Earthquake Aftershock. In San Francisco, here is NBC News correspondent Tom Brokaw.
Interstate 880, leading off the Oakland Bay Bridge, the grim job of recovering bodies continues tonight.
26 hours after a 7.0 earthquake struck the Northern California area, collapsing this interstate highway during the peak of rush hour.
As many as 200 cars may be trapped there. The bodies may be more than 300 altogether, although tonight there is a dramatic story, perhaps, of a rescue.
Good evening everyone, I am Tom Brokaw in the darkened streets of San Francisco.
This is the once elegant Marina area and it has now been all but closed down by city officials.
All electricity and power off, the residents have been evacuated. It is the area that has been hardest hit.
The rest of the city of San Francisco and much of this Bay Area, however, is recovering tonight.
We're told that the San Francisco airports are open. The schools were scheduled to reopen tomorrow, but the fire chief said not until there's an inspection of each of them.
There's been a fair amount of damage to a valuable collection of Asian art here in San Francisco, but traffic lights are coming back on, telephone services being restored.
But in this area, and what you hear behind me, is a fire truck cranking up so that they can pump water on smoldering ruins.
In this area, at least, there's not going to be anybody living here for some, some time. They think it may take four months before they get services back.
Many of these homes have been condemned. This is the area of damage. It's about 100 miles altogether, the San Francisco Bay Area, reaching from Santa Cruz to Northern California to the Sacramento area.
And what we are seeing tonight is a slow recovery from a very devastating earthquake. We'll be back with more on all of this on Earthquake, the Aftershock.
Aftershock.
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Good evening once again from the streets of San Francisco. It is so unusual to be in this festive city essentially in the dark of night.
But those are the consequences of this enormous earthquake that struck here last night.
Power has been shut off especially in this area, the Marina District, and that fire truck is pumping some additional water on the smoldering ruins from that big fire that we saw in an apartment complex last night.
Still, the city is starting to make a comeback. The most severe damage in this four square mile area throughout the rest of the city, not that much structural damage, but a lot of things are broken.
Phones and traffic lights and other kinds of utilities. They're slowly beginning to come back and NBC's Don Oliver has that story tonight.
There were plenty of reminders for San Franciscans of the shaking they'd gone through. Some gentle and some not so gentle.
In most of the city there was only the prospect of cleaning up broken glass to mar a beautiful sunshiny day.
The tall buildings had weathered the quake with few visible signs. Electricity in the heart of the city was still out.
Traffic was generally light as a number of commuters followed the advice of the mayor and stayed away from work.
Many just couldn't have made it to the city as engineers closed the bridges to the south for close inspection.
With the exception of the damaged Oakland Bay Bridge, all of the inspected bridges were later reopened.
Please leave the area now!
Crowd control was a problem in the one area of San Francisco that was dealt a severe blow by the quake.
It's known as the Marina, a strip of high-priced homes and apartments near the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.
I thought that my floor was just going to cave in. Everything, I have a heavy piano that moves like three or four feet from the wall and everything is off all the shelves and table, everything is on the floor.
As many as 30 homes in this area were damaged so badly, they will have to be torn down.
Among those looking over the damage in the Marina, Vice President Quayle, who promised local officials as much federal help as the law allows.
But many here were more interested in getting back into their homes. Some had been ordered not to pending damage inspection.
They won't let us go back. We need to go back. My baby needs a diaper change and he needs some food.
Some of those living in buildings extensively damaged ignored the orders and the warnings and went back in to retrieve their possessions.
They feared that a large aftershock might cause the buildings to collapse.
And of course I had all my valuables and no earthquake insurance and so we all foolishly went into the building and gathered our belongings which are here on the street.
Did you get permission at all to go in or did you just go in? No, no, we just took a chance.
One of the worst jobs is still ahead, removing the rubble to determine if there are any bodies in the splintered remains of the Marina homes.
Officials say they know there are two dead in this building but until they get heavy equipment they say it is too dangerous to attempt to remove them.
Despite the damage and death here, city officials believe San Francisco coped well with the big quake.
We have been planning for it for years, for years and years. So it's just like an exercise to us. We're doing what we've been trying to do.
Many stores remain closed because of the lack of electricity. So some food was handed out at a disaster relief center.
And some people decided they wouldn't drink the city water despite the contention of officials that it is pure and safe.
But all in all San Francisco seems to be taking the quake of 89 pretty much in stride.
The city has adapted remarkably well although the police radio tonight as I was listening to it had scores of calls of broken or leaking gas mains and lines and homes and that of course is a major continuing concern.
Don Oliver you're there in the heart of the city tonight. What do they think about the absolute repair of utilities to this city.
It's going to take probably a week to two weeks before they are able to check the entire infrastructure of the city.
Most of the city as I mentioned in the story was not really that drastically affected by the earthquake but they have to be sure they have to know that all of the oil lines and the gas lines and the electric lines are secure.
