Huge Quake Strikes Bay Area : 6.9 temblor: Portion of Bay Bridge collapses. Block-long apartment in San Francisco is ablaze. Six are killed and power is knocked out across hundreds of miles.

A massive earthquake struck south of San Francisco Bay on Tuesday, killing at least six, injuring hundreds more, damaging thousands of buildings and collapsing a portion of the roadway decking on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The quake, which hit at 5:04 p.m. and lasted about 15 seconds, measured at magnitude 6.9, four times stronger than the powerful Sylmar quake that rocked the northern San Fernando Valley Feb. 9, 1971, killing 58 and causing more than $1 billion damage.

An apartment building covering an entire city block caught fire in San Francisco’s Marina District. The flames spread unchecked, enveloping the entire structure, which eventually collapsed in embers. Several nearby buildings appeared threatened.

At the recently renovated San Francisco International Airport, ceilings collapsed and tumbled into crowded passengers areas.

The earthquake, which was felt as far as 300 miles away, knocked out electrical power, television broadcasts and telephone communications across hundreds of miles.

The quake struck as thousands of fans were crowding into San Francisco’s Candlestick Park for the third game of the 1989 World Series. The game was canceled and players reportedly left the stadium in their uniforms.

Network broadcasters monitoring the pregame activities from other cities saw the game go off the air and spread word of the disaster to the millions across the nation preparing to watch at the game on television.

Several spectators at Candlestick Park were injured by falling debris. Officials ordered the stadium evacuated.

Several motorists were tossed from the Bay Bridge into the water, more than 100 feet blow, when the temblor collapsed a 50-foot section of the roadway. The extent of their injuries was not immediately determined.

Several other major roadways suffered heavy damage. A section of U.S. 101, one of the main arteries to the south, buckled in several places near San Francisco Airport. A double-decked portion of Interstate 880 in the East Bay appeared to have collapsed. It is a main commuter freeway connecting East Oakland with the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

Ambulances, their sirens screaming, attempted to race through gridlocked streets toward downtown San Francisco, where several major buildings collapsed.

Evening rush-hour traffic came to a halt, with traffic signals knocked out throughout much of the area. Many commuters left their cars in parking lots and tried to go home by foot. Market Street was filled with people as aftershocks continued.

San Francisco City Hall and the state building housing the state Supreme Court were evacuated. Both buildings had severe damage inside.

Close to the Civic Center, a large section of a four-story building came down, and eyewitnesses said the bodies of at least two women were removed.

“The whole topside, I saw the building coming down, and I just went forward, trying to get out of there,” said Cliff Bailey.

San Francisco Fire Capt. John Traversaro said that “four or five people, it could be considerably more” were killed in this building alone.

At the nearby federal building, Marcus Williams said, “I didn’t want to be buried alive. As I ran down the stairs, people were screaming. This was the worst one I ever felt.”

At the state Supreme Court, Justice David M. Eagleson said, “There were pictures knocked off the walls, books on the floor and cracked plaster. We were really hit. Things are really a mess.”

Justice Allen E. Broussard said he was completing a meeting with staff attorneys when the temblor hit. “There was so much dust in the air you could hardly see what happened,” he said.

“It was horrible on the Muni Metro,” said Kim Gordon, an insurance company employee who was riding San Francisco’s subway system. “We were underground and it was shaking real bad. We all thought we were going to die.”

She said that when her train arrived at the next station, the passengers were let out but had to grope their way to the surface in the dark.

Seismologists at UC Berkeley and Caltech put the epicenter on the San Andreas Fault, 10 miles north of Santa Cruz in the same vicinity of a 5.4 quake that struck in August.

Damage and injuries in the communities surrounding the epicenter were said to be extensive, with people trapped in damaged buildings in San Jose and further south in Hollister.

A Hayward couple, Steve and Christie Stevenson, said they tried to run out of their front door, but “it was impossible to run.” Steve Stevenson said they “held onto a tree in the front yard and watched the water in the swimming poor come out in three-foot waves.”

In Sacramento, Gov. George Deukmejian’s press secretary, Kevin Brett, said the governor had been awakened in Frankfurt, West Germany, where he had gone on a trade mission, at about 1:15 a.m. Frankfurt time.

Brett said it had not yet been decided whether the governor would cancel the rest of his trip and return to the state.

The historic San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was estimated later by seismologists to have reached a magnitude of 8.3. By that scale, each number represents a 10-fold increase in magnitude--meaning that the earlier quake was considerably more than 10 times stronger than Tuesday’s.

The 1906 quake devastated the city. In the three days that followed that quake, fires destroyed 490 blocks within a four-square-mile area near the financial district. Five hundred were killed, thousands were injured and more than 28,000 buildings ultimately were lost. In 1906 dollars, damage was estimated at $400 million.