Carnage Linked Rival Cities in Fear and Pain : Trauma: Across Oakland and San Francisco, the devastation was a shared experience.

It was just another workday rush-hour for the golden Bay Area, its cultivated image polished finer still this Tuesday evening by the national attention of a World Series.

Judy Stewart, a computer designer, bolted from her San Francisco office en route to the East Bay, skipping out of town on the lower level of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. She eased through it just before 5 p.m.

Across San Francisco Bay to the southwest, tens of thousands of desperately optimistic San Francisco Giants fans, their distaste for the Oakland Athletics almost palpable, streamed into Candlestick Park for the series’ third game. Festivities reigned in the sun-splashed stadium.

And then the carnage began.

Within seconds of its 5:04 p.m. onset, a devastating earthquake would link the rival cities in a clutch of fear and suffering. Few, across the broad expanse of the Bay Area, would escape untouched.

Harrison Brown, 29, was driving his delivery truck south on the upper level of the Nimitz at 5:04, talking on a two-way radio to a friend in San Jose. The friend felt the earthquake first, and spit the news out over the radio.

“I thought he was joking--but the next thing I knew . . . the freeway just started rustling,” Brown said. His truck flipped over. It crushed three cars and temporarily pinned their occupants. Around him, cars flew off the freeway into midair.

“They went right off the top--killed,” said Oakland Police Lt. Ron Zien.

Susan Kato of Alameda was puttering placidly along the lower level until, suddenly, the cars in front of her simply vanished into rubble. “I could see people alive and screaming,” she said.

Another trucker, George Donovan of Berkeley, was driving his tractor-trailer rig on the upper deck of the Nimitz when nature took the wheel.

“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.”

If the horror was not immediately obvious to him, it was to those who live and work near the double-decked roadway. The screams of the injured rose alongside clouds of dust.

“You could hear it crunching down,” said Leroy Fitzgerald, who works at an auto parts store near the freeway.

“But you couldn’t see anything. It was just a big white cloud. You could hear people screaming for help.”

The pleas of the wounded went unheard at Candlestick Park, where nearly 60,000 raucous fans had gathered for the start of the series’ third game--Bay’s Ball, as the contest between the cross-bay rival San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics had come to be known.

A band played on the outfield grass. Hundreds of balloons were set for release. Nervous players milled around near the dugouts. Unwelcome and unsuspected, the tremor built.

Sees Tower Swaying

Security guard Mark Dandridge looked up and saw a stadium tower sway. “And then I looked down to the luxury boxes and I saw all that starting to shake.

“ ‘Oh, God help us!’ ” he cried aloud.

Among the 60,000, a solitary thought stunned Marsha Blanche: “Who’d raise my kids?”

Another road, and yet more horror.

Thomas Kelly and his wife, Debbie, on vacation from Ringwood, Okla., were traveling across the bay on the lower deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge when the quake hit. At Treasure Island, part way across the bay, Caltrans workers ordered them off the bridge.

But once off, they were ordered to get back on to the upper deck--and head toward Oakland. They had little idea what awaited them.

“We had heard on the radio that a section had actually collapsed, but you couldn’t see anything like that,” said Thomas Kelly. “There were about 100 cars, all driving along about 50, 60 miles an hour. People were waving us down, warning us not to keep going. Others were waving like it was all right. It was mass confusion.”

Then Kelly spotted the break. Frantic, he turned his camper around and stopped, facing the oncoming traffic.

“There was a long break between us and the (next) car,” he said. “We had the video camera with us because we were on vacation, and as I was waving from the front, she (Debbie) was filming from the back.”

The car zoomed past.

Debbie Kelly captured the scene on tape: The car plunged into the chasm and then propelled itself back up, catching precariously on the opposite lip. Gasoline ran down its side.

“The driver wasn’t moving,” Thomas Kelly said. “The passenger was pretty aware and wanted pretty desperately to get out.”

Across the Bay Area, catastrophe reigned. Water gushed from the second floor of the city’s health department building, just across from City Hall. Windows in the I. Magnin department store exploded onto Union Square. In the Marina District between Golden Gate Park and San Francisco Bay, a fire raged across a city block of apartments. Plumes of smoke likewise rose from San Francisco’s Embarcadero and from Berkeley.

At the grand old Mark Hopkins Hotel, chandeliers swung so violently that they touched the ceiling, as if, one guest said, they were pendulums gone berserk. Doors slammed open and shut, and the cries of frightened people echoed in the halls.

At San Francisco International Airport, windows shattered and ceiling panels rained down on air traffic controllers. A computer terminal flew through a window and fell nine stories to the ground.

In Sausalito, Zelda Tiffany Low, who as a young child watched San Francisco burn after its last great quake, once again watched smoke rise from the city.

Heading toward the East Bay on a surface street just past the Nimitz, Judy Stewart did not believe what she was feeling.

