1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
The Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California at 5:04 p.m. on the 17th of October 1989, while a national television audience was watching baseball. ABC's pre-game show for Game 3 of the World Series was on the air, with the game scheduled to start at Candlestick Park in San Francisco at 5:35.
Sportscaster Tim McCarver was narrating taped highlights of Game 2 when the video signal began to break up. Viewers heard him repeat a sentence as the shaking distracted him. Then his colleague Al Michaels said, "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth," and the feed from the stadium was gone.
The shaking was already damaging places far from the ballpark. This documentary asks why the quake that arrived was not quite the one forecasters had described. It asks why the ground failed so differently from one neighborhood to the next, why elevated roadways fell, and what a baseball game had to do with the number of lives lost.
Twenty forecasts were announced between 1910 and 1989 for the part of the San Andreas Fault near Loma Prieta. Some were highly specific and covered several aspects of a coming quake, while others were vague and incomplete. Scientists had good reason to watch the area. In 1906 the fault had broken for about 290 miles, both north of San Francisco and south through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Geologist Andrew Lawson of the University of California, Berkeley, had named the fault after San Andreas Lake. He later led the investigation of that 1906 disaster. Since then the Loma Prieta stretch had been so quiet that scientists labeled it a seismic gap.
In 1983, United States Geological Survey seismologist Allan Lindh forecast a rupture 25 miles long, starting near Pajaro Gap and running northwest. He tied it to either a magnitude 6.5 event on the San Juan Bautista segment or a magnitude 7 event on the San Francisco Peninsula segment. That length came very close to what the 1989 quake produced. In 1988 Lindh gave the San Juan Bautista segment a new name, the Loma Prieta segment.
Early in 1988, the Working Group for California Earthquake Probabilities put the thirty-year chance of one or more magnitude 7 quakes in its study area at 50 percent. Information was thin and confidence was low for the southern Santa Cruz Mountains segment, so the group assigned it only 30 percent.
Two moderate shocks, known as the Lake Elsman earthquakes, hit in June 1988 and August 1989. After each one, the State Office of Emergency Services issued a short-term advisory, a first in Bay Area history. The wording was cautious: a "slightly increased likelihood of an M6.5 event on the Santa Cruz Mountains segment of the San Andreas fault."
The June shock measured 5.3 and the August shock 5.4, and both struck within 3 miles of the spot where the mainshock would begin. Each happened on a previously unknown fault rather than on the San Andreas itself. Each moved the ground by only about 4 inches of sideways slip. A group of seismologists nonetheless treated them as foreshocks because of their timing and location. Their study indicated that the two shocks influenced how the main rupture unfolded.
On the 27th of June 1988, the first shock reached intensity VI and broke windows in Los Gatos. Water flow increased at a well in Holy City, and pieces of concrete fell from a parking structure at the Sunnyvale Town Center. The shock on the 8th of August 1989 reached intensity VII and toppled chimneys in Cupertino, Los Gatos, and Redwood Estates. In Los Gatos, a man died after falling or jumping through a window five stories above the ground.
After that August shock, staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz, expecting a larger quake, installed four accelerometers. They sat on the campus, in two Santa Cruz homes, and in a house in Los Gatos. When the mainshock came, nearby high-gain seismographs were driven off scale. The four accelerometers recorded the main event and more than half an hour of early aftershocks.
From the 5th of October 1989, a magnetometer at Corralitos, about 4.5 miles from the epicenter, picked up a large rise in background magnetic noise. Antony Fraser-Smith and his group at Stanford University reported this after the quake. Noise between 0.01 and 0.5 hertz reached exceptionally high levels about three hours before the shaking. Their report became one of the most frequently cited claims of an earthquake precursor. Later studies blamed unrelated magnetic disturbances or a malfunctioning sensor system.
No forecast named a day or an hour. The fault that finally gave way was one that scientists had not yet found, lying beside the San Andreas.
The epicenter lay in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, about 10 miles, or 16 kilometers, northeast of Santa Cruz. Loma Prieta Peak, which gave the quake its name, rises just east of that spot. The shock measured 6.9 in magnitude. It reached a maximum intensity of IX, labeled violent, on the Modified Mercalli scale.
The heaviest shaking in the Santa Cruz Mountains lasted about 15 seconds, but it varied sharply with the ground underfoot. On rocky terrain it was shorter and much gentler. Where the soil was unconsolidated, as in San Francisco's Marina District or at the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland, the shaking was stronger and lasted longer.
Intensity VIII covered a wide swath near the epicenter, including Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and Watsonville. Farther north, parts of San Francisco were rated IX. Peak horizontal acceleration passed 0.6 g near the epicenter. In the Bay Area, more than 44 miles away, it reached as high as 0.26 g.
