics and
critical wound care as fast as you can. Adjusting to
life after an amputation will take time. Life from this
day forward will be about healing and finding a way

(30:26):
forward and making peace with your worst symptoms. And it's
not an easy road, but it is one that countless
countless people have walked before you. You are in good company.
The rescue operation after the quake was endless. Well not endless,
but if you were Panini pressed into your car and

(30:46):
had your seat belt digging into your guts for five days,
you would call it endless. Heavy lift equipment and lighting
rigs were brought into the rescue scene to raise sections
of the fallen freeway well into the night. That was
an until the President, George W. Bush came by for
a visit. And just so you know, anytime you see

(31:07):
a president at a disaster zone, it stops being about
the rescue and very much becomes about the pr spin
and everyone has to stop working to coordinate their photo op.
Five days after the quake, a man named Buck Helm
was pulled alive from under the bridge after being trapped
in his light blue nineteen eighty one Mercury's effort for

(31:28):
ninety hours. They called him Lucky Buck. He was the
last person rescued and he was on life support for
a month before passing away from complications from his injuries.
So what happened, Well, he had a lot of internal bleeding.
Oh wait, you mean in Loma Prieta. Well, an earthquake.

(31:50):
Thank you for listening, But no, this was not just
some earthquake. California gets about ten thousand earthquakes in a year,
and anything below two point five on the Richter scale,
which is most of them, is going to be a
little too small to really notice. What we had here
was a magnitude six point nine, And I am not

(32:12):
saying that they're rare, but anything that strong only counts
for about zero point two percent of recorded earthquakes, So yeah,
they're at least a little special. And if you can
picture the Earth is kind of like a slice of cake.
Earthquakes don't happen at the surface. They've happened at different depths.
Deep ones happen around seventy kilometers or forty five miles underground,

(32:33):
and earthquake today happened around nineteen kilometers or only twelve
miles below the Santa Cruz Mountains near Loma Prieta Peak.
That's where he got the most intense shaking, and the
earthquake got its name. The farther away you got from
the source of the quake, the more long period or
rolling sort of motions in the ground. We call them

(32:54):
Pea waves and s waves p for primary s. For
secondary way, waves move in a compressional kind of a
push pull motion, if you can picture it. Just think
of them as traveling like sound waves. S Waves, on
the other hand, move in a kind of a side
to side or a up and down motion. You can
kind of think of them more like they're twerking. On

(33:17):
top of that, you also get all kinds of different
surface waves. When you're really close to the source, you
can experience this really intense rattling. Long waves, as they're called,
shake horizontally, kind of the way a snake moves, and
rally waves move more like waves in the ocean. In
this situation, the earth never ripped open and eight people alive,

(33:38):
but there were landslides and other ground failures, you know,
little fissures, mud, volcanoes, all kinds of craziness. This quake
was felt as far away as ninety miles or one
hundred and forty five kilometers, as far as Alameda or
Santa Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Benito, getting really local here,
Santa Cruz and Monterey. The weirdest thing I found out

(34:00):
about this disaster came courtesy of FEMA, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency they're kind of a mixed bag as government
institutions go. I mean, on the one hand, they have
helped untold numbers of people in terrible situations, but sometimes
they make it incredibly difficult for the people to receive
that help, and sometimes they just don't show up, and

(34:24):
sometimes there's a little financial fraud. We're really not here
to challenge FEMA. Let's just say that not everyone gives
them five stars for a service, and they went a
different kind of route for today's disaster. See California has
a really temperate climate, which makes it just about a
perfect place for those who spend most of their time outdoors,

(34:48):
like the homeless, for example, And as a result, California
has a lot of homeless. But twelve thousand homes and
twenty six hundred businesses were damaged in the quake, which
makes for a law of freshly minted homeless and unemployed.
And what FEMA did was start turning away existing homeless
from the homeless shelters to make room for those who

(35:10):
had just become freshly homeless. You'd almost think that they
were screening for camera ready or media friendly victims for
the news cameras or something. The quake caused the Oakland
side of the Bay bridge to shift seven inches to
the east. And that's a good length for a penis,
but a terrible length to stretch a supporting bolt for

(35:31):
a bridge. All the bolts on that section sheared and
the deck fell, and that woman who died as a result.
You want to know why she died is because of
a miscommunication between emergency workers. They ended up sending up
some drivers up to the upper deck back towards the
collapse site instead of away from it, and she plunged

(35:54):
over the edge to their death, thinking that she was
racing to safety. Arguably the first part of the disaster
was the viaduct. It was built out of non ductile
reinforced concrete with longitudinal restraints at transverse expansion joints in
the box girder spans. But two things, this is not

(36:14):
an engineering podcast and there is no test at the end.
And b it was built on filled marshland. When the
earthquake hit, the former marshland amplified the shaking and soil
liquefaction occurred. Do what now? When an earthquake happens, loose
soil loses strength, it mixes with groundwater, and it begins

