On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 pacific time the San Francisco Bay area experienced and

earthquake. This event was a 7.1 magnitude. Sixty-three people perished in the quake, forty-two
of those were caused by the 880 Cypress Viaduct. The death toll could have been higher, had
steps to decrease the seismic danger of most structures been taken.

On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 pm PST just as the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants
were getting ready for the third game of the World Series, the earth began to shake. Most of
America was watching Tim Carver and Al Michaels going over the last two games of the World
Series where the Oakland As were up 2-0 over the Giants, and suddenly the park and
everywhere else in the bay area shook. Minutes later the seismic waves made their way to the
central valley of California, mainly Sacramento luckily there was no major damage. As well as
far south as Los Angles. Within the first minutes TV news crews were reporting in from all over
the area calling out damage from the Oakland Bay Bridge and Candle Stick Park. A news crew
from News Channel 10 was one of the first to report from Candle Stick. Of course with any
amount of shifting comes a problem of broken gas lines and prime opportunities for fires to
breakout. The amount of response from the emergency crews was fast and thorough. For 83
years there had been small quakes that drew little to no attention to the potential for a large scale
quake would happen soon, but there were a few 5.0 seismic events two years prior to the quake
that shook on the 17th, led to a strong warning that a larger event was on the horizon.
(California, 2009) The quake struck at 5:04 in the afternoon many people were traveling home
on a typical Tuesday. This time 63 people werent so lucky as well as 3757 were injured and in
addition 12,053 were displaced. (San Francisco, 2012) That being said the amount of people
traveling on the 880 Cypress Viaduct and Oakland Bay Bridge the potential for loss of life was

great but the amount of actual loss was lower because of earthquake prevention that was taken on
newer buildings. Sadly the Cypress Viaduct was the main location of loss of life during the
quake. The viaduct wasnt built with earthquake prevention and survivability in mind as well as
poorly placed rebar caused the columns to fail completely and drop the upper deck onto
motorists on the lower deck resulting in 42 deaths