Oct 17, 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake's Legacy, 25 Years Later

[andy3175]

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Loma-Prieta-earthquake-25-years-later-5828343.php

To someone standing on the landscaped median strip in West Oakland known as the Mandela Parkway, what meets the eye is nothing resembling what was there in 1989.
The Cypress Freeway had walled off the entire neighborhood from the rest of Oakland since 1957 with concrete, fumes and wrong-side-of-the-line stigma. The results were an ugly gray wall, abandoned warehouses and worn-out homes. It hadn't always been like that. Earlier in the 20th century, the neighborhood was known as the "Harlem of the West"  – a center of restaurants and jazz clubs filled by the likes of James Brown and Ella Fitzgerald, and a fountain of black icons from basketball's Bill Russell to the Pointer Sisters and the Black Panthers. But as shipyard jobs dried up after World War II and the freeway and federally funded housing projects moved in, crime and poverty soared. The freeway's collapse reopened West Oakland to progress. Fittingly, the parkway now cuts along the exact same route as the freeway did, presenting natural beauty instead of roaring traffic. ... The results weren't immediate. It took years before Caltrans agreed to reroute the freeway, and the first plants put in place along the Mandela Parkway – one for each person killed in the Cypress collapse – were stolen. It took the tech-boom era to turn the page, starting around 2005. And when it did, the waiting ended with a roar.

http://www.thecalifornian.com/story/news/2014/10/17/loma-prietas-legacy-better-infrastructure-monitoring/17462927/

t's been 25 years since the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake sent waves and jolts throughout Northern California. Following 63 deaths, nearly 4,000 injuries, and an estimated $6 billion in damages, the area has lumbered back to normalcy: highways repaired, hospitals retrofitted, and parts of Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Oakland completely rebuilt. ... One of the most notorious photos from the 1989 quake is of the Struve Slough Bridge along Highway 1 in Watsonville. Sections of the 25-year-old bridge kinked and flattened where supports failed and asphalt slumped. Tom Ostrom, chief of the office of Earthquake Analysis, Engineering and Research at CalTrans, said Struve Slough and other failed bridges in Monterey County helped to inform current construction standards. "One of the lessons we learned during the Loma Prieta earthquake is how much soft soils near water sources like sloughs or rivers amplify earthquake motion." At that time, Ostrom said, it was thought that in order to survive earthquakes, bridges simply had to be strong. But during a quake, the Earth doesn't just rumble up and down; it also sways side to side, requiring bridges to be flexible. "So now our philosophy really is to design our bridges to bend and not break," Ostrom said.