The 1989 San Francisco Quake—Is It A Warning For What Chicago Could Experience With The Predicted New Madrid Fault Quake Coming In The Near Future?

                “…..as the Oakland A’s take….take……I THINK WE’RE HAVING AN EARTHQUAKE!!”

                                                     --Al Michaels and Tim McCarver

        These are the most famous words I heard from these sportscasters who were part of the ABC televised broadcast of Game 3 of the 1989 World Series on October 17, said at the time that an surprise temblor unexpected knocked off their TV signal and temporarily halted the game’s activities for a while in Candlestick Park in San Francisco. I would experience the first time ever that a televised baseball game was knocked off the air due to an earthquake, but I was lucky not to be in San Francisco—I was in Chicago when that went down.

         Before the big shaker under the earth happened, I saw ABC was into pre-game coverage of what they called the “Battle of the Bay” as the Oakland A’s battled not against the Cincinnati Reds, or the New York Mets, or even the Los Angeles Dodgers (in the famous dynasty years of 1972, 1973, and 1974, where the A’s beat these three teams in the years’ World Series, winning back-to-back-to-back World Series championships), but against another Major League team that is also from California, but it was not the Dodgers—it was a team called the San Francisco Giants.

        I saw that Tim McCarver, the color commentator alongside Al Michaels, was mentioning to World Series viewers in the opening minutes of the pre-game of the fall classic about a few highlights of Game 2 at the Oakland Coliseum. One of the highlights McCarver recalled was the Oakland A’s Dave Parker attempting to hit a home run in the bottom of the 4^th inning but  misses it by a few feet as the ball hits the outfield wall, with Giants’  Candy Maldonado, the outfielder, taking up the ball, and single-pumping the ball before throwing it in full commitment into the infield as A’s’ Jose Canseco runs and successfully scores a run as the ball throw was cut off at second base unsuccessfully as Dave Parker reaches second base with a double and an RBI to boot,  and at that point, I heard the background noise of the stadium crowd roaring—I thought at first it was a signal that the Giants have went onto the field, and then, suddenly, I saw the TV screen flash into snowball and white-and-black lines for 3-4 seconds with distortion sounds, then the broadcasters announced to the crowd the word “earthquake”  just before I saw the TV display disappear into a super with green background that said “World Series”, in a still picture, and the audio was temporarily silenced for a couple minutes. As this sudden thing---probably the most famous interruption ever done by an earthquake in my whole history of watching sporting events on TV---happened, I wondered as the program went off the air for about two minutes, how big the earthquake was and I did not know at that point if the quake was really the big one in California. I did not know about any deaths, injuries, or damage at that point but I realized by the knocking out of the TV signal that the quake was probably huge, and I realized after ABC went back on the air, and I saw the first news footage of the quake, where a double-decker expressway bridge in the city  buckled and caused a vehicle to cave in, and another area in San Francisco where there was a large gas-related fire due to a broken gas main in some residential area of the city, gave me quick conclusions that the fault that caused the quake—the San Andreas Fault---was responsible for the main shock, and from seeing the footage of the quake damage, I was thinking that the quake may have reached nearly 7.0 on the Richter Scale and about 9 to 10 in the Mercalli scale. I was about 60-70 percent right in my predictions. Also, when the picture came back, I realized that most of the fans in the stadium remained even though I did not know if stadium officials wanted the fans to evacuate the stadium just in case of possible aftershocks, and I saw that the roof and the decks of the stadium were mainly unscathed.

        The way I had got lucky that Chicago avoided that October 20, 1989 earthquake that happened in San Francisco—the quake that rocked—as well as interrupted—the 1989 World Series---was interesting. The main shock that rocked the City By The Bay happened just 2 days from my 19^th birthday…and was something that at first made me laugh to myself about it. Five years after 1989, however, I got word that the New Madrid Fault that cuts through the Tennessee Valley and touches the tip of extreme southern Illinois could be in for a catastrophic earthquake in the near future, which could cause severe damage to the Champaign-Urbana area (my campus town alma-mater, about 150 miles away from the fault zone),and Chicago (located about 300 miles north away from the fault line)  could get hit with a 3.0 to 4.0 magnitude (maybe a 4.0 most likely). I realized that the main authority on earthquake prediction happens to be the USGS—the United States Geological Survey,  which announced this earthquake prediction ever since a past major earthquake (which happened on  December 16, 1811, with a magnitude reaching about 7.5 on the Richter, so that means on the Mercalli scale, maybe close to a 10 or 11 rating—nearly catastrophic) along the new Madrid fault changed the course of the Mississippi River in the area at the fault line.