They also have to check all of the high rise buildings to make sure that the wiring is still secure. And that is going to take time.
And I would think Don this is a very popular destination city of course for tourists that prudence would dictate that they try to call ahead to see if their hotel has in fact operating elevators and whether they can get around as they might expect you when you agree.
That is absolutely the case. However tonight 24 hours after the quake there are hotels now with their elevators operating that weren't operating this morning.
Traffic signals are back in operation in the streets and some of the restaurants and bars have begun to open up again.
All right. Well that's good news for a city like San Francisco.
NBC's George Lewis is just across the bay where the most dramatic story of the night is going on. We want to take you through now the most damaged areas of the bay area beginning with Interstate 880 a mile long section collapsed.
It looks like a concrete sandwich. Unfortunately beneath those slabs of concrete and steel are cars. No one knows for sure how many altogether maybe as many as 200.
It's a popular off ramp from the Oakland Bay Bridge and a lot of commuters going from San Francisco to East Oakland were on the bridge at 5 0 4 Pacific time.
The peak of the rush hour when it came down some have been recovered but a lot have been killed.
This is the Oakland Bay Bridge the span that collapsed. They do think it'll take about three weeks to get that repaired.
There was some discussion about making some temporary repairs to that and this is where I'm standing tonight. Daylight footage of the Marina District as you can see these elegant homes.
Many of them built in the 1920s on what is essentially landfill took a very severe hit.
The area has been effectively evacuated tonight principally because of structural damage and because of leaking gas lines as well.
Incidentally this is the neighborhood of Cholton Joe DiMaggio. He came by took a look at his house but he's not able to live there tonight either.
And in downtown San Francisco in the Union Square area you'll see that I magnet has shattered windows.
Some tourists were pretty severely cut yesterday when that happened. That's a very popular area of course for pedestrian traffic.
It's right in the heart of the city and yet the high rises of San Francisco did hold together. In fact there's been very little structural damage to those buildings that have been constructed here in the last 15 or 20 years or so.
We do want to go to the most dramatic story of the night however and that is Interstate 880 just across the bay leading off the Oakland Bay Bridge.
NBC's George Lewis has been there all day long. George.
Tom some dramatic developments indeed tonight after saying all day long the authorities were saying that perhaps nobody remained alive.
Earlier this evening they announced that they have found someone alive back there in the rubble in the dark behind me.
There's a crane working back there to try to free the person who they say is trapped in a car there. They don't know if it's a man or a woman yet.
They reacted to noises earlier that the authorities were were hearing noises. They checked it out and they say indeed there is someone alive back there.
So that's going to give new hope to many of the relatives who've been waiting around here all day for for news of the missing persons.
More than 80 missing persons reported in Oakland alone. Many of them believe trapped beneath the rubble of this bridge.
The authorities still believe that practically everyone who was crushed in that two layer bridge is dead.
But this is a startling new development tonight. Tom George.
And the fact of the matter is that a lot of these relatives don't know for sure whether their loved ones were on the bridge or on the off ramp at the time.
They would only know if they didn't appear at home. Right. That's right.
One man we talked to earlier today thought his son was taking this route home and he would have been traveling through this area a little after five the time the earthquake hit.
So he suspects that his son is among the missing people and perhaps crushed in this rubble.
And when we talked to him earlier today, he was very frustrated at the slow pace of the rescue efforts.
The people running this operation say they can't put a lot of people up there on that freeway structure right now because it's a very in very fragile condition.
Any earthquake aftershocks could further topple it. They don't want further loss of life.
So they've been keeping the rescue effort very restrained and saying all along that nobody was alive there.
So it wasn't important to rush. Now that equation may have been changed a little bit by this new discovery tonight.
This is a heavyweight game of pick up sticks.
And of course, the consequences are considerable because the wrong shift in that freeway could bring even more death, not just to the people who are trapped, but to the rescuers as well.
So they do have to do it with great care. We have seen that in Mexico City and Armenia and around the world.
A seven point zero earthquake on the Richter scale. That's a very powerful one.
Probably the second most powerful earthquake to hit a major populated area in this country in this century.
Yet most of the buildings were able to withstand it. Why? Because of the new California construction codes.
Let me see Stan Bernard tonight on all that.
The earth moved in waves, some said like a rolling ocean.
As it moved across metropolitan San Francisco and Oakland, it hit randomly and hardest where the city was most vulnerable.
In the Marina area, a section of the city built on land that had been filled in back in the early nineteen hundreds.
The shifting of the earth was violent enough to collapse three story structures down to one.
Many of these buildings are of wood frame construction.
Gas lines ruptured, a fire broke out and were fed by the gas and the wood.
Scores of buildings were consumed and others, some say up to a hundred, will have to be torn down because they are so badly damaged or have just shifted so severely on their foundations.
They are now even more vulnerable to aftershocks.
