A small piece of the upper deck of The Bay Bridge fell (the tilt you referred to) during the 1989 quake. Luckily the piece killed only 1 person -- light traffic due to The World Series. The "pancaking" of the two decks was a few miles away on Interstate 880, and several dozen people were killed.
Dave was remembering the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. One section of the upper deck of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge fell onto the lower deck. Also, a double-decker freeway in Oakland collapsed, with the upper deck crushing the cars on the lower deck.
@CLester Yes. The Series probably saved a lot of lives, because people in the Bay Area were either at Candlestick or at home waiting for the game to start, instead of being on the road.
My flat was trashed in the Lima Prieta 1989 quake. I was home. The flat (Victorian) was built on filled land, mostly sand from Golden Gate Park. Liquid faction during the quake made the ground move like jello. The steps up to my door separated approximately 10” from the structure. Plaster fell off walls 100 years of soot came down the chimneys and in the flat upstairs the hot water heater fell over flooding the walls and ceiling in my kitchen. I’ve lived in California all my life and that was the most terrifying 15 seconds of my life! Needless to say, I moved to an area of the city located on solid bedrock.
We did a summer trip to Washington to see the aftermath of Mount St. Helens eruption. It was absolutely amazing. Under all those dead trees seemingly lined in order… My dad pointed out to us kids the new vegetation starting to growing from all that grey ash in an area seemingly lifeless. It was so alien yet beautiful.
I was a little girl when the '89 earthquake happened in San Francisco. Our building manager told my dad that another few moments of the earthquake would've had the building completely collapse on top of us. That was enough information to scare my parents into moving us across the country to Florida - a state with hurricanes, tornadoes, and...Florida Man. 🤦♀
I seen a number of tornadoes in the Midwest, usually off in the distance. Kinda frightening and awesome at the same time. They were mostly small though but i imagine folks from overseas would've shat their pants seeing one cause it's truly something else
I lived hundreds of miles away in Montana when St. Helen's blew. Schools were shut down and you barely see a few feet due to all the ash. The next year we moved to Washington state, I was terrified.
I was actually in Anaheim, California during the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes which I believe included the largest earthquake California had seen in 20 years. I was taking a nap and literally did not feel a thing and just slept right through it 😂 but my family said they could feel the beds shaking a bit
I lived on the tenth floor of a building in Taiwan for a year. Earthquakes were common, about every 2 weeks there was a noticeable one. During the strongest one I experienced I was taking a shower, the whole building swayed(supposed to) and I could feel it. Lights cut out and flickered for about 30 seconds and I thought "no, i dont want to die butt naked". lol.
I lived in Los Angeles during the Whittier, Northridge, Big Bear/Landers quakes. I've also been through tornados living in TX and I'd take a few hours of warning over being shook to death at 4AM anyday.
I live an hour away from ridgecrest and holy hell I was scared. The aftershocks were crazy too. I remember there being a smaller earthquake a day before the big one in ridgecrest.
I live in Oklahoma. My first memory is being wrapped up in a blanket, and being taken into a "hidey hole". Okie term for a tornado shelter. I've also seen wildfires (grass fires here). Believe it or not a hurricane hit Oklahoma in 2007. A tropical storm hit Texas. It went north into New Mexico, then made a sharp right turn and strengthened into a hurricane. The satellite picture was crazy with the eye going straight west to east down the middle of Oklahoma
A fair amount of the deaths in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire was the fire. SF being a peninsula with no bridges in 1906, the only ways out were by boat or to go south. While the fire rapidly spread and the city burned many citizens trapped by the circumstance of geography parished.
As a Southern Californian, I can say that earthquakes to us are nornal, we hardly freak out, we really go "oh, earthquake" and keep doing whatever we're doing. The Ridgecrest one was pretty strong, but it only really shook my bed like as if someone was trying to wake me up. Wildfires are normal for us too sadly, the biggest one that got really close to our town was the Thomas fire in...2017? 2018? It really felt so weird so see a mountain at night become illuminated by red/orange lights and a few minutes later the mountain itself just being engulfed in fire.
I slept through quite a few of them growing up down there. My uncle was at a gym rehabbing a broken ankle when the Northridge earthquake hit. Building collapsed on him and broke his ankle again.
Yep, the Cypress Bridge collapsed onto the lower deck. I was nearby the epicenter. In fact, we are coming up on the anniversary, Oct 17, 1989 at 5:04pm PST. It's a day I'll never forget. I was 14 years old and saw the roof of our school gym fall down. I still get flashbacks if I feel a heavy truck shake the ground nearby. But thankfully, the World Series was going on and most ppl were at home waiting to watch the game, so the fatalities weren't as bad as they could of been. Nonetheless, I saw humanity at its finest that week.
