Oakland, California Oakland to consistently be listed as one of America's most crime-ridden cities. In 1980 Oakland's black population reached its 20th-century peak at approximately 47% of the overall city population. The 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake occurred on October 17, 1989. The rupture was related to the San Andreas fault system and affected the entire San Francisco Bay Area with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX ("Violent"). Many structures in Oakland were badly damaged including the double-decker portion of Interstate 880 that collapsed. The eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge also sustained damage and was closed to traffic for one
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake wave-like manner over a distance of several feet. When electrical power to the stadium was lost, someone drove a police car onto the field, where an officer used the car's public address system to advise that the game had been postponed. After the shaking subsided, many of the players on both teams immediately searched for, and gathered, family and friends from the stands before evacuating the facility. The October 18, 1989 edition of NBC's "Today" that covered the earthquake ran until noon Eastern Time. Bryant Gumbel, Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville anchored from Chicago (where they had planned to originally