Why were some areas hit so hard and others almost untouched?
Dr. Ian Buckle of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research.
California has been preparing, if that's the right word for this event, for fifty years in the sense that they have had in the building codes and in the bridge codes the design provisions for seismic loads.
No building codes here. Spytak in Soviet Armenia.
And the earthquake was the same size, 6.9 on the Richter scale, as the California quake.
This was mostly new construction, but it was all prefabricated concrete with insufficient steel support.
Twenty-five thousand people died in Spytak and Leninakan.
As the California earthquake rolled out last evening, it did not damage the Golden Gate Bridge.
Dr. Buckle said that bridge is anchored on stone, both at its ends and its center supports.
But another bridge did come apart, the Oakland Bay Bridge.
But when those structures were built, engineers did not appreciate the demand that an earthquake causes for deflection requirements.
That if we have a bridge span sitting on a pier and the ground starts to move, the pier starts to move, and still staying within its strength properties, it can move so far that the span drops and we have a border being unseated.
And this is what happened in the Bay Bridge last evening.
The approaches to the bridge, Highway 880, a two-level structure became a death trap for more than 250 people.
Experts say the contributing cause here could have been the same as at the marina area, landfill, bad soil conditions, shifting under the foundations for the highway.
The highway rolled like the quake under it, and the upper roadway collapsed with a domino effect, with at least 100 cars crushed between the two levels.
One earthquake specialist said, one way to avoid such a catastrophe is a kind of highway circuit breaker, one weak collapsible link to save the rest.
Either that or build stronger and more expensively.
Stronger and more costly construction is what saved most of San Francisco last night.
Stan Bernard, NBC News.
One of the leading authorities in the country on earthquake construction and the damage that earthquakes can cause is Dr. Fred Krimgold of Virginia Tech.
He's a professor of architecture there. We talked to him last night from Washington, D.C.
He flew out here overnight and he has been inspecting this area. He is now very near Interstate 880.
Mr. Krimgold, tell me about Interstate 880. I think in the 1970s they went in there to repair that, to bring it up to code. What happened?
Well, it's not apparent here. The failure along the length of the freeway is at the same point, just at the change in profile of the column.
There is, of course, a thicker column supporting the bottom deck and then a thinner column supporting the upper deck above.
And just at that change in profile, we've seen a uniform failure along the length of the freeway from about 12th Street up for about a mile north of there.
Is it possible that that same kind of weakness could exist in a lot of other two-tier freeways in this state, which is, of course, so subject to earthquakes?
Well, I'm really not in a position to generalize. I understand that a significant effort was made to restrain overpasses in particular.
But other freeways of the same design, double-deck design of the same period and the same pattern of reinforcing, certainly have to be viewed with some skepticism in the future.
You have had a chance to look at the structures in the Bay Area now. What do you think about how well they performed in light of the fact that this was a 7.0 earthquake?
Well, in fact, I think one would have to say that this experience is somewhat reassuring.
We did see selected failures. We saw the failure of an unreinforced masonry building south of Mission on known soft ground, something which we expected.
We've seen the failure of a limited number of light wood-frame buildings in the marina. But in fact, I guess my dominant impression on coming into the city this afternoon was that, aside from a few special dramatic cases like this one here, evidence of the earthquake is relatively difficult to find.
The building stock, in fact, did quite well.
Thank you very much, Dr. We appreciate it very much. We know that you want to see what's going on around this area. We do appreciate your expertise.
One young man who was evacuating this area tonight had all of his belongings in the back of his car and he stopped and rolled down the window and said to me,
Hey, Brokaw, I'm from Nebraska. I moved out here to escape tornadoes and look what happened. We'll be back with more on earthquakes, the aftershock in a moment.
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The mayor of San Francisco is Art Agnos and he has been all over the city since the moment the earthquake struck, 504 last night, Pacific time, just two hours of sleep and he had to take his child to bed with him because the sun was understandably worried given what he'd gone through.
Mr. Mayor, how are you doing tonight? What about services being repaired for this city? Do you think that you'll have most of the electricity and telephone lines back by tomorrow?
Oh, well, I'm told that he's a...
Now, listen, with Mayor Agnos, we've done a little business in the past, he often doesn't even need to hear the question to give an answer. Mr. Mayor, I offer that only as a compliment. My question was, how are you doing tonight in the city? Do you have most of the utilities back online and if not by tonight, do you think by, what, late tomorrow?
Can you hear the question?
Are you talking to me, Tom? Are you talking to me, Tom?
Yes, I am, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?
I'm sorry, Tom, you're breaking in and out. Is he talking to you?
Yeah, the utilities, about 65% of the city has public power, has power right now, electricity and other utilities. The rest of the city does not and a lot of that will be done, we hope, by tomorrow, late in the afternoon.
The major damage area in the marina will not have power for some time, possibly weeks, but they're working on it very hard right now.