Aftershocks traced a fault about 24 miles long, according to seismologist Bruce Bolt. The rupture spread in both directions, so strong shaking lasted only about half as long as a one-direction break would have produced. A typical magnitude 6.9 shock with a similar rupture length would have shaken for about twice as long.
Stanford seismologist Gregory Beroza drew sharp contrasts between the 1906 and 1989 events near Loma Prieta. The 1906 rupture was shallower, had more sideways slip, and took place on a nearly vertical fault. In 1989 the slip was oblique and began at 10 kilometers down, on a fault plane dipping 70 degrees to the southwest. Most of the slip happened at depth and moved upward along that dip. Beroza therefore proposed that the overlying San Andreas Fault actually held back further rupture. He also maintained that a quake at the spot named by the 1988 working group was a coincidence.
Seismologists Hiroo Kanamori and Kenji Satake puzzled over the large vertical movement in 1989. A long series of such events, repeating every 80-100 years, normally builds high topographic relief. The Santa Cruz Mountains do not show it. They offered three explanations. The fault geometry might change every several thousand years, the type of slip might vary from event to event, or the 1989 quake might not have occurred on the San Andreas Fault at all.
No surface faulting appeared anywhere. The evidence had to come from instruments and from the other scars the shaking left on the land.
Up to 4,000 landslides may have been set off, even though a four-year drought had reduced the risk. Most fell southwest of the epicenter, especially along road cuts in the Santa Cruz Mountains and in the Summit Road area. Others struck bluffs along the Pacific coast, and some appeared as far north as the Marin Peninsula. One person was killed by a rockfall along the coast.
Near San Francisco Bay and the rivers west of the epicenter, liquefaction made the shaking worse. In liquefaction, water-saturated soil briefly loses its strength and behaves like a thick liquid. Sand volcanoes formed in a field near Pajaro and in a strawberry field. Minor lateral spreading was seen along the shores of San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay, where a non-destructive tsunami was also observed. Slumps and ground cracks appeared in many places.
The Marina District of San Francisco sits 60 miles from the epicenter, on land built from fill. Some of that fill was rubble dumped into the bay after the 1906 earthquake. Most was sand and debris laid down for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a celebration of the city's recovery from that disaster. Apartment buildings went up on top of it once the exposition ended. In 1989 the water-saturated mud, sand, and rubble liquefied.
Four people died in the Marina District. Four buildings were destroyed by fire and seven collapsed. Another 63 damaged structures were judged too dangerous to live in. One family lost an infant son who choked on dust during an hour trapped inside their collapsed apartment.
At the intersection of Beach and Divisadero Streets, a ruptured natural gas main set off a major fire. The hydrant system failed, so the fire department chose civilians to help run hoses from a distance. The bay lay only two blocks from the flames, and the fireboat Phoenix pumped its water to engines on shore. The apartment buildings that collapsed were older structures with garages on the ground floor, which engineers call soft story buildings.
Across the bay, the 1957 Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland stood partly on filled marshland.
A 1.25-mile stretch of Interstate 880 in West Oakland, the Cypress Street Viaduct, gave way in the worst disaster of the quake. It opened to traffic in 1957 as State Route 17 and was made of nonductile reinforced concrete, which cannot flex much before it fails. After the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, new guidelines required ductile construction elements. In 1977 the viaduct received limited reinforcement, in the form of longitudinal restraints at expansion joints. No one studied the failure modes specific to this structure, and Caltrans has faced widespread criticism for that. Roughly half the land beneath it was filled marshland, where the shaking was amplified and the soil liquefied.
The freeway buckled and twisted before its support columns failed and the upper deck fell onto the lower one. Forty-two people were crushed in their cars. Cars on the upper deck were thrown about, some flipped on their sides and some left dangling at the edge. Nearby residents and factory workers climbed onto the wreckage with ladders and forklifts, pulling people out through gaps as narrow as four feet.
Sixty members of Oakland's Public Works Agency left the nearby city yard to join the rescue. Employees from Pacific Pipe drove in heavy lift equipment and began raising fallen sections. The volunteers worked nonstop until the 21st of October, when they paused for a visit from President George H. W. Bush and California Governor George Deukmejian. That same day, rescuers freed Buck Helm, who had spent 90 hours trapped in his car. Local radio called him "Lucky Buck." He lived another 29 days on life support and died of respiratory failure at the age of 58.
A 50-foot section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge's upper deck also fell onto the deck below. The Oakland side shifted 7 inches to the east, and the bolts of one section sheared off. The roadbed dropped like a trapdoor. Police began telling stuck drivers to turn around and head back the way they had come.
