San Francisco Earthquake

October 17, 1989 was a calm day in the San Francisco Bay Area. Two neighboring cities, San Francisco and Oakland were buzzing with excitement because each city’s major league baseball team, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics was competing in the World Series. It was a Bay Area rivalry for the biggest prize in baseball and the crowds were headed to San Francisco to prepare for a 5:30pm first pitch at Candlestick Park. Then, at around 5:03pm not long before the scheduled first pitch, an earthquake hit the stadium as well as the surrounding area. According to the History Channel, the stadium withstood the quake but the surrounding area didn’t fair quite as well. Sixty-seven people lost their lives while thousands of others suffered …show more content…
In addition to the lives lost, thousands injured, and billions in damages, the Loma Prieta earthquake also caused more than twelve thousand people to be displaced from their houses. In addition to that, the San Francisco marina district had taken a major hit. Most of the buildings in the area were very old and built with concrete that didn’t have reasonable steel reinforcement. Due to this, the buildings were extremely susceptible to liquefaction and when the ground started to shake, those buildings didn’t stand a chance against the force. Another issue in response to the quake was the lack of help in emergency response units. According to Practical Lessons from the Loma Prieta Earthquake, a book by the National Research Council detailing the key lessons scientists learned from the quake, “In the first few hours following the Loma Prieta earthquake, uneven and in some cases inappropriate emergency responses resulted from the inability of emergency-response decision makers to know where the heaviest shaking and greatest damage actually occurred and from undue dependence on news media reports.” (NRC, pg. 5). In summary, emergency response teams were heavily slowed due to the inability to pinpoint which areas needed the most help more critically than others. Also, research papers titled The Loma Prieta Research Papers coordinated by Thomas L. Holzer, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, discovered that the biggest cause of loss of life during the earthquake was failed highway systems. The article reads, “Failure of highway systems was the single largest cause of loss of life during the earthquake. Forty-two of the [67] earthquake fatalities died when the Cypress Viaduct in Oakland collapsed. The cost to repair and replace highways damaged by the earthquake was $2 billion, about half of which was to replace the Cypress