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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My job prior to the earthquake was covering the playoffs in the World Series. Some of the World Series first started, Uh, I knew that I was gonna be at Candlestick Park and probably the Open Coliseum and that kind of thing doing that

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whole thing. And I was kind of happy because I said, This is the time I don't have to do general news. I could do something special, do something different, some covering sports. And I remember going out there that day and thinking, Gosh, you know, I'm not

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going to have a whole lot to do today. It's gonna be a pretty easy day. I can get off early and maybe go out and do something after the game is over with. So we're shooting in there and with my reporter were up in the stands,

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were doing soundbites. Mos is that kind of thing. So all of a sudden, while I'm getting some B roll, I start shaking whole lot of shaking, and I hear this roar and he fails to get Dave Parker at second base. So the Oakland A's taking take.

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I'll tell you what we're having. I thought after the whole thing stops, everybody starts wondering if they should just run out of the place. The place is going to come down or not. And me. It still hadn't done on me. What happened yet and all the

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baseball players were on the field looking around, and I'm looking around just as curious as everybody else. Try to stay calm here and sort things out. We got other priorities, really. They need to take care of the police and just trying to get the people out

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of here as quietly as they can. On the way back to the truck, I've heard that the Bay Bridge has collapsed. There's cars in the ocean. The cyber structures collapsed. Have you found out what's going on? The Bay Bridge is for? That's not the card. Pardon

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me. What's going on? Well, it looked to me like one of the bridges are collapsed on here. We just lost the TV picture again, as a matter of fact, the epicenter of the quake, now said to be 10 miles northeast of Santa Cruz and 20 miles

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south of San Jose. And there's still I have seen nothing to change the intensity as last heard reported to 69. Mhm. Yeah, again, if you're just joining us, the intensity is now placed at seven. And not only the well here you can see the freeway system.

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Yeah, where it's a collapse, and it almost looks like a roller coaster there. Uh, that's a double decker, uh, system. So when those when the top deck collapses, you can imagine what's happening underneath. It was a bad one. Been through a couple of them in Los

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Angeles, and I knew that this was a lot worse than those people died in those. And I knew this was gonna be really bad. So immediately raced down to my news car. Yeah, one of the first places I went to was your side is six and

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bloodshed San Francisco. And there were, you know, some fatalities. There. Whole fourth floor bricks came down an alley where people were driving in their cars and they were buried in a foot of brick, all right, and the fire department was there trying to get to the

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bodies. But if you know, they were dead, and I guess it was the first bodies on the air. Here's what for violating We really didn't realize how serious it was till we turn the TV on in the van. And we saw the pictures of the Bay

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Bridge and the pictures of the Cyprus, and we realized we were dealing with something a little bit more serious. It seemed kind of fun at first. I come from the East Coast. I've been through a couple of earthquakes, but nothing too serious. And it seemed like

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something that was just a novelty. But, uh, just and it was in a lot of ways, a novelty at first. But then when the scope of the disaster came home, it was something that was It's pretty devastating. Back out to the fire. There you see the

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one remaining building from the Exposition of 1915 and behind it that huge fire. The building that collapsed in the building to its right, if you haven't seen these pictures before, is tilted dramatically on its side from the earthquake partially collapsed. That was your head. Mhm. Been

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working. Happened to us. It was right here. I used to live in the marina district. A lot of people from the station live in the marina district. Um, you know I drove on that 8 80 Cyprus interchange, probably four or five times a week. At least

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it could have been me. I drive on the Bay Bridge all the time. Um and it was it felt emotional to cover something that was sort of ongoing. And you had this kind of a feeling. You know, you feel like you want to think that the

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earth under your feet is sort of like solid ground or whatever. And when it isn't, it shakes up all your foundations that you have of everything. And, you know, they're still pulling people out. People are dead, and, you know, it's sort of ongoing, and it's kind

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of like it kind of makes tugs at your insides emotionally, But you also feel as though you're providing a service for people who are sitting at home and maybe are watching you, like on a battery powered T V or their powers out. Or they're they're watching

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in a store window. Or their only link to the outside world is the little their television set the earthquake. Yes, we're told that the fire firefighters are unable to get control of the fire in the Marina the marina fire that we've been showing you. They cannot

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get control of it. They're telling us that it's already go from a one block section. They just don't seem to have enough water, water mains cracked in the area and having a very difficult time fighting. They wonder. Yeah, two people in they're not. They're laughed. I

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don't know how the hell we're going to get him out, Okay? We have one woman who's unconscious from the hit. She's breathing. She's got a post. We've got this woman here. Obvious facial, Probably a fraction left forearm. Okay, there were cars that were crushed by large

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chunks of concrete. And, you know, what can you say? There's almost no way to photograph something like that because I don't think anybody out there really knows what it looked like. And I don't think that that's our fault. As news photographers, I just think there's something

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that's so overwhelming that it's it's difficult to to transcribe it into the T V. There's some ways that work better than others, but it's one of those things that was just massive. The damage down there was just incredible cars and trucks that are smashed completely. They

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got a lot of I believe they got a lot of dead bodies up there. One of the things that happened was we got held up at a police line and we were told not to go any further until we got an escort. And, uh, time was

