Loma Prieta

The third game of the world series on October 17, 1989 to see the giants try to bounce back against Oakland at Candlestick Park wasn’t the only match to be done that evening. Eighteen kilometers beneath the ground another contest was also beginning in an arena known as the San Andreas Fault. Here two enormous plates of the earth’s crust had been locked in a planetary pushing match since the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. These players were tiring, reaching the breaking point. Their game was in its last inning.

As the fans finally found there seats at Candlestick Park. Expectantly they watched the teams warm up. The clocks had reached 5:04. And deep beneath the ground a section of weak rock had snapped. The two sides of the San Andreas shot past each other. Simultaneously the West Side of the fault rose, and it had seemed to be lifting the mountains themselves.

The ripping of the faults was dangerously unstoppable. And for about eight seconds the earth’s crust unzipped at more than two kilometers per second, twenty kilometers to the north and south. The bucking Santa Cruz Mountains flicked houses off their foundations like eggshells.

The faulting released a frenzy of seismic waves. Setting seismometer needles scribbling around the world, and carrying a lethal message to Californians.

Waves rolling to the south bludgeoned the city of Santa Cruz, which was only 16 kilometers from the epicenter. They took out its commercial heart and had swiped four lives.

The waves smashed into Watsonville, damaging and destroying most homes and turning Main St. into a ghost town. They mutilated Hollister and destroyed the rich settlements of the Salinas Valley.

Waves rolling north rumbled the ground beneath beautiful Los Gatos, shattering Victorian houses and half the business district. They also shook San Jose but most buildings held.

The waves swept up the peninsula, rattling securely planted cities such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park. At Stanford...