The Loma Prieta earthquake....20 years later: A Sacramento Bee photoessay

[marmar]

http://www.sacbee.com/1232/rich_media/2242980.html

[niyad]

1. thank you so much for posting this--the memories it brings are painful, but thank you--and the Bee,

for remembering.

[TransitJohn]

2. I'm getting old.

20 years. :blink:

[FirstLight]

6. no shit, huh?

It's really wild to think I was not yet 20 when it happened, and I'll be 40 in January! yikes!

[Mrs. Overall]

3. Wow, I can't believe it's been 20 years. I was in Berkeley and watched the fire in the Marina in SF

out of one window and watched the huge dust debris of the collapsed Nimitz freeway out of the other window. It was surreal.

[FirstLight]

4. I would have liked to see the "NOW" pics

I heard that the Cypress area has really been wonderfully redone. How is the Bridge holding up 20 years later? what about the retrofits, etc...?
How did the Marina area recover after the fire?

I guess I'll have to write a letter to the Sac Bee, eh?

[inna]

5. wow, it's been 20 years. thanks for posting. nt

[robdogbucky]

7. I was on the 5 o'clock N bus on the bridge

waiting for the game to come on my walkman. It was an incredible event and I had a ringside seat to history.

The Cypress was transformed to side-by-side thoroughfares with new approaches/egresses from the Bay Bridge access point of 880. This time all on the ground, or very near to it. No more pancake structures. I believe the actual surface roadway that was rebuilt on the site of the collapsed old Cypress' path of travel is named Mandela Parkway.

The Marina is fine and was rebuilt/restored rather quickly.

The Bay Bridge is being completely rebuilt on that side of Yerba Buena Island and will soon (couple of years) be completely replaced by the side-by-side span they are building. Once again, no more pancake construction. It also looks like they are constructing a pedestrian path on it, like the GW in Philadelphia that connects to Jersey. I have been driving across the BB every few days and have watched the progress. It was mired in financial messes and is ending up costing about 10 times the original estimate to replace that half of the BB.

Bay Area is amazingly resilient and it was a time of coming together and cooperation in the aftermath. Recall that there was the Oakland Hills fire just two years almost to the day after Loma Prieta. As luck would have it I also had a ringside seat to that piece of history as well. I lived on a hill above the Grand Lake Theater and the fire stopped at the Piedmont Cemetary, about 4 blocks from my place. I started to feel like Zelig in that Woody Allen film of that name. I do have stories to tell my grandchildren.

I recently saw an anniversary story on the news of a young Treasure Island fire trainee that was saved by the Oakland FD from the rubble of the Cypress. He got hired full-time by the OFD a couple of years after the quake and is living his dream working with the same folks that saved his life. These two events engendered many, many such stories here in the Bay Area.


Just my dos centavos

robdogbucky

[HCE SuiGeneris]

8. I was on the mountain ridge 15 miles from the epicenter when it occurred.

It was an other-world experience watching the ground breathe...

Thank you for this. Although, I wish they had included some shots from Santa Cruz.

[kestrel91316]

10. A classmate of mine from vet school was at her home in Aptos,

near Ground Zero, when it hit. She had just come home from visiting family in SC where she went through Hurricane Hugo. What a double whammy!

[Oeditpus Rex]

15. For that, y'gotta go local

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/earthquake

[HCE SuiGeneris]

16. Thanks -- I had neglected to check "The Senile"

:hippie:

[kestrel91316]

9. I remember where I was in my car when I heard the initial report on the radio.

[jimlup]

11. I remember running out of work building.

I was working late on my Ph.D. thesis.

Fortunately, I wasn't in an area where their was much damage but it was scary as hell. I recall being terrified of the after shocks.

[dana_b]

12. 20 years has gone by so quickly

I was 8 mos. pregnant when it hit and my daughter will be 20 next month. that was a scary moment and weird getting bits and pieces of information about what was going on. I still rmeember it all vividly though.

[bridgit]

13. Amazing pics thanks for posting

[comrade snarky]

14. 20 years...

I was in Concord CA. staying with a friend for a couple of weeks before I moved into an apartment in San Francisco on October 15th. I'd crossed the Bay Bridge about an hour earlier.

There were some frantic calls to my new housemates let me tell you. The place was fine. Later we found out it's old enough to have made it through the 1909 quake and Loma Preita.

Love those old funky buildings.