Word: streets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hollister (pop. 11,500) experiences temblors so frequently that some of the townspeople proudly call it the Earthquake Capital of the World. At 5:04 p.m., 19-year-old Albert Valles was working out in a gym when he felt the building begin to shake. He ran into the street as the facade gave way, burying his Jeep under an avalanche of bricks. "I would have been finished," Valles marveled. No one was injured. Yet in nearby Watsonville (pop. 23,550), the Bake-Rite Bakery caved in, fatally smashing a passerby...
Everywhere people yearned for news of what had happened around them. On downtown California Street, a crowd gathered around a woman equipped with a tiny battery-operated TV. Playing anchorwoman, she relayed the news to those who could not see her screen. When truncated copies of the San Francisco Chronicle appeared at 7 a.m. Wednesday, people threw quarters at the sellers and shoved one another to grab a copy...
...every other California city from Eureka to Salinas -- began at 5:12 a.m., at the first light of what would have been a lovely day. A dreadful howling sound shattered the dawn, as the earth suddenly rumbled, vibrated, heaved and pitched, wobbling in a demonic dance. "The whole street was undulating," recalled police sergeant Jesse Cook. The quake shook the city, in words that became folklore, like a "terrier shaking...
...five seconds, the quaking stunned the populace out of sleep into an incomprehensible terror of showering plaster, scattering bric-a-brac, breaking dishes, shifting furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate new city hall disintegrated. When...
...Bridge, when the quake hit. "The building began to sway gently, then more rapidly," Witteman reports. "The phone connection was broken, and then the severe shocks began." With the elevators out of service, Witteman walked down 398 steps to the ground. It was only when he got to the street and saw the blown-out third floor of the adjacent Golden Gate Bank building that he realized the ferocity of the earthquake. He pulled out his notebook and began reporting this week's cover stories...