Bay Area Girds for Traffic Nightmare : Disaster: Baseball commissioner agrees to delay renewal of World Series games until Friday.

The lucky ones spent Sunday at ease, walking in the park or watching the 49ers in the sunshine, but for many thousands in the Bay Area last week’s earthquake strengthened its grip on their lives--and threatened new torments this morning as commuters try to return to work.

Concerned officials urged people to stay home if at all possible, rather than attempt the commute on Day 1 of the new era in Bay Area traffic: rush hours with no Bay Bridge, no Nimitz Freeway through Oakland, and no Embarcadero Freeway or Interstate 280 into downtown San Francisco. Terrible snarls are also expected in the Santa Cruz and San Jose areas.

In San Francisco, baseball commissioner Fay Vincent announced that the World Series would resume--but not until Friday--and in Oakland fresh danger at the collapsed Nimitz Freeway forced nearly 200 more people out of their homes and curtailed recovery work.

More homes were judged unsafe in the region struck by Tuesday’s 6.9 magnitude quake, and many residents discovered they could have a long wait for federal relief.

But there was also some brightness. The promised rains did not arrive, and Buck Helm, the miracle survivor of 90 hours buried in the Nimitz Freeway ruins, improved under the care of doctors at Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Helm was still in critical condition but resting under sedation and breathing with the aid of a respirator. Doctors said he could communicate with his family.

Repairs also began on the Bay Bridge, eerily deserted except for workers who lifted out a damaged section of the upper deck. It was carefully lowered onto a barge, where repairs will take about a month.

The future of this year’s World Series--the apple of the Bay Area’s eye until the quake struck at 5:04 p.m. Tuesday, minutes before the first pitch of Game 3--was announced at a press conference held by Vincent and San Francisco mayor Art Agnos.

Baseball officials had wanted to resume the series--matching the two local teams, the Giants and Athletics--back at Candlestick Park on Tuesday, exactly a week after the quake.

But Agnos said he told the commissioner in a meeting Saturday that it was “unequivocally impossible for us to start on Tuesday.”

Vincent said he had no choice but to go along with Agnos. “It was important for baseball to know its place,” the commissioner said. “He’s in charge of this.”

Vincent said he did not consult Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson. The mayor, reached later, said he had mixed emotions.

“On one hand, it seems that the importance of the World Series, in light of what we have seen happen here, raises serious questions whether it should be played. On the other hand, there is a need to release tension.”

Wilson remained firm on an earlier position, saying it is “highly inappropriate” to play the World Series in Oakland “as long as we are still pulling victims from the freeway.” If necessary, the sixth and seventh games would be played in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

The new problem at the elevated, double-decked Cypress section of the Nimitz Freeway is the cracking and deterioration of support pillars on a portion about 10 blocks away from the collapsed ruins.

Police went door-to-door ordering about 200 residents of low-income housing projects nearby to evacuate. About 15 residents carrying tote bags, suitcases and backpacks boarded buses and were taken to Ralph Bunche Elementary School, which was opened to house evacuees who needed shelter. Most of the displaced found their own shelter.

Caltrans officials said the evacuation may only be for 24 hours while the area was shored up, much as the collapsed section of the freeway was strengthened Saturday night.

“There is very great instability,” Caltrans spokesman Kyle Nelson said.

Four bodies were pulled from the Nimitz debris Sunday, and the body of a woman was found in a destroyed apartment building in the Marina District of San Francisco. The death toll now stands at 60. About 80 people are still listed as missing by Oakland authorities and presumed to be dead in the ruins of the Nimitz.

The state Office of Emergency Services announced Sunday that property damage had surpassed $6.4 billion, making this the costliest U.S. earthquake in history and one of the country’s worst natural disasters. Other estimates put the damage at near $8 billion.

Details of the damage toted so far have become staggering. The agency has counted 405 homes, 104 mobile homes, and an unknown number of apartments destroyed. Another 107,768 single-family homes have suffered some damage in the eight counties affected, an area with a population of more than 5 million.

Both county and state officials caution that the damage figures are still incomplete and likely to increase as the Bay Area struggles to recover from the quake.

