Word: francisco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Galvanized by the fear that they may be next, Southern Californians are urgently reassessing their plans for coping with the Big One. "What was foremost in many people's minds," says filmmaker Gina Blumenfeld, "was the fact that the San Francisco quake could have just as easily happened here." Residents stocked their homes with bottled water, canned food, batteries and first-aid supplies, snapped up wrenches to turn off the gas and prepacked earthquake kits that sell for $30 to $210. Some of the preparations had an only-in-Hollywood quality. One woman whose emergency gear includes a butane curling...
...region has long been aware of its special vulnerabilities. Its water comes in by aqueducts that a big quake would fracture. Like the devastated Marina district in San Francisco, parts of coastal communities such as Marina Del Rey, Venice and Long Beach are built on sandy soil and landfill that could liquefy during a temblor, amplifying its destructive impact. State transportation officials last week handed the city council a list of 48 highway bridges and overpasses that need reinforcement to withstand a powerful quake. Cost: $32 million. Los Angeles' city engineer Robert Horii informed the city council that $100 million...
...last Tuesday, precisely a week after the devastating earthquake, church bells pealed throughout San Francisco to mark the city's survival and recovery. But a few churches declined to join in the commemoration, which had been requested by Mayor Art Agnos, because the reverberations from the tolling might have brought cracked belfries tumbling down. About 90 minutes after the clangor of the bells died out came the ominous rumbling of yet another aftershock, one of thousands that have done little discernible damage but are likely to keep rattling the nerves of residents for weeks...
...sequence was almost too patly symbolic of the situation of San Francisco and its surrounding Bay Area. On the surface, the city had almost returned to normal. By subway under the bay, by ferry across it and by circuitous routes around the area, the vast majority of employees found their way back to reopened businesses, despite the continuing closure of the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge and two freeways. The colossal traffic jams that planners feared never developed. Tons of rubble from collapsed walls and shattered windows had been hauled off by a fleet of dump trucks that came from...
...area was speckled with damage that will take weeks or even months to clean up and repair. The shattered portion of the I-880 freeway in Oakland will have to be torn down, and the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-decker that skirts downtown San Francisco, is riddled with cracks in the support columns. Officially, it is supposed to reopen next spring, but one structural engineer who has examined it says, "I'd never go back on that s.o.b. again. No matter how much they shore it up, there is no way to make it safe." Pier 45, the city...