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In the resort and university town of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, Heidi Nyburg was enjoying the ocean view as she strolled along West Cliff Drive. When she approached the Dream Inn, where she works as a desk clerk, her serenity vanished. "Cars were bumping up and down. People were falling off their bikes, running everywhere, getting out of their cars. Women were screaming. It was panic." Blocks away, turn-of-the-century houses swayed and crumpled. The entire downtown area, including the Pacific Garden Mall, was devastated. Three people were crushed to death. Outside Santa Cruz, the community closest to the quake's epicenter, a corral collapsed. As six frightened horses ran across a nearby road, a pickup truck plowed into them; the driver was killed.
The Salinas Valley town of Hollister (pop. 11,500) experiences temblors so frequently that some of the townspeople proudly call it the Earthquake Capital of the World. At 5:04 p.m., 19-year-old Albert Valles was working out in a gym when he felt the building begin to shake. He ran into the street as the facade gave way, burying his Jeep under an avalanche of bricks. "I would have been finished," Valles marveled. No one was injured. Yet in nearby Watsonville (pop. 23,550), the Bake-Rite Bakery caved in, fatally smashing a passerby.
It was in such terrifying, surrealistic scenes that Northern Californians who chanced to be in the wrong place at 5:04 p.m. last Tuesday were jolted into an awful realization: a major earthquake had struck the Bay Area and its 6 million residents at rush hour. In 15 interminable seconds, an estimated 100 people had been killed and 3,000 injured, making the quake the third most lethal in U.S. history.
Unlike hurricanes, which can be detected as they spawn and tracked until they expire, earthquakes give no timely warning. This one's subterranean birth pangs had persisted for decades, attended only by seismologists helplessly unable to pinpoint when calamity would strike. When its punch was finally delivered, it was measured at 6.9 on the Richter scale, a force not recorded in the U.S. since the 9.2 quake that shook Alaska in 1964.
The tremor was felt far beyond the Bay Area. In Reno, 225 miles northeast of San Francisco, University of Nevada student Laura Mildon saw the clothes in her closet swinging on their hangers. In Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south, high-rise buildings swayed and water sloshed out of swimming pools. Jody Paul, an administrator for a film company working on the 23rd floor of a Century City tower, felt a gentle movement that gave her "a really strange feeling."
In another example of television's ability to create an instant global community as historic events unfold, some 60 million baseball fans in the U.S. and millions more in countries as distant as Japan and Australia got details on the California tragedy long before those who were closest to it. Just 21 minutes before the start of the World Series' third game, the TV pictures from San Francisco's Candlestick Park started to jiggle. ABC sportscaster Al Michaels shouted, "We're having an earth . . .!" Then the screens went black as power was lost. Soon the network switched to a rerun of a sitcom.