COMMENTARY : Radio Rises to a Tragic Occasion in Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO —  With no power here the night of the great earthquake, there was no television news to be seen until the morning after.

So except for those with battery-powered portable TVs, the night of Oct. 17 in the city without lights turned into a journey back to a time when news traveled by radio and word of mouth.

By the time power and television returned Wednesday morning, I had a fresh appreciation of how well radio, conversation and imagination can work together to keep us informed.

I was sitting in Candlestick Park when the earthquake struck. As soon as the stadium stopped shaking, the festive World Series crowd cheered. In those first few moments of giddy surprise, no one knew how devastating the earthquake was.

Soon radio was carrying the first news of damage to the Bay Bridge. As the news spread from person to person, people began leaving the stadium.

Outside, along the residential streets around Candlestick Park, car radios and transistors were turned up loud enough for everyone to hear.

“What about the San Mateo Bridge?” someone asked.

“It’s closed,” said a man with a transistor radio to his ear. “That’s what the radio says.”

Later, dozens of people gathered atop a Bernal Heights hill overlooking San Francisco and the bay. From the hill, we could see smoke and a red glow in the city’s Marina District. The Bay Bridge was visible too, but not the damage. Without electricity, downtown skyscrapers became invisible as darkness enveloped the city.

I imagined firefighters struggling to extinguish the Marina fires and people groping their way through unlit high-rises. I tried to envision exactly what part of the Bay Bridge had collapsed.

The news came from radios. Owners of the radios became news reporters.

“What’s the latest?” I asked someone with a radio in his hand.

He provided a succinct, clear summary. Part of the 880 Freeway had collapsed, he said. Dozens of cars had been crushed.

Unable to get to my home in Oakland, I went to the home of friends and joined them in listening to the latest news on the car radio.

Bit by bit, just as my parents had done before television, I had pulled together the day’s story not only by listening to the radio, but also by talking about what I was hearing.

When I went to sleep that night, I had a pretty good sense of what had happened the day of the earthquake, even though I had not seen a single television report.

The television images I did see when power was restored were compelling. They confirmed the destructiveness of the earthquake in a way that radio cannot match. Yet as powerful as the images were, they were also numbing. After a night of fast-paced radio news, television coverage seemed almost sluggish by comparison.

In those first hours of darkness after the earthquake, radio had stimulated my mind and my imagination. It had encouraged discussion. It made me feel like a participant in the reporting of the story.

I’m not ready to give up television. But I will always remember that it was radio that kept me informed about the Great Earthquake of 1989 when there was no television.