(36:37):
to act more like a liquid than a solid. It
makes a shaking ground more intensely jellowlike. Think of it
as cosplaying as quicksand at sites that had rocky terrain,
the duration of the shaking was shorter than in the
Marina District, for example, or the Cypress Street viaduct in Oakland,
where the shaking was more severe in intensity, and it

(36:58):
also lasted longer. Multi story buildings were left partially sunk
and tilted at weird angles. One woman called nine one
one saying that she was on the upper floor of
her building, but rescuers found that the first and second
floors were just gone, and now her third floor apartment
had a street view. San Francisco's entire Marina District was

(37:22):
built on soft, unstable landfill, and that made it amongst
the hardest hit and most affected areas. Ordinary people dug
through the rubble with their bare hands to reach survivors
and formed human chains to carry away the injured. Entire
buildings crumbled and even streets sunk into the ground. And

(37:42):
do you think any of this was good for gas lines? Yeah? No,
They severed and erupted into flames that grew to engulf
entire city blocks. Six of these fires were classified as major.
All of this was a big step up from that
first fire we heard about from the helicopter so long ago. Anyways,

(38:02):
not much firefighters could do with water mains also being
broken throughout the area, no water, no power, limited phone service,
linking rescue workers, and a hugely expansive playing field of
interrelated problems. There were too many problems to address. Frankly,
ordinary people used garden hoses to help where they could,

(38:24):
and formed human chains passing buckets of water from the
bay to the fire where they couldn't. It's one thing
for your home to partially phase into the earth and
burst into flames. Tag on that lack of power, working
phone lines, and people were left fearful in the dark,
unable to check on loved ones, and afraid of aftershocks
finishing them off over night. The apartments built there had

(38:47):
ground floor garages which collapsed, leaving buildings sagging and resting
awkwardly against each other and propped up with boards. That's
what you get when you build your homes on a
hundred years of pepsi bottles and garbage. I'm mostly joking.
A lot of it was actually the rubble from the
nineteen oh six San Francisco earthquake eighty three years earlier.

(39:08):
It's almost impossible to do an episode on a San
Francisco earthquake without referencing the world famous Great San Francisco
earthquake of nineteen oh six. Just after five in the
morning on April eighteenth, a massive earthquake estimated around magnitude
seven point nine struck along the San Andreas Fault, and
in less than a minute, the city of San Francisco

(39:31):
was torn apart. Buildings collapsed, streets buckled. All the hits.
Towns as far away as Oregon and Nevada felt it,
and in some places the earth had shifted by as
much as twenty feet. The city was densely packed and
mostly built out of wood and brick. Entire neighborhoods crumbled,
and broken gas lines meant that fires broke out pretty

(39:55):
much immediately. Oh and the water mains were also wrecked.
The city was consumed by a wall of flames that
lasted for three days. The thing most people don't know
about this quake was because the firefighters had no water,
they switched to using wildfire tactics, the best way to

(40:15):
stop the fire in its tracks was to create fire
breaks by blowing up rows of houses with dynamite. In
their imaginations, it was like taking a domino out of
the path of falling dominoes that was there thinking. What
it actually did was throw flaming debris all over the place,
creating even more fires. I am really not going to

(40:37):
do the story its full justice here. Let me just
say more than eighty percent of San Francisco was destroyed,
tens of thousands were injured, and more than half of
the city's four hundred thousand residents were now freshly homeless.
The death toll was set around seven hundred, but modern
historians believe it was likely the over three thousand because

(41:02):
San Francisco has always been a multicultural city, but when
you go back far enough in time, extracurricular skin colors
didn't always make it onto lists like that if you
follow my meaning. Three people were killed as several unreinforced
masonry buildings collapsed in Santa Cruz Historic Pacific Garden Mall

(41:24):
with the first shock of the earthquake, which you would
expect in a historic district, along with thirty one other
buildings in the area, including Ford's department store, where its
trapped victims within and activated the heroic instincts of others.
At the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, a brick wall
collapsed inward, trapping customers and employees beneath it. Police dogs

(41:47):
and lifeguards and regular joes crawled all over the debris,
searching for signs of life, Strangers helping each other climb
from the rubble, rushing into burning buildings to pull people
out before the flames could consume them, using anything they
could to dig through the debris. And there's something people
don't realize about earthquakes. They're not one of these. Raise

(42:10):
your hands if you need help situations. Rescuers have to
search every building for possible victims. At the Santa Cruz
Coffee Roasting Company, this created tension between the police and locals,
who refused to stop searching for a missing woman. Of course,
the police won because they brought handcuffs and the woman
that they had been looking for was found the next day,

(42:33):
just ceased. Were there any upsides to this disaster, Well,
surprisingly yes, Because the unique soil conditions we talked about,
scientists gained a deeper understanding of how different kinds of
soils and structures react together in seismic events, which actually
led to better building codes. It also led to improvements