“My car started shaking and going crazy and I thought, ‘I just got a front-end alignment and those (garage) guys must have screwed it up really bad!’ ”

Heroes proliferated. In Los Gatos, a worker at the Velomeister bicycle shop was struck in the head with a brick. Then Bill Lansen, still bleeding, saved a young girl’s life. He hauled her to safety as she ran before a wall of falling bricks.

In Santa Cruz, security guard James Campos pulled a woman out of the rubble of the historic Pacific Garden Mall. “The dust was like a fog,” he said. The renovated historic area, replete with gardens and bricked walkways, was smashed. Twisted mannequins lay in the street.

Stunned and fearful, people nonetheless rushed to help. At the Nimitz Freeway, workers from nearby shops carried tall ladders toward the crumpled concrete, dragging burrowing equipment behind them. One man drove a forklift from a warehouse through a fence to open the site to volunteers.

Darius Brewer, a 26-year-old cook, crawled into the mangled wreckage to search for survivors. Using a crowbar, he and some friends pried open one car, and used ropes to lower an elderly man 20 feet to safety.

“Then we went to the top of the second deck and just mostly got everyone down that we could,” Brewer said. “People were yelling, ‘I’m hurt! I’m hurt!’ ” The trapped who could not speak honked their horns in futility.

Bodies crushed and bloodied were tugged from the wreckage. Television news crews took to the skies overhead, their helicopters sending back to viewing audiences the initial glimpses of the destruction.

William McElroy, who lives two blocks from the ruptured freeway, ran to the site and crept up a ladder to the lower deck. Inside the pancaked structure, he found victims--silent, stunned, and alive.

“They weren’t saying anything. They were in shock,” he said.

Rescuers like Brewer and McElroy crept on their bellies through tons of askew concrete, shouting: “Is anyone hurt? Is anyone alive?” Occasionally, a victim crawled out.

Enormous steel girders and reinforcing bars wound surreally through the broken concrete like giant strands of spaghetti. Officials issued stern warnings that the wreckage could collapse at any moment.

Speaking for his brethren, construction worker Dwain Tolbert, 32, snapped his response.

“We are volunteering. If we get killed, it’s our own thing.”

Slow too was the impact sensed at Candlestick. Entire sections of fans, fearless or brazen, shouted rhythmically: “Let’s play ball! Let’s play ball!”

To the north in the Marina District, reality was already intruding. Police begged, then ordered, residents milling about to go home. Firefighters, hampered by low water pressure, fought blazes with water brought in from San Francisco Bay.

Power outages darkened the dusk and the smell of escaping gas gagged residents. They began gathering outside, the only sure place of safety in an area where houses had bounced off their foundations and freeways off their stanchions.

Thousands of commuters were stranded in traffic jams. Houses fell and fires sparked across the breadth of the Bay Area. Airplane passengers who took off from San Jose saw miles and miles of drivers stranded in traffic, their lights merging into red and white ribbons. Bricks and plaster showered the financial district. One Yuppie, not to be deterred, sauntered through the mess with a glass of white wine in her hand.

San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos hastened to the airwaves. “Be calm!” he implored. “Things are in good shape as far as we can tell.” But the truth was far from that.

On the sundered Bay Bridge, it took “hours and hours” for help to arrive, said vacationer Thomas Kelly. The fate of the driver whose car flew off the bridge’s edge was uncertain.

The Kellys themselves drove back along the upper deck toward San Francisco, picking up along the way several stranded reporters who had abandoned their cars at the base of the bridge and walked up to survey the scene.

From the vantage point of the bridge, high above the bay, “you could see the smoke from the big fire,” Thomas Kelly said. “You could see sections of the city in darkness. You could see Coast Guard choppers and a blimp come over, trying to help people in the water. You could see something massive happened over on the highway in Oakland. You could see fire engines.”

Something massive had indeed happened. The burrowing volunteers were soon replaced by professionals, who found that their training was grossly insufficient.

As dusk turned to night, the whine of sirens and the dull thump of helicopters filled the ears. A smattering of stars appeared in the sky.

At the Nimitz Freeway, paramedics hastily dispatched the wounded to hospitals and the dead to a temporary morgue at Ralph Bunche High School. And amid the bravery of the volunteers came a more sinister desire. According to Oakland Police Officer Dave Drury, some people apparently climbed into the freeway wreckage and stole the wallets of the dead.

“Vultures don’t do that,” a disgusted Drury said. “Vultures don’t steal wallets.”

On his belly in a 2-foot-high section of the wreckage, Dr. James Betts crawled toward a smashed two-door sedan. Betts, the director of trauma services at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, found two women crushed in the front seat.

From the back seat, an 8-year-old girl had already been extricated. Her 6-year-old brother remained trapped, his legs pinned in jumbled concrete, his torso covered by the body of his mother.

