It struck during the World Series, live on national television — the first great quake a country watched happen in real time, as the broadcast shook and cut to black.
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DownloadThe Loma Prieta earthquake hit at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989 — moments before the third game of the World Series at Candlestick Park, so an unusually large audience was watching live when the shaking began. Its epicenter was in the Santa Cruz Mountains on the San Andreas Fault, about 100 km south of San Francisco.
The deadliest damage was far from the epicenter, where soft bay-fill soils amplified the shaking: the double-deck Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland collapsed and a section of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge failed. Most of the deaths occurred at these sites.
Loma Prieta became a textbook case of how ground conditions — not just distance from the epicenter — decide where an earthquake does its worst damage.