Mr. Mayor, I know that tourism is a big piece of your economy, but given the conditions that exist in San Francisco, wouldn't it be a good idea for people who are maybe planning to come here in the next couple of days to defer their trip for 10 days or so?
I think by the end of this week, by Friday of this week, this city is back to normal, two days from now. Our bus systems are up and running, our light rail systems, our water systems, sewage systems are all working right now.
We have full police protection and the city, for the most part, is working normally. Our opera will be performing Friday, so we're in good shape.
There's one eight block part of the city that is obviously not and that's the area we're concentrating on right now.
And that's the area just where I am standing, which is the marina district. What about looting? It seems to me that there has been relatively little of that that has gone on both in this area because you've had pretty heavy law enforcement, but also in the other areas along Market Street and the Mission Area.
That's right. That's one of the first things we did was to put out a full complement of police force. We're backed up by soldiers from the Army Presidio and deputy sheriffs. And last night we experienced the lowest crime rate we've had in recent history of this city.
We average about 100 arrests a night. We had 25 last night. So San Franciscans are caring for one another and not hurting one another.
San Francisco has always been a guy. I'm sure I know that you are and the people have performed quite magnificently here. San Francisco, however, was very lucky with this earthquake, wasn't it?
You've got really decent weather. You know, to put it in an old sports analogy, we got some good breaks. We got it in the in the daytime. We got good weather for this. There weren't any fierce winds blowing the fires.
And we took advantage of those breaks with a tremendous response on the part of our official city departments as well as the Red Cross, the volunteers and most of all, most of all the citizens of San Francisco have been truly heroic in responding to the crisis with their own personal behavior, helping one another in the good old fashioned American way. I'm very proud of them.
What have you learned as a result of this experience that will help you prepare for the next one?
Well, we're we're working on trying to improve our techniques. As you suggested, we got some lucky breaks. None of the vital organs of our city were knocked out. Our police stations were operational. Our hospitals are ambulance services. All of those things were functioning at the time of the quake and weren't knocked out afterwards.
We need to improve and make sure that if any of those are knocked out, we still have we still have the capability of responding as superbly as we did last night. And we're going to work on that. As a matter of fact, with the with the specter of even worse aftershocks that some of the experts say could happen anytime in the next six months.
I've instructed my city departments within the next 48 hours to tell me what they would do in addition to what they've done. Should we lose some of those vital organs that I described that are part of our response.
Mayor, thank you very much. And I hope that your son is able to sleep a little more peacefully tonight and you as well.
Thank you very much.
Mayor Art Agnos, the city of San Francisco. He's been out and about with only about two hours of sleep since the earthquake struck last night.
We still cannot predict exactly when or where earthquakes will strike. But once they do strike seismologists, the scientists who make a study of all of this can learn a lot more on all that now from NBC science correspondent Robert Bizzell.
California is laced with faults for the San Andreas visible from the air in some places is the largest and best known.
What caused yesterday's quake and the one in 1906. The 1906 earthquake and the fire that followed almost destroyed San Francisco.
The event has symbolized the hazards of living on California's fault lines, a danger that over the years has been romanticized and often ignored.
Scientists point out that the 1906 quake was 30 times more powerful than the one yesterday. Californians, they say, should expect and prepare for much worse than what happened yesterday.
It, of course, is not the large earthquake that we expect to eventually happen there. But this size earthquake is not at all uncommon, leading up to the larger earthquake.
The fault forms beneath mountains and valleys were huge sections of the Earth's crust called plates pushed together. Over the years, the plates move slowly, building up pressure until like yesterday, the fault suddenly slips.
The portion of the fault that caused the 1906 quake is in the north part of the Bay Area. The portion in the south where yesterday's quake occurred has not slipped for many years.
Using those sorts of observations, researchers studying the faults have learned to make forecasts. They had said that there was a 30% chance that a quake of yesterday's size would strike in the next 10 to 30 years.
We've moved fairly rapidly on being able to do this sort of long-term earthquake prediction, which is extremely important for development of local, state, government agency response to earthquakes.
We're still not there, but we're working hard on the question of short-term earthquake prediction, which would give days to weeks of warning for such an event.
But earthquake prediction is a tricky business. What if there had been a short-term warning for yesterday's quake? Dr. Robert Wesson is the government's chief earthquake scientist.
We might well have postponed the World Series game before we got several tens of thousands of fans into Candlestick Park and then caused traffic problems and so on by trying to evacuate them.
Even without specific prediction, scientists say there is a lot that can be done to minimize earthquake damage.
They point out that much of the Bay Area is landfill, where there used to be water, and that is where the worst damage occurred.
When the quake struck the bedrock, it jerked sharply but caused little damage. But the landfill, which is soft, rolled and waved, so damage was more severe.
Scientists studying the San Andreas Fault believe the next earthquake as powerful as 1906 will strike not in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in Southern California.
