In the 1989 World Series, it was a Battle of the Bays, an Oakland A's versus San Francisco Giants game. On October 17th, the third game of the series was to be played 5:30 pm at Candlestick Park, then the Giant's stadium. The series was lead 2-0 by the A's. Naturally, almost everybody in the Bay Area had left work early so they could either go to the game, or go to a party to watch the game. This is what saved people.
At 5:04, normally a bumper to bumper rush hour traffic time, a 6.9 level earthquake (Loma Prieta) hit San Francisco, but because of the World Series, the roads were not so full as they might have been. When the two story Cypress Structure (part of the 880 freeway) collapsed on itself over a mile in length, but there were only 42 fatalities. There were 67 fatalities in all from the earthquake, $5 billion in damages, gas leaks that lead to fires, and a massive power outage. However, had it been almost any other day that that earthquake hit, many more would have died.
This World Series later became known as the Earthquake series and the one truly unfortunate outcome of it was that the A's won.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/1989-san-francisco-earthquake
I find this really interesting if it weren't for the World Series, there would have been several more fatalities. This also shows that the World Series was relevant to a large number of Americans in that most of the people were watching it at home on their televisions. One question I had was what did they do at the stadium when the earthquake hit?
ReplyDeleteI thought this post was really interesting! It's interesting to see how a seemingly commonplace event actually saved people's lives.
ReplyDeleteThis was an interesting piece of information I knew nothing about. It is interesting to see how random events can have a great impact on individuals.
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