Im born and raised right here in Nashville TN and remember how shocked I was a tornado hit here in Nashville at that time in 1998, that was the first time ever for me and I was 26 at that time. Nashville has had one or two more since but it isn't common as much in actual Nashville.
For the SF earthquake, my uncle had just passed the section of the bridge that collapsed, and was stranded on the island it went to for a day. My brother was a skyscraper window-washer and had just gotten off work and to the bottom of the skyscraper when it hit. Both lucky.
Lived thru blizzards, hurricanes- one with green lightning will never forget that, fires and earthquakes. For me the most terrifying are tornadoes. Seen one once which was in the sky- didn't touch down but was still very scary
The UK has plenty of tornadoes. It's practically its own tornado alley. In fact, the UK, along with the Netherlands, have the most mesocyclones of any country in the world. Mesocyclones are early-stage tornadoes, which start out as swirling winds. Up until recently (c. early 2000s), the majority of these mesocyclones never developed further. Now it's quite common as the UK's climate becomes more temperate.
When I was 18 I was working at a Blockbuster Video store at 11:30 at night. We were closing in a half hour, so we had some customers inside still. A tornado hit it, ripped part of the roof of and dumped it in the parking lot. Everyone was OK, the only car in the lot that was damaged was my mother's I had driven to work.
As a little kid, definitely remember the 1971 (February 9th) Sylmar earthquake of Los Angeles, a magnitude 6.6 on the Richter scale. The thing that makes earthquakes so weird is: THEY ALMOST ALWAYS SEEM TO HAPPEN IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS WHEN YOU'RE IN BED! You are completely caught by surprise. Sylmar happened right around 6AM. The 1989 San Francisco quake happened during the telecast of the baseball world series. Sportscaster Al Michaels only got the words "we're having an earth......" out of his mouth before the telecast was knocked off the air by the quake.
I live in an area where tornados happen often. I'd rather dodge the occasional tornado though, than deal with extreme cold, feet of snow and/or blizzards. I hate autumn only because it means cold weather is around the corner and our winters aren't harsh at all. I just hate cold weather.
I live in LA. The house shaking a little, I’ve experienced that a few times. The worst one was where I used to work in a high rise building and bldg shook, drawers opened . That was intense
Lawrence lives fairly close to me in Chicago (I can tell from where he posts). We had a rare tornado hit my neighborhood in Chicago at the beginning of the pandemic. It was a special type called caused by a derecho and came off the Lake. Tons of downed trees
I live in NY and literally the only natural phenomenon I haven't experienced is tsunamis and volcanos. Blizzards, heat waves, tornadoes, even felt the Richmond earthquake (the northeast has low topsoil due to glacial erosion so we can feel earthquakes hundreds of miles away). The US is absolutely wild in the ways it can kill you.
Dave, a funnel cloud that never touches the ground, is only a funnel cloud. It doesn't get the moniker of tornado, until it touches ground. Funnel clouds are much more prevalent than tornados, here in the states. They obviously don't cause any damage, other than an occasional power line.
I like tornadoes and used to live in Florida during one of the big ones, big holes where large trees where ripped out by the storms or lying on their side half attached to the ground, flattened homes, trees had to be chopped up to open the road back up after the storm.
Additionally, in 1989 when the SF Bay Area experienced the bridge collapse, the Major League Baseball playoffs were just about to start in San Fran at Candlestick park. There was network television of the park filled with people go friggen berserk during and after the earthquake. They postponed the series until they could repair the damaged stadium.
Yes, I grew up in southern New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia and I now live in Washington, DC. I also spent a year in southern California. All told, off the top of my head, I've experienced at least two eathquakes that I noticed -- probably more that I can't remember or didn't notice and at least two hurricanes - Agnes and Isabel. We were also sideswiped by Superstorm Sandy.
Yup I’m from California. Still in California. I was 2 years old when that earthquake happened when my family and I lived right there in Oakland. My pops did construction in SF & my mom would drive him over that bridge with me in the car seat about everyday. Except for that day of the Earthquake. My pops just so happened to call out sick from tonsillitis and we stayed home.. then the Quake hit right at 5:04pm. My parents tell me we would have been in the middle of that bridge bringing my pops home at around 5:10pm🤯‼️Ever Since my parents told me this when I was maybe 15years old…It’s always strange and scary thinking that any other day we would have been on that bridge 😬🤯 My pops always makes a point to say “And I thought I was having the worst pain and worst day I could have (tonsillitis) but turns out it saved our family.” Not all negatives are NEGATIVES 💯
4:30 Yes you are 100% correct, but specifically that freeway collapse was in Oakland, CA on the other side of the San Francisco Bay from the city of San Francisco. It was part of the "880 freeway" called the "Cypress Viaduct" and that section was a double decker section and when the earthquake hit it pancaked crushing cars, trapping and killing a ton of people. That section was removed and is not there anymore but to me it's also just eerie when i drive where that part used to be. Note there was also a section of the San Francisco Bay bridge which was also a double decker bridge where a section of the upper deck broke and fell into the lower deck. There are often scenes of one car going over it as it breaks. But these are two different freeways that had sections collapse. They are not far from each other though. And the one above, the 880, had far more loss of life.
