Seventeen Years Ago -- Loma Prieta Earthquake

Has it really been seventeen years since the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989? The answer is a resounding "YES".

A view of the hole left in the upper deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after a section of it fell onto the lower deck. (Photo: Kurt Feichtmeir)

I remember the events of that afternoon very well. It was a Tuesday (just like today, eerily enough), and Game 3 of the World Series (dubbed the "Bay Bridge Series") between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park was about to start. I didn't have my television tuned to the game at the time because I was playing Mike Tyson Punch-Out!! on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). For those who want a glimpse of the game, watch this YouTube demonstration.

At 5:04 P.M., the big one (6.9 on the Richter scale) hit -- the epicenter in the Santa Cruz mountains. Everything shook, and the power went out. When the power came back on, those television stations which weren't knocked off the air had reporters scrambling to various sites. Santa Cruz took the full brunt of the destruction. Candlestick Park had some structural damage which caused the cancellation of the Game 3 and the postponement of the World Series. The Cypress Freeway in Oakland collapsed, as did the Bay Bridge.

By the way, if you weren't in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, but you were following the World Series, you probably got to see this from ABC.

As the 6.6 earthquake in Hawaii took place, it is a chilling reminder of what happened 17 years ago today...