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The 58,000 high-spirited spectators in Candlestick Park were at first either confused or nonchalant. Both teams had finished batting practice. Then a soft, distant rumble grew louder. "It sounded like rolling thunder," said Peter Rubens, a winery manager seated in the right-field lower deck. The stadium shuddered. Light towers swayed. The foul-line poles in left and right field whipped back and forth. Though expansion joints at the top of the stadium absorbed the blow, chunks of concrete fell off, precisely as planned. One dangerous block crashed into a seat in Section 53. Only a moment before, its occupant had gone to buy a hot dog.
When the noise and shaking reached their peak, the spectators fell silent. After it finally stopped, the relieved and unhurt crowd broke into a cheer. "That's San Francisco," said an admirer of the city. "They cheer an earthquake." A fan scribbled an impromptu sign: THAT WAS NOTHING. WAIT TILL THE GIANTS BAT! After the public address system lost power, police in squad cars used bullhorns to tell the fans that there would be no game and that they should move slowly toward exits. As they left and looked north, they could see a plume of black smoke rising into an otherwise clear sky.
No matter how blase Californians pretend to be about earthquakes, this one shook that faxade. Lisa Sheeran, a public relations manager, picked up a rental car in Colma, just off the San Andreas fault. As she opened one of the doors, the vehicle bounced up and down. "What's wrong with this car?" she asked. The rental agent shrugged and said, "I don't know." Then both watched a wave of undulating earth approach them from a graveyard at the bottom of a hill. It reminded her of the ghostly movie Alien.
When the quake struck, Serina Johnson, 13, and her sister Corina, 11, were alone in their small apartment across from Oakland's city hall. "The food started flying off the refrigerator, dishes started breaking off the wall, the TV started knocking over, and the windows started breaking and cracking," said Serina. "I started screaming, and I tried to get my little sister out of the house. We ran outside. I looked up, and there was big cracks in the walls. And the building was coming down." Said Corina: "It was like being in a blender."
Across the Bay in San Francisco's public library, a chain reaction rippled through the stacks, dumping 250,000 books into piles on the floor. At a meeting of water-pollution-control officials at the Moscone Convention Center, security guard Charles Scott stood with 200 people at an awards ceremony. "Suddenly people were falling off the stage, and the lights went out," he said. "Then everyone panicked and starting running in all directions. I screamed, 'Don't run, don't run!' But people were running over each other, and I was knocked down." Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt.
+ San Francisco's high-rise buildings, many constructed in the past 20 years, proved to be among the safest havens. Built to strict standards adopted after the 1971 San Fernando tremor, the buildings bent rather than snapped as the quake rippled through the bedrock. Not one of them suffered major damage.