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The Battalion
Page 15
Nation tries
to contact
quake victims
GRAPEVINE (AP) — Grand
parents, aunts, uncles, husbands
and friends grabbed telephones
and waited impatiently at Dallas-
Fort Worth International Airport
Wednesday for the first available
flights to earthquake-ravaged
northern California and answers
they hoped they would find
there.
“We are flying to San Jose to
find out how our son and his fam
ily are,” said Jean Smith, 60, of
Cape Coral, Fla., with her hus
band Edward, 62. “He lives in
Hollister, the epicenter of the
earthquake and we are very con
cerned. He and his wife have a 3-
week old baby. The thought of
something happening to a 3-
week-old baby just makes us sick.”
The Smiths were waiting to
board Delta flight 363 with oth
ers, many of them looking ner
vous and tense.
An earthquake in Northern
California Tuesday night killed
more than 270 people in the Bay
area and left 650 others injured.
“I’m very frustrated,” Tim Mc
Coy, 27, of San Francisco said. “I
have no idea how my family is
and I have been trying to get
through for hours. I’m just wor
ried and frustrated.”
McCoy said the Wednesday af
ternoon flight was his third at
tempt to get home. American
Airlines cancelled his two pre
vious flights because air traffic
into San Francisco was shut down
late Tuesday. SF International re
sumed a limited schedule early
Wednesday, officials said.
Most of the passengers at the
Dallas airport grabbed any avail
able phones they could find as
they waited to board planes.
“It took me several hours to get
through to my wife, but I finally
got through and she’s okay,” said
Richard Walker, 51, of Los Altos,
Calif., who cut a business trip to
Cincinnati short to-r,get back
home. “I can’t get tfifough to the
rest of my family.”
Walker said the chimney on his
house fell in during the quake.
Passengers on American Air
lines flight 315 to San Francisco
were delayed more than an hour
because of a limited flight sched
ule at San Francisco International
Airport.
Witnesses tell about fright, tragedy
during second-worst quake in U.S.
Susie Allen was fighting rush-
hour traffic on her way home across
the San Francisco-Oakland Bay
Bridge, Kim House was walking with
her fiance and Bob Witzgall was tak
ing a shower in his hotel room. Then
it hit.
Northern California’s earthquake
at 5:04 p.m. Tuesday turned a rou
tine rush hour into tragedy, sent
frightened tourists and natives rush
ing into the streets and left victims
and heroes.
At 3 p.m., thousands of baseball
fans began streaming into Candle
stick Park for Game No. 3 of the
World Series, scheduled to begin 2
and a half hours later. The first
pitch was never thrown.
Allen was amid heavy traffic
heading out of San Francisco on the
lower tier of the Bay Bridge when
the span began to ripple and sway.
“First I thought my shocks weren’t
working,” she said. “Then I realized
the car wasn’t having problems; the
ground was having problems.
“The road rose up to meet me,”
said Allen, who was heading from
her office in San Francisco to her
home in Oakland. “I couldn’t figure
out why the road was at a 50-degree
angle to my face.”
Allen, 26, stopped her car, locked
it, and joined other motorists walk
ing toward a 30-foot gap created
when a piece of the upper deck col
lapsed onto the lower level.
Thomas and Debby Kelly, a vaca
tioning couple from Ringwood,
Okla., were on the upper level and
took home video pictures, acquired
by ABC station KGO-TV. Their
shots included one of a small car that
tumbled nose first over the gap.
“Ohhh, gosh! That could have
been us . . .” Debby gasped as the red
car fell to the bridge’s lower level.
Then, to her husband, she said,
“Thomas, we need to get down there
and help!”
Cathy Miranker was driving north
on an elevated section of Highway
101 to her home in San Francisco.
“It was like bumper cars,” she
said. “It literally started to buckle
bend and bounce. Cars were
bounced into the air on the roadway.
UT expert says chances
of Texas quakes are slim
AUSTIN (AP) — While Texas has
geological faults, the chances of an
earthquake similar to that which
rocked the San Francisco area and
killed more than 270 people are
slim, University of Texas experts
said Wednesday.
The Balcones Fault, which runs
through the Austin area, was a focus
of violent activity some 20 million
years ago but is benign today, Ed
Garner of UT’s Bureau of Economic
Geology said.
“Generally, the possibility of an
earthquake at the Balcones Fault is
extremely low because conditions
have changed over time,” Garner
said.
“The area now has about the low
est seismic potential in the United
States.”