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drawing short. There were other ways into the scene. So essentially, we cut across the line and we got over there and found the competition set up doing a live shot over on the other side of the line. I think that in this instance, it was a

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good time to cut the line and we did it. We got over there and they were extracting the last guy who got out alive. Sherry, who has been following this? She was on the Bay Bridge at the time of the earthquake. She is now over in

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Oakland at last report anyway, and she's got a live report. Let's go to Lauren. Right now. I'm at the corner of Cyprus and Peralta in Behind me is a section of the 8 80 the Nimitz Freeway, that Cyprus section that has collapsed now, amidst all the

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tragedy and all the bad news we're reporting tonight. We have a glimmer of hope. Just moments ago, where we took pictures of a man who was actually rescued from the wreckage in a section of the Nimitz freeway. I'd like to show you that tape. There's the

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man right now. I can't tell you much about him. He was up there. He was trapped on the lower deck. The top deck had fallen top of him. He was inside of his car. Shoot your tape as if it were going to go on live and

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just put it on right from the van The minute it's shot, just put tape on there and get new pictures on the minute. They're shot all day long. Okay? This is a Coast Guard helicopter attempting to aid the person in the car that fell into the

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felt. That that's right beneath the car that we're seeing on the screen. And so they came, came in and were able to lift that person. Actually, you will see that there's not enough open area for him to get in there. Apparently, he did. He did. Apparently

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he did. Yeah, he got in there, and there was some Caltrans people that also pulled up as you can. Now, that's tricky flying. As you can see, those lights tensions every so many feet. And if the rotor were to hit that, that would be the end

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of it. All right, there. So now, Now, the rescue crews are out. So I'm shooting across the span. I'm on the other side of the on the other side of the So you're on the San Francisco side and you're looking now at the Oakland side. Big

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problem here right now has been the traffic coming from downtown and the people from the Giants game. What we can do is the news agency is to inform. I'm sure a lot of people out there are wondering where their loved ones are. Well, 101 is a

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parking lot going south right now. You can see the crowd right here, their phone lines about 10 people deep, 20 people deep in many service stations. Many phone lines are not working. So if you're worrying about your family about your friends, they're more than likely out

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here right now. For the most part, for the 24 hours that we were on or however many days were on afterwards that our coverage amounted to a warm glow in the corner of the room. But I was amazed at the number of people that came up

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to me on the street and said, Thank you for having the warm glow in the corner of the room. It's all we had. It's all we had Mac and Wendy. We turned on at three in the morning, and my God, there they were and we knew

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that it was okay because we saw them there. We did manage to talk with the sister of the young man who died when the roof collapsed in this building, and she was clearly very distraught. I just know that I heard that a lot of buildings crumbled

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on the mall and I knew my brother was working in one of them, and I hadn't heard from him since the quake at five o'clock, and I just got off work a little while ago and we said, We're going to stop by and make sure because

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we heard two people are still trapped inside, and when we got here, the owner of the company and I guess it was her son, found out. We were the relatives and came up and said, um they have taken your brother away That he had died is

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at the coroner's office, and they're very trying to be very calm about it and everything and yeah, yeah, it takes time to rebuild the roads. It takes time to get things back to normal. A plane goes down, that's pretty bad, but they clean it up and

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they get it out of there. This thing took us months to get through, and we're still not through it in a lot of ways. Okay? Yeah. Were you here last night? I was. I had my animal with, So I've gotten flaked. Oh, I lost everything. Oh,

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yeah. Mhm. Uh huh. I think that I'm in terms of doing something right. I managed to maintain a sense of humanity, and I pulled a couple of reporters off of people when it was just too much. And I'm glad I did that. Probably from a strictly

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a strict news gathering point of view. Maybe we should have gotten that one more interview, but at a certain point, it does become too much. Yeah. We photographed some of the victims coming in, which is one of those things that his news photographers were called upon

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to do. It's not a whole lot of fun, but people seem to be fairly understanding about it. One of the hospital administrators actually stopped me from taking a picture. You don't take pictures of people in a rather forceful way. Put his hand in front of the

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camera, and then he we were doing a live or with a live talk back with him. About five minutes later and he apologized. It seems like everybody's nerves were afraid. Thank you. It was really odd being in the middle of such a big story that was

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happening in my community. It brings you a little bit closer to what's going on. I couldn't get a hold my wife till after midnight. I didn't know where she was or what she was doing at the time of the quake. You got that going on in

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the back of your mind. And but, you know, you got to do your job and your jobs, your priority, because people have got to know what's going on and kind of have to put that aside because you know everybody else is going through the same thing

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that you're going through. Your job has to be in a news photographer after you have to hang in there. You know, you get the information eventually, but you're not gonna get it as soon as anybody else will, because your job is to inform them about the

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big picture. Television and television news can provide a real service to the community in a disaster. I mean, we have news on every day 56 11 and noon. And this was one time when people really needed news to be on TV. Do you want to be

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here for the next one? Yeah. You know, I hope the next one never comes. I really hope the next one never comes. There's a lot of there's a lot of different ways to go, but if it comes, I want to be here for it. If it

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comes and yeah, I do want to be here for it, and I'll know a little bit more about how to cover it.