Word: oaklanders
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When the quake struck, Serina Johnson, 13, and her sister Corina, 11, were alone in their small apartment across from Oakland's city hall. "The food started flying off the refrigerator, dishes started breaking off the wall, the TV started knocking over, and the windows started breaking and cracking," said Serina. "I started screaming, and I tried to get my little sister out of the house. We ran outside. I looked up, and there was big cracks in the walls. And the building was coming down." Said Corina: "It was like being in a blender...
...most horrifying scene was in West Oakland, where screams and smoke issued from the crumbled concrete of I-880. Beneath the smashed upper deck, some cars had been flattened to a height of 6 in. As survivors yelled for help, citizens long divided by race and class forgot their differences in a rush to assist them. William McElroy, an unemployed boilermaker who had just reached his home from the freeway, returned to the disaster. "We couldn't do a damn thing at first because we didn't have any equipment. We broke into a factory yard and got ladders. Then...
Arriving fire fighters finally managed to pry Cathy loose. Then doctors who had rushed to the scene from Oakland hospitals made a tough decision. "The mother is in the way, O.K.?" said intern Daniel Allen. "We're going to take a chain saw through the body to get to him." Even after that macabre operation, the boy was still trapped. Only when trauma surgeon James Betts amputated his right leg could Julio be freed. "He was moving and crying out," Betts explained later. "We couldn't just leave him there...
...When Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson declared that there could be no more survivors in the fallen freeway, dogged rescue crews ignored him and searched on. For a brief moment on Wednesday, their determination seemed to pay off when a faint voice was heard in the rubble. But it turned out to be from a CB radio...
...Wednesday most of San Francisco had returned to near normal. The BART mass-transit system, which suffered only minor damage to its tunnel beneath the Bay, resumed normal service, and airports in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose were operating again. The surest sign that the crisis was over: baseball commissioner Fay Vincent announced that the World Series would resume Tuesday night if local officials decide it could be done safely...