I believe that we're going to have to take very seriously the possibility of and the probability of earthquakes in other parts of California.
But that's no consolation to the people of Northern California tonight. Robert Buzell, NBC News.
T.A. Heppenheimer is a PhD and the author of a book that's gotten a lot of attention and is called The Coming Quake, Science and Trembling on California's Earthquake Frontier, and he's with us tonight from Burbank.
Dr. Heppenheimer, what about that? Is this earthquake in any way forbode the idea of a big earthquake coming to Southern California?
Yes, this is kind of a warning of the really big one that we must expect here in Southern California, which could come at any time.
But can you give us a wider parameter than that? I've always heard that it'll probably happen in the next 30 years or so.
Okay. There's a stretch of the San Andreas Fault about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, and this is very, very dangerous.
We know that it has not had a major earthquake in 300 years. It's got three centuries of strain built up, and when it goes, it's going to go with tremendous power, tremendous force.
We're going to have a tremendous amount of shaking, huge shaking across the entire Southern California area, not only for Los Angeles, but also the suburbs, Orange County, which is heavily populated, San Diego as well.
And what's even worse is we will not only have huge numbers of dead and injured, huge amounts of property damage, but the damage and the injury will be so great that Southern California will be largely cut off from the outside world.
People will have to manage with whatever limited amounts of material resources they have on hand, and I think that's going to be particularly terrifying for huge numbers of people to need help badly, and yet it won't be available.
The damage will be just too severe.
Dr. Heppenheimer, you sound very certain about all of this, and yet you continue to live in Southern California.
Well, Southern California is my home. If I were to live in other parts of the country, there might be tornadoes, hurricanes. There could be terrible blizzards, but this is where I live, and I'm just going to face the danger and ride it out like many millions of other people when it comes.
What are the lessons that Southern Californians should learn from this experience in Northern California with a 7.0 earthquake?
To treat Mother Nature with a lot more respect than we tend to give to her.
Nobody, I think, was expecting that a magnitude 7 quake would bring down that double-deck freeway in Oakland and cause so much death, so much of a tragedy, and yet it happened.
Now, what's going to happen when this great quake takes place 100 miles east of Los Angeles?
It's going to be the greatest disaster to hit the United States since the Civil War.
Isn't there the possibility that there could be enough minor quake activity that it would relieve the tension on that part of the San Andreas without having to have the big one?
You would need 10,000 modest-sized quakes to relieve the stress that's built up along this stretch of fault where the danger is so great. So the answer is no.
All right, Dr. Heppenheimer, thank you very much, I guess, for what is a very scientific look now at the San Andreas Fault, although we can never say for sure when or if or how big an earthquake will be.
The people who live just across the Pacific Ocean have had a lot of experience with earthquakes, of course, and they've offered to help in the Northern California area, the Japanese.
Our chief correspondent in Tokyo is Diana Karuki, and she has a report tonight on the Japanese experience with earthquakes.
This is what it's like to be in the middle of an earthquake.
They're an ever-present threat in Japanese life.
But even though the Japanese are used to earthquakes, they are not blasé.
They recognize an earthquake's destructive power, and they take that power seriously.
The Japanese are well prepared to handle earthquakes. The thinking ahead starts with construction.
Many new buildings, for example, have springs that absorb energy.
Japanese buildings are required to have, say, twice to three times larger resistance than buildings in Los Angeles or San Francisco area.
Ask any Japanese child what to do in an earthquake, and the answer comes back by rote.
This may look like a normal Japanese office, but look closer and see the chains on the bookshelves, the desk legs wedged into sockets in the floor,
the windows recessed to prevent flying glass, and the numbered roofs so buildings can be identified from overhead.
Japanese stood transfixed in front of large-screen TVs today, watching their networks carry the American network's coverage of the tragedy.
One person has been rescued, but... Many are worried about friends and relatives in the Bay Area,
but once the first shock of the tragedy wore off, the coverage turned to claims of superior engineering here.
A construction engineer described these reinforced beams on the freeway he designed, saying his freeway wouldn't have collapsed.
An American engineer made the same point on national television by describing a suspension bridge as state-of-the-art.
They've incorporated into them all of the latest design with regard to seismic activity,
and I don't believe that an earthquake of the kind that just hit San Francisco would cause any damage to these bridges here.
The Japanese take the spirit of preparedness right into their own homes, making them as earthquake-proof as possible,
and Japanese television doesn't hesitate to show what can happen if you don't get with the program.
Diana Karicki, NBC News, Tokyo.
And we have more news from the earthquake front tonight. Three earthquakes have struck northern China.
We are told that 14 people have been killed so far and that 6,000 homes have been...
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Earthquake Aftershock will continue.
Thursday, Theo faces a problem which could affect any child.
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No use crying over spilled milk.
