World Series Turns Into World Serious

SAN FRANCISCO —  What do you do in an earthquake? How do you know when the big shock has already come and what I feel is just aftershock? Is the earth settling down, or is there more?

You do not know.

It is a heck of a story: earthquake at the World Series. It struck a half-hour before gametime. The windowless concrete pressroom at Candlestick Park began to quiver as if heavy equipment was being moved on a truck. Then it got worse.

Lights flickered and went out. The quivering became a tremble and then a shake. They say you’re supposed to stand in a doorway. That was the source of the only light. A group of us gathered underneath the steel structural beam. Maybe that was the best place to be.

It went on for about 20 seconds. Then what? Do I get out of here or do I stay to find out what is going on? If I think it is reasonably safe, I will play war correspondent, but how do you know if it is safe? I am not that dedicated.

I have been through hurricanes and have been evacuated. Hurricanes last longer, but they come with a warning.

How do you find out anything in an earthquake when there are 60,000 people in Candlestick Park, the lights are out and bits of concrete have fallen?

I found out: You do not find out.

You ask people who have seen more than you have and you wait to be told something, anything. The non-information and the misinformation and the real information swirl within each other. It is frightening.

This is being written beneath a battery-operated emergency light on the mezzanine of Candlestick Park. I cannot be sure the trembling beneath my feet is really inside me, or if there really still is some shaking going on. I do not know if the phones will be working if I get finished. I would like to be funny; I do not think I can.

This is San Francisco. They have earthquakes here all the time. I was once in a hotel room here and I thought somebody was rattling my door in the middle of the night until I realized the windows were shaking, too. In the elegant lobby of the St. Francis Hotel, the elegant marble pillars are scarred where the fire followed the earthquake in 1906.

People from the Bay Area told me Tuesday night’s was a big one. I could tell.

From that concrete workroom there was nothing to be seen, so I went out to see people were beginning to move around in the runways. Some were leaving, walking down from the upper deck, where it had been the worst. Some were lining up for beer.

“I just want to get the ... out of here,” said Kim Claton, 24, who was in the upper deck. “It was unbelievable. You have tremors that might break something on a shelf, but we were shaking in the wind. If you had a drink in your hand, it would have spilled.”

“Everybody stood up and you could see the roof plates separate,” Debbie Graca, 28, said. “We stood and then we held onto each other. We came down because we needed a restroom.”

At first there had been some cheering when the first shaking came. People here are used to some of this. Then they recognized that this was not something they had experienced before. Then they got quiet. When the shaking stopped, there was some cheering again and fist-shaking. That ought to show the Oakland Athletics something.

Word began to come through on portable radios. There was no information announced in the ballpark.

One radio said that the earthquake was 7.0 -- a big one. The biggest since the big one that destroyed the city. That was 8.3.

It was centered 50 miles from San Francisco. There was substantial building damage. All volunteer firemen had been called. A portion of the upper level of the Bay Bridge to Oakland had collapsed onto the lower level. A train was stranded in the BART tunnel.

There was a five-alarm fire in the Marina District and they were running out of water. That is what happened in ’06.

In the grandstand, people were told to remain in their seats. Brad Schmidt, a recent California-Santa Cruz graduate walked by with a piece of concrete the size of a tennis ball. It had fallen from the roof. “It’s better than a Battle of the Bay T-shirt,” he said.

There was more trembling underfoot. Someone said, “I’ve been coming here since I was 10; I was here when they were bad. I don’t want to die going to my first World Series.”

We all tried a little lightness. It seemed like the thing to do for ourselves because there was nothing else we could do. It did not work.

How did we know we had not seen merely the pre-shock? “We don’t,” a Californian said. Candlestick is built on filled land. Buildings are built to sway with the land, but how much can they withstand?

“You look around and there’s no way out,” a young woman said. “Fifty-thousand die,” he said. He shrugged.

A police car with a speaker on top announced that the game had been postponed. Tom Donovan, an options trader, went to find a phone to call his wife, or his parents in North Babylon. He found no phone that worked. The roads were jammed. The exits from the parking lot were ribbons of red tail-lights.

We have to leave the ball park. There is some structural damage. We cannot stay. I can finish in the car, maybe find a phone.

Nature had taken over and has not let go yet.