Collapsed Freeway, Symbol of Bay Area Quake, Reopens

Nearly eight years after the massive Loma Prieta earthquake ravaged the Bay Area, the symbol of the temblor’s greatest destruction is rising from the rubble.

The first leg of the Cypress Freeway, which killed 42 motorists when it collapsed during rush-hour in the 7.1-magnitude quake, is scheduled to reopen before dawn today.

Workers will have toiled through the night to finish striping most of the 5.2-mile stretch of pristine asphalt and concrete. An additional bridge and two offramps will open in the months to come.

“This was the most dramatic collapse,” said Colin P. Jones, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. “The double-deck pancake was the lasting image of the Loma Prieta earthquake.”

No ceremonial ribbons will be cut in this gritty West Oakland neighborhood to commemorate the long and arduous process of bringing the ruined road back to life.

No smiling dignitaries will take the first ride on what has become the most expensive strip of highway in California history--a $1-billion project fraught with pain, strife and lawsuits.

Instead, California Highway Patrol officers will be on hand as the stars fade and the sun rises, quietly escorting the first commuters. A broad curve replaces the fallen double-deck artery that transfixed the world in October 1989 during a days-long agony of death and rescue.

“I’m sensitive to the next of kin of the 42 who lost their lives on the Cypress Freeway,” a somber Harry Yahata, regional Caltrans director, said at a Tuesday morning news conference that began here with a moment of silence. “A ribbon-cutting is a celebration. I don’t know that we want to have a celebration when we open this.”

The collapse of the 32-year-old Cypress Freeway--the first double-decker roadway of its kind in the United States--claimed nearly two-thirds of the quake’s 67 victims. Although neighborhoods went up in flames and communities from Santa Cruz to the Bay Area struggled with aftershocks and fallen buildings, it was the chaos on the Cypress Freeway that most riveted the public.

When the ground began to shake at 5:04 p.m. that Oct. 17, the upper deck of the freeway slammed into the lower level for more than a mile. Motorists, many heading home early to watch the third game of the first-ever San Francisco-Oakland World Series, were trapped between the two decks, caught in pockets ranging in height from one to four feet.

In a sad irony, the quake’s final victim also was the final survivor rescued from the Cypress Freeway. After four days spent slicing through the freeway’s rubble with blowtorches, jackhammers and a concrete cutter, rescue workers found longshoreman Buck Alvin Helm, 57, caught in an air pocket in his Chevrolet Sprint. The emotional moment--a near miracle--was caught on live television.

“Thank God, I’m alive,” the battered Helm said when a paramedic’s head finally came into view. And indeed, Helm became a symbol of hope and survival amid the devastation of the quake. He died a month later from widespread infection and the stress his ordeal placed on an already ailing heart.

On Tuesday, Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris remembered the freeway “as a scene of such devastation and despair that many of us haven’t been able to forget it.”

The freeway’s partial reopening today “is really the first step in putting that behind us,” said Caltrans spokesman Jones. “Certainly this is a major milestone for us, for the community, for the commuters.”

The road back for West Oakland has been long and bitter. Even in its earliest incarnation as a showpiece of American transportation engineering, the Cypress Freeway was a bane to the community that it sliced in half--a “Berlin Wall,” in Harris’ words.

Soon after as the structure fell, community leaders began clamoring that it should not be replaced where it stood, but instead be moved about a mile away to the edges of residential West Oakland.

State legislation was passed requiring community participation in the rebuilding process. After years of meetings, environmental impact reports, lawsuits and property acquisitions, many of the area’s residents got their wish.

Today, the new Cypress Freeway arcs sharply north and west of where the old structure stood. But there is still some unhappiness here, and it bubbled up Tuesday as state and local officials unveiled the rebuilt route.

Some community activists have argued that the construction process has not given enough jobs to the financially strapped city across the bay from San Francisco. Others bemoan the fact that the freeway still plagues the residential fringes of the neighborhood, that promised sound walls may be temporary, that hazardous wastes still need to be cleaned up.

“Business has been disrupted,” Harris acknowledged Tuesday. “People’s lives have been disrupted. We have not had the successes in terms of business opportunities and job opportunities.

“But this is an opportunity for all of us to come together in the aftermath of the earthquake, have some of the healing that comes from the ending of this project,” Harris said.

Not so fast, said an indignant Renee Morrison, who has lived most of her life in the shadow of the Cypress. With an Environmental Justice Now sign in hand, she and her colleagues interrupted the men who unveiled the freeway.

“No state official here would have this where they live,” she cried. “Our children are suffering because of all of the toxic contaminants.”

“We have been complaining from Day 1 about the noise,” cried another woman, who issued a challenge to the gathered officials: “I would ask any of you to spend the night at my house--free of charge--and see what we put up with.”

The level of public outcry is one reason freeway reconstruction has taken so long, one reason why the traffic bottleneck has dragged on in the tangle of freeways and detours near the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

In addition, rebuilding meant realignment, and houses and businesses had to be relocated, hazardous waste had to be cleaned up, property had to be acquired. The rebuilding process was further complicated by nearby BART train lines.

“This project was not just a repair or replacement, as you had . . . with the Santa Monica Freeway,” said Jones of Caltrans, referring to the stretch of Interstate 10 that was refurbished just 84 days after the 1994 Northridge quake.

“We didn’t have the political will to reopen it like you did in Los Angeles. There’s a whole different view of freeways in Northern California.”

A collapsed segment of the San Francisco Bay Bridge was repaired just a month after the Loma Prieta quake; a stretch of California 1 near Santa Cruz took five months.

The Cypress Freeway, also known as Interstate 880, will not be completely reopened until 1998. And in San Francisco, several freeway repair projects stemming from the 1989 temblor are still pending--other victims of Northern California democracy, a process in which all protests are heeded.

As of this morning, however, relief will be evident to those who travel through the Interstate 880 detour from the East Bay across the Bay Bridge and into San Francisco. The new freeway will divert 45,000 cars a day from the clogged detour, saving commuters to San Francisco between eight and 10 minutes in the morning and about five in the evening.

“Traffic suffered from the day after the earthquake, and the community has, too,” Jones said. “There’s been suffering on everybody’s part. We can now put that behind us.”