On Inside Edition, some of his patients accuse this doctor
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Good evening, I'm Mort Crimm on the Nightbeat.
Coming up at 11, a story some call a miracle amid the rubble of the California earthquake.
An area mother under arrest for murder after two of her children die in a house fire.
The brutal stabbing death of a local mother and child, still a mystery, but you may be able to solve it.
And is your marriage in trouble?
Carmen Harland's series looks at how kids can be part of the problem.
All that plus wings highlights and Chuck's complete forecast right here at 11 on the Nightbeat.
Just to repeat what we were saying just a few moments ago, three earthquakes now have hit in northern China.
We are told that at least 14 people have been killed and 6,000 homes have been lost.
But then the construction in rural China of those homes is a little more than a sand base, so they come down very easily.
Here we still don't know exactly how many homes have been lost.
Damage estimates, very preliminary, more than a billion dollars.
That's probably go much higher than that.
Not a lot of earthquake insurance around.
The high cost of all of this, our chief financial correspondent is Mike Jensen.
To repair damage like this, insurance companies are expected to pay out more than one billion dollars
to the owners of destroyed or damaged homes and businesses and factories.
That's the insured cost.
The overall cost of this earthquake is expected to be much higher.
While most businesses here, at least the large ones, carry earthquake insurance,
only one home in five in California is insured for earthquake damage.
The government is going to help homeowners and small businesses, but mostly with low interest loans.
Well, San Francisco has always been a city that's been able to rebound.
It certainly rebounded from the earthquake of 1906.
I think the business community will pull together in San Francisco and the surrounding communities
and make a strong economic recovery and certainly SBA will be there to help them.
Much of the earthquake damage was in San Francisco.
Twelve apartment buildings destroyed by fire.
Another 40 buildings damaged or unusable.
Store windows shattered like this one at I-Magnon.
Today, businesses were closed all over the city.
Many had no electricity or gas.
Some were cleaning up. Others were checking for structural damage.
There was a run on flashlight batteries.
The Pacific Stock Exchange operated by candlelight and flashlight.
Things also were bad outside of San Francisco.
There was terrible damage in Santa Cruz where a shopping mall collapsed.
Two buildings were completely destroyed, 40 damaged.
There were 25 fires, an estimated $325 million in damage.
Then there was the destruction of public property all over the area.
Buildings and roads and bridges, streets that buckled.
All that will cost additional millions of dollars to rebuild and repair.
As always when disaster strikes, there were profits to be made.
Building materials were selling out.
Contractors had all the business they could handle.
Analysts said even the insurance companies would probably do well
because the damage claims would not be too high.
More people probably would buy earthquake insurance and premiums might rise.
Unfortunately, many insurance companies do try to either wiggle out of a claim
or pay as very little as they can.
Some insurance company stocks traded higher on the New York Stock Exchange.
But generally, this earthquake sent a sobering message to the business community
and to California economists.
Some experts said this kind of severe earthquake could slow down
the rapid economic growth rate that Northern California has been enjoying,
at least for a while.
Mike Jensen, NBC News, Los Angeles.
We've been having our own power difficulties here tonight.
We wanted to try to show you as best we could the doorway to this apartment house,
which is right behind me, and I don't think that will be possible.
A lot of structural damage to real estate in San Francisco
and a lot of psychic damage as well.
One woman saying to me tonight, I'm not sure that this is Nirvana anymore.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the real estate values in this city,
which has among the highest priced real estate anywhere in the country.
In 1971, when I was living in Southern California,
we had the big earthquake there.
The psychic damage was enormous for the children of the San Fernando Valley.
They were seeking special help for many months afterward.
That happened again not so many years ago.
We have NBC's Heidi Schulman tonight looking at what counseling kids need after an earthquake.
Today, among Whittier school children, the long-term trauma of an earthquake was clear.
The teacher said that the truck drove by to work in this construction,
shook one of our buildings today, and there was a gasp throughout the classroom when the building shook.
Approximately two weeks ago, an air conditioner kicked on in a classroom,
and every child went under the table.
They still remember too clearly what happened here two years ago,
when the last biggest California quake hit their town,
when homes and businesses collapsed, when people died.
Mary Yoon hasn't recovered yet.
We lost a business. We had severe damage to our home,
and a lot of psychological trauma to our younger children in particular.
And the psychological trauma can be recurring.
One day you're fine and you're functioning six months from now,
and the next time you step in the shower, you do it with your clothes on.
Yoon met today with other members of the Whittier Disaster Preparedness Committee,
as scheduled before San Francisco's disaster.
Top priority, of course, was their children's physical safety, but they know the emotional scars.
Questions from six years old, would you stay with me if I got crushed under this building?
These things can kill, and they have to face that at an age, as Mrs. Yoon said,
before maybe they're ready to face that.
I'm sure I'm going to have some phone calls in my desk that said,
you know what, my kids are having bad nightmares again.