A miscommunication at Yerba Buena Island sent some drivers up to the upper deck and eastward toward the gap. One of them, Anamafi Moala, a 23-year-old woman, did not see the opening in time. Her 1980 Mercury Zephyr plunged over the edge. She died, and her brother, the passenger, was seriously injured. The family later sued the state over her death.
The viaduct's replacement opened in stages between 1997 and 1999 and was fully finished in 2001. Caltrans did not rebuild over the same ground. It routed Interstate 880 farther west around the edge of West Oakland, giving better access to the Port of Oakland and the Bay Bridge. The move also answered community wishes to keep freeways from cutting through residential areas. The neighborhood had been predominantly African- and Hispanic-American when the viaduct was built. Street-level Mandela Parkway now follows the old roadbed.
On the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, falling debris killed three people. That was half of the six earthquake deaths in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Some 31 buildings were damaged badly enough to be demolished, and seven of them were listed in the Santa Cruz Historic Building Survey. The four oldest were built in 1894, and the five oldest had withstood the 1906 earthquake.
Ford's Department Store and the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company both collapsed inward on customers and employees. Civilians began freeing victims from the rubble right away. Two police officers crawled through voids in the debris and found one person alive and another dead inside the coffee house. Beach lifeguards helped move victims, and police dogs were brought in. A woman was found dead inside Ford's.
Officials soon came to see the civilian helpers as a hindrance. Coworkers and friends of a coffee house employee thought to be trapped kept digging in the dark, and police arrested those who refused to stop. The arrests became a political issue in the following days. The body of a young woman who worked at the coffee house was found under a collapsed wall late the next day.
For the first few days, electric power was out for most Santa Cruz County customers, and some areas had no water. Limited phone service stayed online and gave rescue workers a crucial link. As many as six teams of dogs and handlers searched the many damaged buildings, most of which held no victims. There were 51 aftershocks above magnitude 3.0 in the first 24 hours, and 16 more on the second day. Many residents slept outside their homes.
In Watsonville, a driver died after colliding with panicked horses that had escaped from a collapsed corral. A Ford's department store there suffered a crack down its front, and the twin bridges across Struve Slough failed structurally. At Moss Landing, liquefaction destroyed the causeway that carried the Moss Beach access road across a tidewater basin. It also damaged the bridge linking the Moss Landing spit to the mainland.
In the Old Town historical district of Salinas, unreinforced masonry buildings were partly destroyed, and some were later demolished. Damage to the Salinas River rail bridge reduced traffic on the Monterey Branch Line. That drop contributed to the end of freight rail service in western Monterey County.
Fifty-seven deaths were directly caused by the earthquake, and six more were ruled indirect, for a total of 63. There were 3,757 injuries, 400 of them serious. Early media reports put the death toll near 300. That estimate ignored how the game had thinned the traffic, and it was corrected to 63 in the days after the quake.
The 1989 World Series was the first cross-town series since 1956, and both the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were based in the affected area. Many people left work early, or stayed late, to watch the game in groups. Freeways that are normally crowded on a Tuesday rush hour carried unusually light traffic. The Cypress structure was said to carry 195,000 vehicles a day. By a rough estimate, thousands of people might otherwise have been on it at 5:00.
When the picture failed, ABC put up a green "World Series" technical difficulties graphic. The broadcast cameras and microphones ran on the local power supply. Audio from the stadium returned after thirteen seconds through a telephone link. Al Michaels called the moment "the greatest open in the history of television." The screams of fans who knew nothing of the wider damage could be heard behind him. ABC then ran commercials and switched to reruns of Roseanne and The Wonder Years, held ready in case of a rain delay.
The first television news report came at 5:11 p.m. from reporter Mark Coogan on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. ABC News began continuous coverage at 5:32, with Ted Koppel in Washington, D.C., and Michaels effectively became its on-site reporter. CBS News started around the same time, using its San Francisco affiliate KPIX-TV. NBC News followed about an hour later with Tom Brokaw anchoring and local coverage from KRON-TV. A Goodyear Blimp already overhead for the game filmed damage to the Bay Bridge.
An estimated 1.4 million people lost electric power, mostly because of damaged substations. KGO-TV was off the air for about 15 minutes, KRON-TV for about half an hour, and KGO-AM for about 40 minutes. KTVU returned after roughly an hour and 40 minutes, with anchors Dennis Richmond and Elaine Corral reporting from the station's parking lot. KCBS-AM switched immediately to backup power and stayed on the air despite a later generator failure. KCBS and KGO-TV both won Peabody Awards for their coverage.
KNBR-AM, the designated Emergency Broadcast System station, failed to activate the system for the public. Its engineers struggled with major malfunctions, and most of its staff were at Candlestick. San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos later came on the air with an update.
