Nimitz freeway collapse

Some time in the middle of the First World War, it must have been towards the end of the dreadful year of 1916 after the nightmare slaughter on the Somme, an aunt of mine, whose husband was a soldier in France, announced that she didn't believe a word of what she read in the papers.

She was going to write to her husband to find out for real what was going on on the Western Front. This showed, first, a touching ignorance of the censorship of letters both ways, but eventually he replied. All he could tell her about the way the war was going was what life was like in a mudded trench he'd been living in for a month or two and what a blasted 200 yards looked like between him and the German trenches. The whole war for him shrank to dampness, lice, chilblains, rats, bully beef, the sight of two ruined trees and would she please send him some chocolate and cigarettes.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday of this past week, it struck me that the constant irony of the San Francisco earthquake in this, the wonderful age of worldwide communication, was that compared with the people of Europe, Australia, India, wherever, the only people who hadn't a clue to what was going on were the people of San Francisco and other neighbouring cities without power.

From the first rumble and shudder of those racking 15 seconds and on for a couple of days, they had no television, no radio, no newspapers and a reporter who'd flown in from the east on Wednesday wrote that it was a strange, embarrassing feeling to stand in almost any part of the city and tell these gaping natives about Candlestick Park, the Nimitz Freeway, the damage in the Mission District, the collapsed shopping mall 90 miles away in Santa Cruz, the buckled highways, the astonishing range of pictures she'd seen on television overnight, mainly transmitted from that station in Atlanta, Georgia – CNN – which the irrepressible Ted Turner started years ago and which pulls in, through innumerable sources, live coverage from everywhere on earth and broadcasts without a pause 24 hours a day.

On Tuesday night in the east, when the scene jumped to President Bush at a dinner to give us the latest word, the CNN anchor people charitably left him as soon as possible. He was already well behind the times. He had not been home watching Atlanta.

It was an eerie break for millions of Americans settling across the country at five Pacific time, 8pm in the east, that they were about to have the privilege of getting a vast panorama of the scene below, of the baseball stadium and the surrounding city as seen by a blimp that is always on hand on high for such sporting occasions.

All these fans were settling in, as I was with a friend and a beer, to watch the third game of the baseball championship of the World Series. It was five o'clock and we'd seen the 60-odd thousand rustling away down there and, inevitably, they always like to set the stage, long panning shots of the enchanting bay and the great bridges glistening in the falling sun. We saw the pitchers warming up in the bull pen, the managers and teams chewing away, gum perhaps, more often tobacco, in the dug out. We were ready for the introductions, the national anthem and then all but one of the batting team would trot back to the dugout and the fielding team would spread for the first pitch and there'd be a raucous first roar of the Oakland fans who'd come to see the Christians – the Giants, that is – mauled.

Back to three anchormen in their booth. They chatter, one of them looks behind him and down as if a friend had called up. Then he looks up and then the second deck of the stadium at Candlestick Park, well the camera must have been clumsily handled, the deck seemed as if it were swaying. I don't believe we knew this as a fact till it was over and providentially the huge crowd didn't seem to catch on either.

To this day, the blessed, the unexplained truth, is the absence of panic. I thought for a time the umpires had not turned up, some other failure of the usual arrangements and then we heard. And, in no time, the great blimp took off and was seeing the incredible sight of the collapsed span of the Bay Bridge and, as the night came on, it soared over the huge blacked-out city, with smoke plumes rising there down toward the bay and then the plumes turning into flames and the beginning of the fire.

The pictures picked up now from all around the bay swam with menacing slowness all through the night till at daybreak we saw, as I'm sure you did wherever you were, the collapsed upper deck of the Nimitz Freeway on the Oakland side, the sudden ghastly appearance of what somebody came to call 'the concrete sandwich'.

