Newsweek: Bracing for the Big One

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I am a graduate of Berkeley High, and attended UC Berkeley both as an undergraduate and grad student.  So when a 6.9 earthquake hit in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, I volunteered to go.  I rented a car at the San Francisco airport and a man asked me if I would give him a ride downtown.  Turns out he was a physician who knew the details of the emergency management plans for all the city hospitals – and shared them with me on the ride in.  It was an emotional and eerie story to report, ending with a miraculous rescue of a man trapped in a car under the collapsed Bay Bridge.