Stormi Nyx

mp3

Spoken in my own voice. 73 seconds.

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On October 17, 1989, at four minutes past five in the afternoon, the ground under the Bay Area moved.

The quake broke on the San Andreas Fault, centered beneath a stand of redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It took its name from the nearest thing anyone knew: Loma Prieta Peak. The hardest shaking ran about fifteen seconds. Sixty-three people died. Forty-two of them in Oakland, on the Nimitz Freeway, where a double-decked stretch called the Cypress Street Viaduct pancaked, the upper road collapsing onto the lower one with the cars trapped in between.

Here is the part I cannot stop turning over.

It was five o'clock on a workday. Those freeways should have been bumper to bumper. They weren't. Thirty minutes up the road, the Giants and the Athletics, the two Bay Area teams, were about to play Game 3 of the World Series, and much of the region was already inside, watching.

The roads had emptied. The collapse that should have swallowed a river of stopped cars met almost nothing.

At Candlestick Park the ballpark was full. The stadium rode it out. Nobody died there. The game never started.

So the crowd everyone would have feared was safe. The road nobody was thinking about is where forty-two people died. The thing that looked like the day's biggest danger turned out to be the day's mercy. The road nobody gave a thought to was the one that fell.

Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]