The Day the World Series Stopped

The line wasn’t long. The game had not started. So as I was queuing up for a polish sausage, the shaking started.

Candlestick Park was rocking and it wasn’t the crowd in San Francisco on this day 25 years ago.

It was the day the World Series stopped and a massive emergency response began following the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake.

The name came from a peak in the Santa Cruz mountains near the epicenter. The most deadly damage was felt well to the north.

The Marina District of San Francisco, much of it made up of landfill from the debris of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was on fire.

Part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed, sending cars into the water. A freeway viaduct along the Nimitz Freeway near Oakland pancaked killing 47 people.

I was there not as a newsman, although I was employed as one at the time, but as a Giants fan.

I had been on vacation the previous week and had settled in for the third game of the series with my wife.

We survived, although at one point she remembers thinking, "We are about to die … but at least we are at the World Series."

From the seats at the stadium I went downstairs and found a satellite truck and an engineer and hired them on the spot on behalf of NBC.

From there we conducted reports throughout the night with the latest updates from the California Office of Emergency Services.

Later, after returning to the city, I remember arriving at the famed St. Francis Hotel at Union Square.

The entire lobby was filled with guests who were camped out for the night, too afraid to make their way upstairs to the towers above.

There was no electricity. The lobby was filled with candelabras.

After that I spent the next three weeks going up and down the Northern California coast — from Los Gatos to Watsonville — chronicling the aftermath, the recovery and the loss.

One of the great stories of that day was the impact baseball may have had on the loss of life. It was the first and only time the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s had played each other in the World Series.

As a result, rush hour traffic — at 5:04 that evening — was light. Everyone was already home or had gone to watch the game at bars and taverns after work.

Experts believe hundreds more would have been on the bridge or the Nimitz Freeway had the game not been taking place.

San Francisco and Oakland eventually recovered and the World Series was played 10 days later.

The region's resilience was both an inspiration and a lesson.

A 6.9 magnitude temblor is a large quake but a larger one is still expected along the San Andreas, both there and in Southern California.

And when it does hit it is unlikely there will be a ballgame to help keep people out of harm's way.