The Balcones Fault was active
when the Texas coastline was only
about 75 miles from Austin and the
area was a hinge point in the Gulf of
Mexico basin, he said.
Sedimentary deposits originally
caused the activation of faulting, but
the system has been in equilibrium
for millions and millions of years, he
said.
Cliff Frohlich of the Institute of
Geophysics said the biggest earth
quake in Texas history occurred in
1931 near the small town of Valen
tine in West Texas.
“That one had a magnitude of
about 6.0 (on the Richter scale),
which means that the ground shook
10 times more violently yesterday in
San Francisco than it ever has in
Texas since the state was settled,”
Frohlich said.
Minor earthquakes occur in Texas
every year.
Most, Frohlich said, are in the 3-
to-4 range on the Richter scale.
There are fairly frequent quakes
in the El Paso area, and many are de
tected south of San Antonio and
near Snyder as a result of oil and gas
recovery operations.
“But almost any place in the world
is going to have at least some small
earthquakes,” Frohlich said.
Cars tried to stop but the motion
kept them running even if you
slammed on the brakes.”
Across the bay in Oakland,
George Donovan was driving his tra
ctor-trailer rig on the upper deck of
Interstate 880, the Nimitz Freeway.
“The pavement started to move,”
he said. “I had waves of asphalt
come up over my windshield. It was
undulating all around me. It was like
a Disney ride.” ,
A mile-long stretch of the high
way’s upper level collapsed onto the
lower deck, crushing more than 250
people, authorities estimated.
Researcher will
study effects of
quake on glass
LUBBOCK (AP) — A Texas Tech
glass researcher and graduate stu
dent flew Wednesday to San Fran
cisco to study windows broken dur
ing Tuesday’s earthquake.
“We’ll look at injuries and damage
caused by glass falling,” said H. Scott
Norville, director of the glass re
search and testing laboratory at
Tech. “We’ll see how the windows
failed and what kind of remedial
measures we can recommend.”
He said he planned to start in the
South Bay area and work up to San
Francisco, where news reports men
tioned the streets of downtown were
littered with glass shards.
Norville, often working in con
junction with Tech’s Institute for Di
saster Research, has participated in
several storm damage surveys after
tornadoes and hurricanes. He vis
ited the Pampa area after a chemical
plant exploded two years ago out
side the Panhandle city, breaking
windows for miles around.
In the laboratory, he propels
gravel, hailstones, small timber and
other objects at glass to study how it
breaks when hit by windblown mis
siles. He said Wednesday he also has
run lab experiments that mimic the
effects of earthquakes.
The aim is to find ways to reduce
damage to structures caused by nat
ural disasters. Norville would like
someday to help formulate universal
designs for building codes that
would lead to safer windows.
S.F. Quake
(Continued from page 1)
Transportation Secretary Samuel
ikinner toured the area Wednesday
iy helicopter.
The federal government normally
lays at least 75 percent of the cost of
ebuilding bridges and public facili-
ies that are destroyed, and provides
bw-cost loans. The order covered
seven counties.
Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy said dam-
iusei! ig e was “the better part of $1 bil-
iwin? ion.” Other estimates were in the
billions in San Francisco alone.
Gov. George Deukmejian headed
home from a trade mission to West
Germany.
In San Francisco’s Marina District,
where a fire fueled by gas destroyed
a block of 12 apartment buildings,
about 500 people packed a cafeteria
at Marina Middle School for break
fast after spending the night on cots
and mats.
Deputy Fire Chief Mike K. Farrell
said he strongly suspected people
were trapped in collapsed buildings.
“We’re going to bring in dogs to see
if people are trapped in there. I saw
three- and four-story buildings that
are now one-story buildings.”
Los Angeles donated sonic equip
ment to help detect any sounds of
people trapped alive in rubble, said
Scott Shafer, a spokesman for Mayor
Art Agnos. Ten people are known
dead in the city, according to the
coroner’s office.
The death toll elsewhere included
five people in Santa Clara County,
five people in Santa Cruz County,
and one in San Mateo County.
State Sen. Milton Marks of San
Francisco estimated damage in the
Marina area alone at $1 billion.
Shafer said damage throughout the
city would run into the billions. Most
of the damaged buildings were Vic-
torian-era.
Agnos estimated 40 buildings as
either damaged or unusable, and
said, “The city is well-organized and
responding effectively to the crisis.”
Agnos described the city’s emer
gency services’ performances as
“sensational,” and asked city workers
not at work to volunteer for the Red
Cross.
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