Screams Replaced Cheers At Ball Game

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 18, 1989

SAN FRANCISCO, Wednesday: At 5.03pm on Tuesday, Candlestick Park was filled with the light of the setting sun.

The only rumble was from the 58,000 fans watching the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics warming up for the third baseball game of the World Series.

Band music filled the stadium as Giant fans celebrated the first World Series game to be played at Candlestick for 27 years. The first pitch was scheduled for 5.20.

At 5.04, the stadium rumbled from movement deep within the earth, and thoughts of baseball vanished. Cheers and music were replaced in an instant by screams and shouts of alarm.

"I was just strapping on my brace on my knee," said Don Robinson, scheduled to be the Giants' starting pitcher. He was in the Giants' clubhouse at the time. "I thought it was the crowd. When the rumbling became more intense, I ran into Roger Craig's office and lay down under the doorway."

Craig, the San Francisco manager, no stranger of earthquakes, said: "I've never felt it like that before."

Al Clark, one of the umpires, said he was in the umpires' room preparing his equipment. "I felt the tremor and my legs gave way," he said. "I was kind of confused. I looked up and saw the wall waving. I got tremendously scared. I ran out of the room and went to right field."

When the 15-second tremor stopped, the shaken fans began streaming onto the playing field, heading for the exits in the gathering twilight, as the players called their families to join them.

Some fans carried young children and many clung to one another, looking for reassurance and wondering if an aftershock might soon follow.

The public address system stopped working when the electricity failed. The police used loudspeakers to talk to the crowd, to tell them that the game had been postponed and to leave the park as quickly and calmly as possible.

The baseball commissioner, Mr Fay Vincent, said he was standing at his seat at the time talking with Willie Mays, the former Giants' star. "I thought it was a jet," he said. "My wife said she thought it was an earthquake. She was right." He said the "ground started shaking and I shook with it".

Television viewers across the country were first aware that something was wrong when their pictures began to tremble and shake.

The Goodyear blimp, circling over the stadium, was the first to provide aerial television pictures of the disaster, with at least one fire burning on the horizon and close-ups of a collapsed section of the Bay Bridge with three vehicles dangling in collapsed concrete slabs.

Chub Feeney, former president of the National League and of the San Francisco Giants, said the quake was "the biggest one I've ever felt".

More than an hour and a half after the earthquake, some fans were still leaving the stadium. Reports of death and damage would not come until later, and some fans were in a jovial mood.

"Four earthquake cups for a dollar," one called out.