“Some counties are still too busy to provide anything but preliminary estimates,” noted Lisa Covington, a spokeswoman for the state emergency office. “When they make a damage estimate, they invariably add the word ‘plus.’ ”

The American Red Cross said more than 10,000 people displaced by the earthquake took refuge in its 19 shelters. About 2,000 remained in shelters Sunday, while others had moved in with friends or relatives.

As Sunday dawned, churches began to fill.

In Oakland, parishioners of the St. Francis de Sales Cathedral moved services to a Baptist church because the cathedral’s tower was filled with cracks and leaning precariously.

“Sometimes in life, God shakes us and says ‘Pay attention, there is something more important than the ordinary things in your life,’ ” Father Joseph M. Powers said.

Archbishop John R. Quinn was at San Francisco’s St. Mary Cathedral for a special Mass.

He stopped at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadelupe, patron of the Americas, to make an act of entrustment, a ritual that placed San Francisco and all other stricken areas “under the protection of Our Lady, asking her to pray that we are spared further tragedy.”

“My heart beats for the elderly people, who are so affected by the uncertainties of this hour,” he said. “I weep for the children who are so frightened and filled with anxiety. I weep for the parents, who try to console and reassure them.”

Elsewhere in San Francisco, people jogged, bought hardware, attended movies and read the Sunday papers. Young men surfed at Ocean Beach. Couples strolled hand-in-hand on the streets.

“It’s only the Marina, the Bay Bridge and the Cypress structure that got hit. For the rest of us, it’s just business as usual,” said Ronald Little, a local sign painter, as he strolled at Ocean Beach with a friend.

“We have three children and I assume Halloween is still on for the children,” said Naomi Galili, as she and her 8-year son picked out pumpkins at a pumpkin patch.

The football San Francisco 49ers--wryly dubbed by some the “6.9ers” after the magnitude of the quake that has now surpassed the city’s 1906 disaster in damage--played before a larger-than-usual crowd of about 70,000 at Stanford, an alternate site chosen so repairs could be made at Candlestick Park.

The fans were subdued at first but in the second half got into the spirit of the game, which the 49ers won, 37-20, over the New England Patriots. But there was a dark lining there, too. Jeff Fuller, a 49ers defensive player, suffered a broken neck and was taken from the field on a stretcher.

Meanwhile, hundreds of luxury hotel rooms in San Francisco that were offered free to the earthquake homeless remained empty, partly because people don’t know about it and partly because some would rather stay in Red Cross shelters.

But those rooms may be snapped up this week as commuters fill the city and encounter trouble getting out.

The loss of the Bay Bridge is expected to cause overcrowding at Bay Area Rapid Transit subway stations and on trans-bay ferries hurriedly brought from other West Coast ports. Closure of the Nimitz Freeway will further disrupt East Bay commuting, and the emergency shutdowns of the Embarcadero and Interstate 280 freeways into downtown San Francisco could turn that side of the bay into a jumbled mess.

Rod Diridon, chairman of the nine-county Metropolitan Transit Commission, used the strongest terms in urging commuters to cooperate and avoid driving.

“The message is simple. If you find yourself in a single passenger vehicle and have not tried very hard to use a car pool or van pool, you’re committing an antisocial act,” Diridon said. “We are in a state of emergency.”

“And if we are trying to avert economic disaster, people must be able to get to work. This is not business as usual. Everyone is going to have to alter their life styles when it comes to commuting in order to maintain economic viability.”

The transportation crisis was expected to be nearly as bad in the Santa Cruz-San Jose area.

California 17, the main link from Santa Cruz into the so-called Silicon Valley area, will only be open to car pools of three or more and buses, and they will be guided through damaged sections of the highway.

For some, the quake has meant a new experience with public transportation.

A middle-aged woman at an Oakland Bay Area Rapid Transit station stared wide-eyed at the subway system map and admitted it was her first time.

“I feel like a foreigner in my own city,” said the woman, who didn’t want to give her name. “I have absolutely no idea how this all works.”