They wanted to climb into bed with me, some of our elementary school children.
So it's going to reoccur.
In fact, some of the reactions may not be unlike those that we have seen in combat veterans.
Dr. William Arroyo has treated children and adults traumatized by earthquakes.
We have seen people who have developed nightmares,
people who have had problems with concentration,
people who have had some sort of extraordinary reliving experiences.
Unfortunately, there are a minority of people who will have symptoms for many years.
Why wouldn't you have any light after an earthquake?
Dr. Arroyo says children often recall vivid details of an earthquake years later.
Sixth graders in North Hollywood did today.
In the October 1st earthquake in 1987 was my first quake ever,
and I was with my friend, and I didn't know what happened,
because I just looked and the ground was moving up and down,
and then when it stopped, everybody started screaming and everything.
We were outside, my mom started to kind of scream, and I was trying to calm her down,
and I was thinking of my dad, what if something happened to him.
Mixed with their memories and their fears is a certain fatalism.
I think that's a warning for the big one, the ones coming up.
I couldn't sleep, so I should say if the big one comes, I want to die, but with my family.
See, not alone.
Dr. Arroyo says that places a greater burden on parents who may be traumatized themselves.
Youngsters frequently emulate the behavior of those adults about them,
but we see in some instances that parents who seem to panic or lose control often have kids who do likewise.
Doctors who worked with victims of this quake in Whittier in 1987
are concerned that the latest victims in the Bay Area get the psychological help they will need.
The trauma recurs unexpectedly, they say. The fears may last.
I wasn't that scared yesterday, but today I am scared.
Heidi Schulman, NBC News, Los Angeles.
And we had hoped that we would have some good news tonight of a dramatic rescue from Interstate 880,
but George Lewis has just told us that they have gone into the wreckage now with infrared cameras
and they have found no sign of life in that area where they heard sounds they thought might be someone asking for a rescue.
In fact, there is no sign of life in that particular area tonight.
We'll be back with more on Earthquake, the aftershock, right after this.
Let's go with this fabric.
To my customers, every little detail means a lot, so I can't stop when my minor arthritis pain acts up.
So instead of aspirin, I take Advil.
My doctor told me to try Advil when my hands feel stiff from the pain.
You know, one Advil is as effective as two regular aspirin, and that's the kind of strength I like.
Yet Advil's gentler to my stomach than aspirin.
For hours of relief, Advil is just my style.
Advil, advanced medicine for pain.
Are your teeth sensitive? Do they hurt?
Watch out for the domino effect.
It could end in tooth loss.
It's a chain reaction that can start with sensitive teeth, then pain, which can make you stop brushing.
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Sensodyne helps stop the pain.
And the domino effect.
Ask your dentist if you need Sensodyne. The toothpaste dentist recommends most for sensitive teeth.
Helps stop the pain and the domino effect with Sensodyne.
For a change of mood, change to Phillips soft-tone pastel light bulbs.
I'm in the mood for love
I'm in the mood for love
Simply because you're near me
Funny but when you're near me
I'm in the mood for love
Make everything seem more beautiful with new soft-tone pastels.
It's time to change your bulb to Phillips.
Gritty and authoritative.
Trying to give blind justice to speak of the truth.
Now, see for yourself why one critic says, I'm willing to believe in Mancuso.
A special Mancuso FBI Thursday following Dear John.
We have been talking a lot tonight about San Francisco, but of course there's much more to the Bay Area than just San Francisco,
which is the capital of Northern California in a way.
But Oakland is an important community and they've been suffering a lot as well.
San Jose suffered damage and lost a lot of power.
The epicenter was in Santa Cruz, California, which is on the Pacific side of the San Andreas Fault,
part by the Pacific Ocean, a scenic little community that has taken a terrible beating as a result of this earthquake.
NBC's Roger O'Neill went there to see what happened.
This is where it began, the San Andreas Fault cutting across Highway 17.
The epicenter about halfway between the communities of Santa Cruz on the edge of the Pacific and Los Gatos on the east.
Both towns suffering a lot of damage.
Both towns dark again tonight and probably the electric power won't come on before the weekend.
The earthquake changed a lot of things.
This is now the California lifestyle, standing in long lines, waiting to buy water and food that won't spoil.
Pack of root beer, bread, chips.
Everyone knew, of course, what happened, but still a newspaper was as important as a loaf of bread.
In Santa Cruz, the Pacific Garden Mall was wrecked by the shaking earth.
It was the place to be today, the place to look at the damage.
Nearly every building in the seven-block long mall was hit.
There are some very, very major road problems in our county where essentially thoroughfare is serving lots of different residences,
have been severed, and may need to be completely rebuilt.
In Los Gatos, as many homes as businesses were hit, old Victorian homes which the little town in the mountain is known for.
The reputation may change now to the town closest to the epicenter.
Still, residents like where they live.