A paramedic sprawled on the hood, and two firefighters carrying the Jaws of Life tried to cut the boy out. When they could not, they sedated the boy and cut his mother’s body away to free the child.

“We needed to do whatever was needed to save the kid’s life,” said Betts. “We had no choice.”

But the boy was still trapped. He was freed only when Betts amputated his right leg.

By 11 p.m., when exhausted rescuer William McElroy left for home, there was one sound that cut through the din of rescue vehicles and the drone of generators that lit the night sky. It was the sound of the wounded, still “moaning and groaning,” McElroy said.

Across the bay, their only light the three-quarter moon that hung mournfully in the sky, scores of San Franciscans inexplicably gathered at 950-foot Twin Peaks, normally a refuge only for lovers.

As the city lights returned, slowly, section by section, cheers rose from the crowd.

With dawn came a surge of renewal. National Guard troops were activated to help out, and volunteers from charitable organizations began streaming into the city. At 6 a.m., San Francisco’s airport resumed limited operations, and California formally requested emergency federal aid.

President Bush, approving the request, praised the relief workers. The government, he said, “will take every step and make every effort” to assist the victims.

But in California, Wednesday’s dawn also brought a sobering accounting. Shortly before daybreak, a hook-and-ladder truck moved alongside the Nimitz, stopping periodically to let firefighters shine lights into the crevices. Police dogs scoured the wreckage.

And more volunteers poured into the site, seeking to help. “We’re the guys who build these things . . . we know there are people alive in there,” said carpenter Scott Connor.

If Connor had hope, trauma surgeon Betts had none, not when he confronted the father of the little boy named Julio whom he had rescued from the wreckage. He told the man about the rescue, about having to cut away the body of the man’s wife to save his child.

“I hope I’m never involved in something like this ever again,” the doctor said.

In San Francisco as well, search dogs probed the wreckage of flattened buildings in the Marina district. Two bodies were found in a collapsed four-story, 30-unit apartment complex. They died awaiting aid.

“All we could see were their hands sticking out of the rubble,” an emergency medical technician at the scene said Wednesday. “They were screaming that they were suffocating.”

And more were expected to be found. According to the Fire Department, the search there will take another three days. Of pressing interest were not only the scores of collapsed buildings but also those that burned Tuesday night.

“There have got to be people in there--unless we got real lucky,” said administrative coroner Joseph Surdyka.

Many who had no wreckage to clean nor memories to mourn simply left town. The Kellys took their videotape to KCBS in San Francisco, which was first to air the footage, and then to KGO, the ABC affiliate. They parked their camper in the KGO lot overnight, and then, after a short appearance on “Good Morning, America,” headed for Reno.

“I think it’s time to cut this part of the vacation short,” Thomas Kelly said.

For the victims came the inevitable questioning, as they traded tales of unfathomable luck and unspeakable horror, of fright and bravery, of heroism and hooliganism.

2 Die in His Arms

From Robert Majors, who lives a block from the Nimitz: “Two women died in my arms. There was a man who died with all of us watching. There was nothing we could do. He was stuck under the concrete. . . . There was nothing we could do.”

Judy Stewart, who blithely traveled across the lower level of the Nimitz Freeway just moments before it tumbled askew, found torment Wednesday.

“I had my purse ready to go and I left work on the dot, because I was heading to a Stevie Nicks concert,” she said. “If I had taken any time getting out of the building, talking to my friends, I would have been in that bottom layer when the sections fell down and left those cars 6 inches tall.

“I just keep thinking about and thinking about that.”

Aftershocks rumbled through the Bay Area on Wednesday, reminding the survivors that they could not forget the Earth’s tumult, even if they wished. And from David Russ of the U.S. Geological Survey came a thought even more chilling for those who had salved their jangled nerves with the hope that maybe this was the quake that California has awaited.

“No,” he said, “this was not the Big One.”

Times staff writers Glenn F. Bunting, Russell Chandler, Stephanie Chavez, Steven Churm, Rich Connell, Miles Corwin, John Dart, Kevin Davis, Darrell Dawsey, Virginia Ellis, Leslie Eringaard, Jerry Gillam, Phillip Hager, Marita Hernandez, Paul Jacobs, Tracey Kaplan, Daryl Kelley, J. Michael Kennedy, Maria La Ganga, John H. Lee, Carol McGraw, Myrna Oliver, Rick Paddock, Judy Pasternak, Jeffrey L. Rabin, Ron Russell, Esther Schrader, Douglas Shuit, George Skelton, Tracy Shryer, Ronald L. Soble, Larry B. Stammer, Edith Stanley, Suzanne Tay, Ronald B. Taylor, Lois Timnick, David Treadwell, William Trombley, Anna Virtue, Jenifer Warren, Mike Ward, Dan Weikel, Daniel M. Weintraub, Tracy Wood and Victor Zonana contributed to this report. Also contributing were researchers Ann Rovin and Tracy Thomas.