(42:54):
in earthquake monitoring and early warning systems, because in California,
it's never a question of if, but when this is
going to happen again. When the first radio station came
back on the air after the quake, they played Carol Coles,
I feel the Earth move under my feet First. Californians
do have a pretty dry sense of humor when it

(43:15):
comes to earthquakes. For me, remember when we started this
episode at a baseball game. Well, if not for that
game and the fact that it was a super local,
super important Subway series game scheduled during rush hour, actual
rush hour traffic across the Bay Area would have been

(43:36):
a lot busier, and the number of dead would have
been dramatically and shockingly higher. And thankfully, almost mercifully, only
sixty three people lost their lives that day. If it
hadn't been for the colossal efforts of the A's and
the Giants during the regular season that year, the number
of people killed on the Cyprus Street viaduct alone could

(43:59):
have made this two or three nine elevens. Instead, the
viaduct claimed forty two, and that was a full two
thirds of the total death toll, not to mention more
than thirty seven hundred others were injured. It's not your
favorite souvenir when you get to see that. Some fans
got to take home chunks of concrete from Candlestick as

(44:19):
there souvenirs. The series did continue, but not for another
ten days. It was the longest delay in World Series history.
Game three was held in San Francisco and Game four
the following afternoon. The A's swept the Giants four games
to none, and the head brass at the ABC network
all did that high five where you all jump in
the air at the same time in clap hands. There

(44:41):
were sixty seven aftershocks that followed with magnitudes greater than
three point zero in the days that followed, and because
of that, some residents chose to sleep outside at least
for a while. This quake caused and estimated six billion
dollars in property damage. It's about fifteen billion today, making
it one of the most expensive natural disasters in US history.

(45:05):
Damage was everywhere, with spacious cracks appearing far and wide.
The Oakland Airport alone suffered thirty million dollars in damages
to the runways. Because there's nothing quite like an earthquake
to really help you local infrastructure show its age. All
of the Bay Area's bridges had to be seismically retrofitted.
After this, part of the regional freeway system had to

(45:27):
be completely demolished and rebuilt from scratch. The Cypress Street
Viaduct took almost ten years to rebuild. They were able
to get the Bay Bridge reopened within a month, but
the repairs lasted an incredible twenty four years. Asides from
all of those issues, the only good to come of
this was how much unity was shown in the face

(45:48):
of so much calamity. I mean, people comforting stringers. There's
just people sharing what little they had, and they worked
together to survive a terrible and shocking event. The quick
reach a magnitude of six point nine, like we said,
putting it in a category of rare and serious quakes
throughout history, worthy of fear and respect. It was the

(46:10):
strongest earthquake to hit the Bay Area since the Great
San Francisco Earthquake of nineteen oh six, and although it
wasn't the strongest or the deadliest, it does hold a
pretty interesting distinction and our attention for all time. Because
the Loma Prieta earthquake disaster was the very first earthquake

(46:30):
to be broadcast live on television. The same geologic forces
that give the Bay Area its beautiful, sweeping and hilly
panorama are the same ones that make it what some
scientists call a tectonic time bomb. The nineteen oh six

(46:52):
quake was sixteen times more powerful than the nineteen eighty
nine quake, and that one wasn't the big one either.
Here's the thing about California earthquakes that most people don't know.
Fifty one years before the nineteen oh six quake, the
Fortejne earthquake of eighteen fifty seven happened about halfway between
San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was one of the

(47:15):
largest earthquakes in US history, with an estimated magnitude of
seven point nine. Now only two people died because the
population of the state was less than four hundred thousand
at the time, and for reference, the population in nineteen
eighty nine was closer to thirty million, and in this quake,
the ground shifted up by as much as thirty feet

(47:35):
in some areas. Fissures were opened up entire rivers were rerouted,
and everything was pretty much unrecognizable from before. Think of it,
like you were playing monopoly or written someone came and
shook the board. The Loma Priatic quake is often said
to have properly lasted only about fifteen seconds. The nineteen

(47:57):
oh six quake lasted for almost a minute. Eighteen fifty
seven quake lasted as many as three minutes. That is
an eternity for an earthquake of any strength. And the
thing is, they figure that the earthquake likely relieves stress
on the central section of the San Andreas fault, but
pressure and strain in the rest of the fault line

(48:19):
has continued to build ever since. Has just continued to
build ever since. The fault is supposed to pop off
once every one hundred and fifty or two hundred years
or so, but it has been accumulating stress now for
over three hundred, which make parts of it primed for
an even larger and deadlier quake in the future, the

(48:40):
big one. One. As they say, well, if you are
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(49:21):
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(49:47):
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(51:14):
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(51:57):
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(52:21):
of nineteen ninety. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and
thanks for listening.

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The Loma Prieta Earthquake Disaster of 1989 | Episode 85

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Loma Prieta Earthquake Disaster of 1989 | Episode 85