Nothing is scarier than when u are driving at night and the hills are on fire in all direction and the wind is going so you never knew where it was gonna go
4:30 A portion of the top deck of the Bay Bridge collapsed (along w/ a section of freeway in Oakland) The earthquake hit just as Game 3 of the 1989 World Series was getting started, so the cameras broadcast what was unfolding in real time from SF stadium. They should check out the live footage -- it's surreal.
I wonder you you guys are gonna do an out of the office Office blokes series where you guys come over to the states together and try, see stuff in person. I'm sure any of the states would be happy to have you.
The great fires in Michigan were a result of massive lumbering. One of the reasons MI got populous enough to become a state was the lumber industry. In those days,they clear-cut everything but left the brush behind. The ground dries out from the wind and sun exposure… click. Tales of an inescapable wall of fire abound. I expect the Wisconsin fires are the same thing. Chicago right in the are also - Almost all densely packed wood buildings.
Again this goes to show you how vast the USA is! Even though natural disasters happen in the US more often than other places in the world, there are plenty of states that almost never see any of it!
There's videos of people in California leaving their homes to fires and all along the roads they're escaping on are fires and smoke all around them. It's pretty terrifying, I imagine, feeling trapped in a fire in your car with a tank of gas.
OB Dave I think the earthquake you are thinking of where the bridge collapsed is the Northridge Earthquake in '94. I experienced that one. A can of white paint fell out of the rafters in the garage and onto my dad's black car. Then our cat ran through the paint and then through the entire house so there was white paw prints all over the carpet. I was 7 at the time and there was an aftershock at school and we had to get under our desks. We had already had earthquake drills in school so we knew what to do. This may not be the exact one you are thinking of since this kind of thing has happened other times as well.
An "ordinary" tornado just looks like a pointy bit at the bottom of a storm cloud. Not really impressive apart from the danger it will get stronger. But thicc stovepipe monster tornados are Cosmic Horror. They look like something supernatural come to eat the world, and you couldn't pay me to live somewhere regularly threatened by those. Just the thought of it would ruin too many days.
In all honesty, while there are incidents with the extreme weather, the fatalities are very low. Fatalities from rain and snow are far greater making common rain and snow far more dangerous. It's like being scared of sharks when you're far likely to die in a car accident on the way to the beach.
Yes, that was the NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE, I believe it was the bay bridge?? Not sure, but yes that was San Francisco area, and it was a double decker bridge. X👍🍀
Tornados are NOT RARE, I Live in tornado alley, and we have a tornado season and get a lot of tornadoes each year during this time. But things are changing now, climate change
Yep. Louisiana here and I can’t remember a year out of my entire 53 years living here that we didn’t have at least one tornado each year within 50 miles of my house.
Mt St Helen - I was old enough to remember this event. He says 57 people perished, and that is horrible. It might also seem low, but I remember that they had ample forewarning of the eruption, and they were evacuating people from the area for weeks prior, and there was a story about one elderly man who refused to leave. He [*was born] 'had lived on the mountain for a long time, and said he would meet his end there as well. So to hear that 57 people still died is actually incredible given the warning and mandatory evacuations. I would have expected just the one. Imagine how many thousands would have died if the eruption had not been forecasted in advance.
He wasn't born on the mountain. But he lived there so long and was old enough to not want to live anywhere else. God bless you harry truman. Sitting on your lodge porch drinking a bloody mary,living your life on your terms until the very last second of it.
The most ironic thing about it? Evangelicals say that natural disasters are caused by people sinning. But the bible belt has the worst natural disasters in the country. So they must do an awful lot of "sinning".
California doesn't maintain their forests like they should, which is a big reason why they have so many bad wildfires.. Which is hypocritical of them, since they're the ones who preach the loudest about being environmentally friendly. And supposedly, there have been sitings of lasers in some of those wildfires. Seemingly lasers that have been coming from outer space, and supposedly making the wildfires worse.. Heard it being talked about after lasers were seen over Hawaii the other night, from a suspected Chinese satellite.
