Loma Prieta, 20 Years Later

As many in the local news/blog firmament will be repeating this week, Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which was not such a doozy of a quake in the grand scheme (a 6.9er) but was certainly big enough to be imprinted on everyone's memory and to put some much-needed infrastructure improvements into the pipeline. But what of those infrastructure improvements, twenty years hence?

The most obvious changes came from the collapse of the elevated Cypress Freeway viaduct in Oakland, which caused the majority of fatalities from the quake (42 of the 63 total dead [Note: the Chron has the total at 67]) and which led to the construction of the 980 freeway connection that now divides Oakland and West Oakland; from damage in the Marina district that led to much reconstruction; and from the collapse of pieces of the Central and Embarcadero Freeways in San Francisco which led to the renaissance of Hayes Valley, the Ferry Building and the waterfront.