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At the corner of Sixth and Bluxome streets, however, the fourth-floor brick wall of a building erected a few years after the 1906 quake tore loose. "Bricks were falling, and dust was everywhere," said Charles Pinkstaff, who ran out of a nearby structure that also rumbled. "Then everything was quiet, except for water dripping somewhere. I saw a car smashed so flat I couldn't tell if anyone had been in it." When he got closer, he saw that the driver had been decapitated. The falling wall had smashed seven cars, killing at least five people. "I've seen people die, but nothing like this," said San Francisco fire battalion chief Jack Bogue.
The most horrifying scene was in West Oakland, where screams and smoke issued from the crumbled concrete of I-880. Beneath the smashed upper deck, some cars had been flattened to a height of 6 in. As survivors yelled for help, citizens long divided by race and class forgot their differences in a rush to assist them. William McElroy, an unemployed boilermaker who had just reached his home from the freeway, returned to the disaster. "We couldn't do a damn thing at first because we didn't have any equipment. We broke into a factory yard and got ladders. Then two kids came with forklifts from another factory. We put pallets on them, lifted them up like stretchers and brought people down." Heedless of aftershocks that continued to rumble, ghetto youths perched atop ladders, peering into 18-in. gaps between the layers of concrete to help mostly white commuters climb to safety. Said McElroy: "In time of disaster, people don't ask your color. They just ask for help."
Patrick Wallace, a worker in a local paper plant, shinnied up a tree to reach the fallen highway. He saw two women dead in a flattened auto. Then he heard "one little whimper" from the backseat. Pinned beneath a slab of concrete and the body of his mother was Julio Berumen, 6. His less seriously injured sister, Cathy, 8, also lay there. For nearly an hour, Wallace struggled to free the boy. Once he felt movement. "But it turned out it was just the clothing sliding from his body."
Arriving fire fighters finally managed to pry Cathy loose. Then doctors who had rushed to the scene from Oakland hospitals made a tough decision. "The mother is in the way, O.K.?" said intern Daniel Allen. "We're going to take a chain saw through the body to get to him." Even after that macabre operation, the boy was still trapped. Only when trauma surgeon James Betts amputated his right leg could Julio be freed. "He was moving and crying out," Betts explained later. "We couldn't just leave him there."
When Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson declared that there could be no more survivors in the fallen freeway, dogged rescue crews ignored him and searched on. For a brief moment on Wednesday, their determination seemed to pay off when a faint voice was heard in the rubble. But it turned out to be from a CB radio.
On Thursday, as the stench of decaying bodies wafted over the debris, officials gave up and called in equipment to lift off the slabs. The next night, engineers attached a cable to a pillar at a particularly fragile point of the wreckage to test the structure's ability to sustain the weight of more workers. The rubble shifted, opening a larger gap. It was a prelude to a miracle.