Good morning, it's Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. Thirty-four years ago today, at 5:04 p.m. Pacific Time, 12 miles below ground in a densely forested state park six miles inland from the California beach town of Aptos, two immense tectonic plates shifted. Geologists don't really know what triggers sudden seismic activity, but everyone knows the deadly impact that can result.
On Sunday, the fourth earthquake in a week, this one registering 6.3 on the Richter scale, struck Afghanistan. The first one, on Oct. 7, killed an estimated 2,000 Afghans, 90% of whom were women and children, according to the United Nations. This tragedy has been overshadowed by the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Israel and the IDF's bombing and impending invasion of the Gaza strip. But earthquakes can remind human beings -- should remind us all -- that life is fragile, and should be celebrated and protected, not wasted by bankrupt ideologies or ancient prejudices.
The Loma Prieta earthquake lasted only 15 seconds, but at the quake's epicenter in the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park enormous redwood trees were strewn around like matchsticks as it ruptured the earth along a 25-mile line. Its tremendous release of energy then reverberated toward populous areas, one of which happened at that very moment to hold the attention of much of the nation.
On Oct. 17, 1989, a sellout crowd was still gathering at San Francisco's Candlestick Park for Game 3 of the World Series between two Bay Area teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. I was among the baseball fans with a ticket to that game. Although I was working as a Washington correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News by then, I'd grown up in that area -- Aptos was the first place I ever surfed, as I think about it this morning -- and I'd spent the week before the 1989 World Series on home leave writing for the Merc about politics and baseball and the politics of baseball. The unexpected reward was from executive editor Bob Ingle, who presented me with two box seats behind the dugout for Game 3, the first one of that Series in Candlestick. I knew immediately who to invite to the game. My brother David and I had been hoping for a Bay Area World Series since the A's had moved to Oakland in the late 1960s. Living in Seattle then, but visiting Los Angeles that week, Dave booked a quick flight into SFO.
The A's were proving to be the stronger team. They'd won the first two games, 5-0 and 5-1, as their starters stifled the Giants' potent lineup. "We ran into a buzz saw," Giants' star Will Clark said after Dave Stewart shut them out in the first game. It didn't get much better the next game, but the real buzz saw was yet to come.
That night, famed ABC Sports broadcaster Al Michaels was doing his opening setup for Game 3 with color man Tim McCarver when Americans' television screens suddenly lost the visual feed. Viewers heard Michaels say, "We're having an earth--" before the audio signal was lost too. Seconds later, the sound -- but not the picture -- was restored. "Well, folks," Michaels said with a nervous laugh, "that's the greatest open in the history of television, bar none!"
Inside the stadium, the scene was surreal. Giants pitcher Don Robinson raced through the clubhouse hollering, "Earthquake! Earthquake!" so his teammates and coaches would know what was happening as an ensuing power outage left them in darkness.
Running wind sprints to loosen his legs, Will Clark watched the outfield grass ripple "like a wave." The Giants' first baseman likened the sound of the quake to an F-15 jet roaring overhead. But the noise was not coming from the sky. It was coming from below.
There was another sound, too, and it emanated from the crowd. Hardly anyone panicked, and only a few headed immediately for Candlestick's exits. Most fans stood and let out a roar. Perhaps this was because they were exhilarated to know that the maligned old ballpark proved to be a safe shelter.
"One of the things that struck me was Candlestick Park," San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer Ray Ratto later recalled in an oral history. "It was supposed to be a rotting whorehouse of a ballpark, but it took this huge beating from the Earth's crust like it was nothing. I thought, ‘Well, I'm in the safest place in the Bay Area.'"
Californians -- and most of the fans in that stadium were locals -- can be blasé about earthquakes, and that's how the crowd was that night, at least initially.
"I'll never forget the [crowd] noise," recalled Mike LaCoss, the Giants' scheduled starting pitcher. "After I opened the door to the dugout, 60,000 people were standing on their feet."
The plucky Candlestick crowd then erupted into a spontaneous chant one usually hears at football games: "WE WILL, WE WILL ROCK YOU!" One enterprising fan wrote on a makeshift sign, "If you think that's something, wait until the Giants come to bat."
Such bravado is inspiring, but no baseball was to be played that night. Outside the ballpark, where I was waiting for my brother's plane to land (just before touching down, it aborted landing and went back to L.A.) things were grim.
The Bay Area was soon covered in darkness as the sun set and nighttime revealed vast power outages. Various fires lit up the sky. Sixty-three people died in the Loma Prieta earthquake, which toppled Oakland's double-decked Cypress Street Viaduct, killing dozens, and took out a section of the Bay Bridge, where one motorist plunged to her death. In San Francisco's Marina District, a ruptured natural gas main burst into flames that could be seen across the city, claiming four more lives. Among the homeowners whose house was wrecked was Joe DiMaggio.
As the Candlestick Park public address announcer informed the crowd that the Bay Bridge had collapsed, the fans' mood became instantly somber. They made their way to the exits, their thoughts turning from baseball to the fate of friends and family. I'm thinking of them myself this morning, and how the world moves on.
Joe DiMaggio died 10 years after the quake that shook The City. My brother Dave passed away on my birthday in 2016. The Oakland A's are planning to leave Northern California for the siren song of Las Vegas. Candlestick Park is long gone, replaced by newer stadiums, one for baseball and the other for football. It may have seemed by 1989 like an "old whorehouse" to some. But it was where I first saw Willie Mays and Juan Marichal play -- and where I watched Dwight Clark make "The Catch" that put the 49ers and Joe Montana in the 1982 Super Bowl. So I never stopped loving the place, just as I never stopped loving the people who went there with me.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