We have to stay. We have three cats and one dog in our house. We have to stay.
The quake shook a lot of things loose, but not the earthen dam holding back the waters of Lexington Reservoir.
Thank God, not the dam.
And thank God for people like Chris Benson, who moved his restaurant outside today to serve all who were hungry, whether they could pay or not.
Roger O'Neill, NBC News, Los Gatos.
Chris was one of many heroes, large and small, throughout the Bay Area as a result of this earthquake.
You know, it struck at 5.04 Pacific time, right at the height of the rush hour, and during pregame ceremonies.
For games free of the World Series at Candlestick Park, 60,000 fans were gathered there.
Many of them, when it began, thought that those were just enthusiastic San Francisco fans stomping on the floor of Candlestick.
Then they realized it was a good deal more than that.
And after that 15-second shaker, then it was evacuated, and it all went very, very peacefully.
Indeed, people helping each other out of Candlestick Park.
NBC's Bob Jamison, who was there, said one sportswriter had a friend, and when it stopped, the friend began to run out of the stadium.
And when the sportswriter said to the friend, where are you going, the friend said, I'm headed for Kansas.
Well, that was an understandable reaction.
But the fact of the matter is, people helped people throughout the Bay Area last night and throughout the day, and will be for several days to come.
We've asked Keith Morrison tonight to take a look at these heroes of the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake.
In a long San Francisco night, in the horror in Oakland, there was a real and remarkable burst of heroism.
What Samaritans these people found themselves to be?
One doesn't easily forget a picture like this.
Around the Bay, people risked life and limb last night for strangers.
Would the house fall on them as they rescued those inside?
Who knew?
They pulled hoses to fight the fires and dug in the rubble to save who they could, and didn't think about it.
Until today, when a little pride crept inside.
Last night, they were just good Americans.
They weren't white people, they weren't black people.
They were just people out here trying to do a good deed and trying to help their fellow man.
It is a humble sort of place, is the neighborhood in Oakland, where the road went down.
What makes news here? It is poor, tough.
And last night, they were very tough.
The people that came out the most were the people from the project, the poor people, the people on welfare.
They came out with a pair of pliers, with extension cards, they came out with ladders, they came out with car jacks, anything that would move metals.
But heroes?
And down the way, at Tim Walsh's Yellow Cab Depot, they watched the road crash down.
And right away, shitted up there to get the people out, and ran the cabs all night as ambulances.
Didn't go home at all.
I'm out here, and I saw that lady get ready to step off that ledge.
And the thing was just to run up the street, and I just ran up there.
And I didn't even think about it.
But heroes?
Right in here, you feel like you're going to cry at any second, but you can't bring it up yet.
Who would brave such danger?
Turns out a great many ordinary people.
Which in this town seems not such a bad thing to be.
Keith Morris in NBC News, Oakland.
And in the San Francisco area, civility rules as well tonight.
A lot of people were kept from their homes in this area, even though the streets did seem to be safe to be walking on them.
The police said, no, you can't go home and recover your precious things.
And the citizens understood somehow, did not argue with the policeman, who barricaded them from their own property, understanding that this was a traumatic time for everyone.
I'll be back with some final thoughts about all this in a moment.
I think little Timmy here.
They were lawyers in love, on the trail of a brutal killer.
Rape?
Yeah.
A trail that could lead her back to her lover.
I'm not like that.
Felicia Rashad.
He's guilty, and I know it.
Philip Michael Thomas.
Got the wrong man on trial, Lin.
The world premiere thriller, False Witness.
One day.
This earthquake changed so much, of course, including the World Series.
It stopped Game 3 in its tracks.
And that game now has been temporarily rescheduled for next Tuesday night.
But we'll have to wait and see.
The decision left up to Major League Baseball Commissioner Faye Vincent.
And where it will be played, no one can say for sure.
It is so tragic, so unfortunate what has happened here.
But it is also somehow fitting that if there is to be a big earthquake in this country,
that it happened in California.
A state given to excess.
A state bursting at the seams.
A state that is also a state of mind.
But if it were not a part of our union, it would be one of the top ten nations in the world.
The population of more than 26 million people.
A long and glorious coastline, great cities, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco.
Some of the great geographic wonders of our time.
Yosemite Valley and the desert, Steppe Valley.
Yes, California will survive this earthquake as it has itself in so many ways for so long now.
And Californians always have an attitude about life out here on the edge of the country.
On the Pacific Rim.
On the edge of danger, as it were.
They like to joke even about the really big earthquake.
They like to say when that one comes, the rest of the country will slide into the Atlantic.
I'm Tom Brokaw in San Francisco.
This has been a special report on earthquake, the aftershock.
Music
As the California earthquake tragedy unfolds and the recovery process begins, NBC News team coverage continues.
From NBC News at sunrise, to Today with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauling,
to NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw reporting from the scene wherever news breaks, whatever it takes, NBC News.