Hasty guesses were made about the numbers of cars and people trapped in there and overseas papers grabbed at a figure – 250 – which the police here first deplored saying that after many hours only seven bodies had been dragged out. But on Thursday morning, a reporter close by pointed to the compression of the upper deck of the highway on the lower and banished any hope of survivors by remarking that the visible space between the two decks was, at most, 18 inches high.

Apart from the strange, almost casual, departure of the 60,000 baseball fans, it might be said that the other great and unanticipated blessing was the comparatively minute damage done to the city of San Francisco itself with, accordingly, little loss of life – compared, that is, with April 1906. The reading on the Richter scale of Tuesday's earthquake, you'll have heard, was 6.9, exactly the measurement of last year's earthquake in Armenia which took 25,000 lives.

That difference is easily explained. Since 1906, California, northern California especially, has lived always with the prospect in mind of another great quake and in 1907 drafted its first new building code devised for the first time by structural engineers working with architects. It required bracing systems and reinforced masonry and until the Second War, the city has withstood innumerable shocks, minor of course by Tuesday's reckoning.

In 1946, another tougher code went into effect. By 1965 we had a wealth of new building materials and by then also, San Francisco was, lamentably, about to put up its first high-rises and downtown skyscrapers. So another, more elaborate and stricter code was made to apply to all new building. In the early 1970s by the way, they decided that the concrete decks on the two-tier bridges might in an earthquake be top heavy for the vertical supports. They reinforced them and this time the Golden Gate Bridge and two others across the bay held firm, though engineers now suspect that the sustaining verticals on the Bay Bridge, at one point anyway, proved too skinny.

One expert in earthquake engineering went so far after the Nimitz disaster as to doubt whether any more two-decker highways should be built.

As I speak, only days after the event, what is most impressive is the speed and harmony that marked the mobilisation within the hour of the national guard, the army corps of engineers, the California state authorities, the city fathers, the police, engineers, the Red Cross and – a resource that San Francisco is unique in being able to call on – a permanent standby earthquake medical team. Not to forget the heartening sight of thousands of ordinary citizens up from their beds in the middle of the night helping the teams at the collapsed highways, of forming human ladders with buckets at the marina fire before they were able to rig up the system of pumping water from the bay itself.

All these volunteers in San Francisco were warned to go home and stay there. The great fear, once the fire started from burst gas mains, was the fear that was devastatingly fulfilled in 1906 – the gas leaks from other mains and the eruption of hundreds of other fires.

When I first went to San Francisco 56 years ago and for several decades thereafter, old San Franciscans would wince at a gaffe regularly committed by outlanders – any mention of the earthquake. It was always the fire, the great fire, and it's true that while immense damage was done by the initial shock on that April morning, the ravaging of the heart of the city was done by fire. So insatiable was the fire's appetite, raging over four square miles, that to save the north-western tip of the city, the army was called out from the Presidio and dynamited the whole cross avenue of Van Ness and held the fire.

Well, this time there were no aftershocks to burst other mains. Aftershocks can happen days or weeks or months after the first jolt, and all these helpers, expert and amateur, came together under the government's central authority, the federal emergency management agency, known as FEMA which, it so happens, had held a simulated earthquake drill throughout the city only two months ago.

FEMA's main job is the granting of low-cost loans to people who have suffered loss of property or injury. FEMA, just now, suffers from a cruel disability. Most of its national team or teams are off in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and South Carolina working 16 hours a day, helping to repair the wrecked lives of over a quarter of a million victims of hurricane Hugo. A disaster insurance expert with FEMA brought us a timely, if grizzly, reminder on Wednesday that Hugo is a far greater human catastrophe than the earthquake.

At this moment, FEMA is trying to handle 20,000 applications for help in the Virgin Islands, 45,000 in and around Charleston, South Carolina, 200,000 in Puerto Rico. FEMA's resources have touched bottom and the man stressed for all of us who feel compassionate about San Francisco that cash for Hugo from people anywhere is still the main burden of their appeal.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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