Fewer than half of the more than 62,000 fans at Candlestick Park had reached their seats when the shaking began. A seismic-strengthening project on the upper-deck concrete windscreen may have prevented injuries. Fans reported that the stadium moved in waves, that the light standards swayed by many feet, and that the windscreen rippled. When power failed, an officer drove a police car onto the field and used its public address system to announce the postponement. Many players on both teams went looking for family and friends in the stands before leaving.
After ten days, the longest delay in World Series history, Game 3 was played on the 27th of October. The Athletics beat the Giants 13-7, then swept the series the next afternoon with a 9-6 win in Game 4. The ballpark was ready again within days, but the region's roads would take years.
The earthquake caused an estimated $6 billion in property damage, one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history at the time. Some 12,000 homes and 2,600 businesses were damaged. On the 26th of October, President George H. W. Bush signed a $1.1 billion relief package for California. Private donations also poured in. The Federal Emergency Management Agency turned away people who had been homeless before the quake and gave shelter to those who had homes. Oakland City Hall stayed evacuated until an $80 million retrofit was finished in 1995.
Damage to the region's transportation system was estimated at $1.8 billion. Large cracks in Oakland's runway cut its usable length to two-thirds of normal, and airport repairs were assessed at $30 million. San Francisco's Muni lost half its transport capability for 12 hours when electric power failed. After 78 hours, 96 percent of its services were running again, including the cable cars. Amtrak suspended the Coast Starlight north of Salinas, and its historic 16th Street Station in Oakland was rendered structurally unsound. Amtrak moved its Oakland operations to a new station in Emeryville.
On the 18th of November, Caltrans reopened the Bay Bridge after replacing the collapsed section. The quake made clear that the bridge needed major repair or replacement for the long term. Construction of a new eastern span began on the 29th of January 2002 and finished on the 2nd of September 2013. All Bay Area bridges were seismically retrofitted.
With the bridge closed, the Transbay Tube became the quickest way into San Francisco from Oakland. Bay Area Rapid Transit weekday ridership rose from 218,000 to more than 330,000, a 50 percent increase. BART ran around the clock until the 3rd of December. In 2006 it began a $1.3 billion Earthquake Safety Program to retrofit tunnels, aerial structures, and stations, completed in September 2024.
San Francisco's incomplete Embarcadero Freeway was closed and demolished in 1991, which opened the waterfront to new development. A ground-level boulevard replaced it, and the Ferry Building Terminal was renovated. The uncompleted northern stub of Interstate 280 came down between August and October 1995, and the full project was finished in late 1997. The section of the Central Freeway between Mission and Market Streets was rebuilt as a single-deck structure, completed in September 2005, that feeds into Octavia Boulevard.
State Route 17, which crosses the San Andreas Fault near the epicenter, was closed over more than half its 26 miles for one to two months by landslides. Only buses and carpools with three or more people could cross it at first. Retaining walls and barbed fences were added afterward. On Highway 1 in Watsonville, the Struve Slough Bridge collapsed and the road stayed closed for several months. Commuters used State Routes 152 and 129 as bypasses.
Ferry service between San Francisco and Oakland, which had ended decades earlier, was revived during the month-long Bay Bridge closure. A terminal was set up in Alameda, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged a ferry dock at the Berkeley Marina. The passenger-only service proved popular. The need for a backup when the region's roads and tunnels become impassable led to the creation of the San Francisco Bay Ferry system.
Updated
Common questions
When did the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake happen?
The Loma Prieta earthquake struck at 5:04 p.m. PDT on the 17th of October 1989. It happened just before Game 3 of the World Series was due to start at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
How strong was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake?
The Loma Prieta earthquake had a magnitude of 6.9 and a maximum Modified Mercalli intensity of IX, labeled violent. The heaviest shaking in the Santa Cruz Mountains lasted about 15 seconds.
How many people died in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake?
The Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people: 57 directly and 6 indirectly. There were also 3,757 injuries, 400 of them serious.
Why is the Loma Prieta earthquake called the World Series earthquake?
It struck during a national broadcast of the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. The games that followed are sometimes called the Earthquake Series.
What happened to the Cypress Street Viaduct in the Loma Prieta earthquake?
The upper deck of the double-deck Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland collapsed onto the lower deck, killing 42 people. It was the largest source of casualties in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Did the Loma Prieta earthquake happen on the San Andreas Fault?
It was related to the San Andreas Fault System but originated on an undiscovered oblique-slip reverse fault beside the San Andreas Fault. Seismologists have debated whether it occurred on the San Andreas Fault itself.
How much damage did the Loma Prieta earthquake cause?
The Loma Prieta earthquake caused an estimated $6 billion in property damage, and about 12,000 homes and 2,600 businesses were damaged. On the 26th of October 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed a $1.1 billion relief package for California.
All sources
99 references cited across the entry
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