THE QUAKE : 273 Killed in Quake : Most Believed to Have Died Under an Oakland Freeway; Tonight’s Series Game Is Off; Stadium Damage Studied : Search on in Debris for Victims

State officials announced this afternoon that the deadliest American earthquake since the great San Francisco quake of 1906 has taken at least 273 lives in an area of destruction strewn for nearly 100 miles along the San Andreas Fault.

Most of the dead are expected to be pulled from the rubble of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway through Oakland, which collapsed in the 6.9-magnitude jolt that struck Tuesday afternoon just before the start of the third World Series game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The Alameda County coroner’s office has asked local refrigeration firms to make space available for corpses.

Ten people were also reported killed in San Francisco, where thousands without power, water or phones spent the night on darkened streets in fortunately mild weather.

At least 600 people have been injured, and buildings have fallen from San Francisco south to Hollister in San Benito County. The city of Santa Cruz remains completely cut off by road, local officials said.

President Bush signed a disaster-relief declaration and said, “We will take every step and make every effort” to help. Vice President Dan Quayle was meeting with California officials at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale this morning, and Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner was sent from Washington to evaluate the situation.

A series of aftershocks has rattled the Bay Area. The strongest was a 5.0-magnitude jolt at 5:43 p.m. Tuesday, and a 4.5 temblor shook the area just before noon today.

The confirmed count of the dead reached 69 today, including seven known victims of the Nimitz Freeway collapse. But the state Office of Emergency Services said authorities expect to find more than 200 bodies in the freeway rubble when workers are able to clear the twisted slabs of concrete from a quarter-mile of upper deck that fell on motorists stuck in rush-hour traffic on the lower deck.

In some places rescuers were left a crawl space one or two feet high between the lower deck and the upper deck. But in some spots the two decks met in a tight fit, leaving no hope for any motorists caught underneath.

Rescuers shined lights and probed metal rods into the crawl space in the darkness Tuesday night but they moved cautiously. “They are afraid it is going to collapse with the slightest aftershock,” said Kyle Nelson, a Caltrans spokesman. “Sound, movement, anything could make it go.”

A 6-year-old boy, identified only as Julio, was removed from his family’s crushed car after three hours of surgery to amputate his right leg above the knee. Workers said they also had to use a chain saw to cut through the nearby body of his mother. The boy’s sister also was rescued.

Searchers used sniffing dogs briefly today to look for more victims but gave up the effort about noon after concluding that there were no other survivors. It may take days to recover the bodies, officials said.

“It’s going to be real slow, painstakingly slow,” said Marty Boyer, spokeswoman for Alameda County. “It’s very grim out there.”

Harrison Brown, 29, was driving his express delivery truck south on the upper level when the quake hit.

“Imagine you’re driving down the freeway at a normal pace, and all of a sudden the road in front of you just drops. The freeway starts rocking, and then there is no more freeway,” he said. “Then all around you these people are screaming and hollering.”

Oakland School District Police Officer Dave Drury said dispatches on his police radio indicated that some people apparently climbed onto sections of the broken freeway and stole wallets.

“Vultures don’t do that. Vultures don’t steal wallets,” he said with disgust.

Police said that there was sporadic looting in downtown Oakland after the quake knocked out power to most of the Bay Area but that no arrests were made. Brick walls and smokestacks were down on several Oakland streets. Twenty-eight people from damaged apartment buildings spent the night in an emergency shelter set up at Martin Luther King School Cafeteria-Auditorium in Oakland.

Commuters who use the Nimitz Freeway through Oakland were talking today about what could have been.

Judy Stewart, 36, of El Cerrito had driven along the lower deck 10 minutes before the upper deck crashed down. She had left work promptly to attend a Concord concert by Stevie Nicks.

“If I had taken any time getting out of the building, talking to my friends, I would have been in that bottom layer when the sections fell down and left those cars six inches tall,” she said. The concert was canceled.

The death toll in San Francisco rose to 10 this morning, including a 3-month-old baby and a man who fell from stairs trying to escape from his building. Authorities have yet to discover any bodies in a block of apartment buildings that burned down in the Marina district Tuesday night.

“There have got to be people in there--unless we got real lucky,” said Joseph Surdyka, the city’s administrative coroner.

There also were three murders that Police Chief Frank Jordan said were not related to the quake. About 209 people were treated for injuries, 25 of them critical.

The damage in the newer Marina area came as a surprise to city officials, who expected to find most problems in the older, run-down Tenderloin section or in Chinatown. But streets in the Marina area buckled and many buildings there will have to be condemned, officials said.

“It is not as big as it could have been, but we have all (the damage) we could handle,” said Carl B. Koon, head of the city’s Office of Emergency Services. “Overall we came out OK.”

Deputy Fire Chief Michael Farrell said he saw “three or four buildings that used to be four stories high and now they are one story high.”

The city was dark through the night, allowing thousands of residents and stranded workers who spent the hours outside an unusual glimpse of stars. Headlights and an occasional building running on emergency generators were the only bright lights. Among the landmarks that remained lit were San Francisco General Hospital and the glass-front Davies Symphony Hall downtown, but the usually well-lit Bay Bridge was dark except for the flashing lights of emergency crews.

A 30-foot section of the bridge’s upper roadway collapsed onto the lower deck in the quake, killing one person. The U.S. Coast Guard said today that no cars or people fell into the bay, although the Coast Guard did help rescue two people from the bridge.

Mayor Art Agnos urged residents of San Francisco and commuters from other areas to stay home today. And while the streets did remain eerily quiet in San Francisco, several thousand people rode ferries and warily drove highways to reach work.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system reopened this morning, as did Oakland Airport and San Francisco International Airport.

Scott Shafer, press secretary to Agnos, said City Hall would open at noon for limited business. Some court business would take place and the mayor’s office would reopen.

In Santa Cruz County, the epicenter of the quake, five bodies have been found so far but officials said there could be others.

Two died when buildings collapsed in the Pacific Garden Mall, a pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz. One died when a bakery collapsed in Watsonville, another in a nursing home and another in a traffic crash after the quake.

In all, 40 buildings collapsed in Santa Cruz and Watsonville, where damage was estimated at $350 million, Santa Cruz County emergency services coordinator Dinah Phillips said. Hospitals remain open, but all highways into Santa Cruz were closed, including California 17, the main link to San Jose, which was blocked by landslides and fissures. The highway crosses the San Andreas Fault near the epicenter.

A wildfire had consumed 650 acres, and 25 buildings had burned to the ground. Officials were advising residents to boil all water because of concerns about broken water and sewer lines.

“People should stay home. They should boil their water. They should clean up and prepare for a long haul,” said Phillips, public information officer for the county.

Three other deaths occurred in Santa Clara County, officials said. The small city of Los Gatos suffered some of the heaviest damage in the Bay Area. Pavement was buckled on streets in the center of town, natural gas and water lines were ruptured and several dozen Victorian homes were shifted off their foundations. Many chimneys had crumbled, and some homes had simply collapsed.

On Main Street downtown, brick rubble from building facades was piled 3 feet high in some areas. No one was killed, but Los Gatos police reported 15 to 20 injuries that required hospitalization.

Officers stood guard in the downtown area through the night to ward off looters. They were joined by wary shopkeepers.

“I’m just out to keep an eye on things,” said Loren Johnson, whose family owns a building on Main Street. “A lot of people are sleeping outside their buildings tonight.”

This story was written by Times Staff Writer Kevin Roderick based on reports from Dan Morain, Tracy Wilkinson and others in the Bay Area.