Barbara Founier, 63, a lifelong San Francisco resident, was making only her second BART ride, this time under the bay to return home after visiting her children in Berkeley.

“I was so nervous, especially after the earthquake,” she said, “I usually just drive everywhere.”

Lisa Stone, 24, said her employer plans to provide two cars and keep one parked in Oakland, the other in San Francisco. Employees can then take BART under the bay and use either car for business trips.

“It’s going to be horrible on Monday,” she said. “We’re really bracing for the worst.”

There were some reports of tempers flaring in towns in the Santa Cruz Mountains near the quake epicenter, as building inspectors fanned out to tag those homes too damaged to be saved. Some residents were refusing to cooperate.

“They are used to being self-sufficient mountain people,” said Barbara Macallair, a director of the Zayante Fire Protection District, which serves about 5,000 mountain residents.

Explorer scouts and firefighters who checked street-by-street found 92 homes demolished--either split in half, slid down hills or burned to the ground--in the Zayante district alone. In all, 323 homes were uninhabitable and at least 1,000 had minor to moderate damage, such as broken windows or toppled chimneys.

Houses are posted with “condemned” signs all over the mountains, home before the quake to a peculiar coastal Northern California mix of computer-literate professionals and a more rustic breed of latter-day hippies, organic farmers and doers of odd jobs whose economic status is more dicey.

In Redwood Estates, a town of about 400 homes five miles from the epicenter, the owner of one home that cracked in half and slid off its foundation posted a sign--”For Sale. $200k. Fixer-upper.”

Notices are posted along the mountain roads advertising clearing and hauling services--prices to be negotiated. Propane and carpenters were also in short supply.

Further south in Watsonville, families sleeping in parks refused to return home and moved into tent encampments set up by the National Guard and relief agencies.

“This place is a disaster,” Pamela Cote, of the Santa Cruz County human resources agency, said as she tried to coax 50 survivors living in Callaghan Park to move to 22 Army tents erected several blocks away by the National Guard.

“People are everywhere on the streets in this town,” Cote said. “A lot of this is cultural, they don’t want to leave their houses, they are afraid people are going to go in houses and take things.”

Even building inspectors’ word that 363 homes have been checked and are safe to enter hasn’t appeared to sway many whose confidence in even the ground beneath their feet was shaken by the 15-second jolt.

“There’s this distrust of government because a lot of people are here illegally and they don’t want to be turned in,” Cote said. “We are giving services regardless. The INS is not going to show up.”

Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner, President Bush’s quake relief coordinator, said there will be an indefinite delay before the Bush Administration comes up with an estimate for how much it is willing to spend for assistance.

“We need to do a lot of workup from the field,” Skinner said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. “I don’t think anybody can say what’s really needed today. We’re still learning about the damage.”

Skinner indicated he does not believe the construction of double-decker freeways should end as a result of the quake.

“The technology for the construction of freeways has changed since the 1950s,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot.”

Meanwhile, House Budget Committee Chairman Leon Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), interviewed outside a tent village in Watsonville, called for new federal taxes to help pay for earthquake relief.

The following Times staff members contributed to earthquake coverage. In Oakland: Stephanie Chavez, Ashley Dunn, Andrea Ford, Kenneth J. Garcia, George Ramos, Sheryl Stolberg, Tracy Wilkinson and Scott Masko. In San Francisco: Jack Cheevers, Lily Eng, Philip Hager, Ron Harris, Robert L. Jackson, Tamara Jones, J. Michael Kennedy, Dan Morain, George Stein, Victor F. Zonana and Warwick Elston. In Menlo Park: John Balzar and Louis Sahagun. In Santa Cruz: Tracey Kaplan, Edmund Newton, Charles Hillinger and Eric Bailey. In Watsonville: Marita Hernandez and Miles Corwin. In Los Angeles: Steven R. Churm, Kristen Christopher, Michael Connelly, John Glionna, Myrna Oliver, Kenneth Reich, Judy Pasternak, Bob Secter and Jenifer Warren. In Washington: Doyle McManus.

Related STORIES PICTURES: A3 and A18, C1