On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m., during rush hour, the San Francisco area was hit with a major earthquake. The entire nation witnessed the dramatic event on television as the two local baseball teams prepared for the third game of the World Series. The epicenter of the earthquake was located southeast of San Francisco, near Santa Cruz, and occurred on the San Andreas fault system. Seismologists now call this the Loma Prieta earthquake and its intensity has been set at 7.1 on the Richter scale.
