Loma Prieta Periodic Comet Machholz 1 96P/Machholz on May 12, 1986. The first official West Coast Messier marathon was conducted from this site in March 1979. The epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was near the mountain. The mountain was the longtime site for the transmitter tower of San Jose television station KNTV (from 1955 to 2005). It moved its transmitter northwest to San Bruno Mountain in September 2005, after it became the Bay Area's NBC affiliate. Loma Prieta is the tallest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains and it is common to see snow on the mountain during the winter.
San Francisco Bay during earthquakes, and most of the major damage close to the Bay in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 occurred to structures on these areas. The Marina District of San Francisco, hard hit by the 1989 earthquake, was built on fill that had been placed there for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, although liquefaction did not occur on a large scale. In the 1990s, San Francisco International Airport proposed filling in hundreds more acres to extend its overcrowded international runways in exchange for purchasing other parts of the bay and converting them back to wetlands. The idea was, and remains, controversial.