CNN 20: The San Francisco Earthquake of 1989 Still Impacts the City
GREG LEFEVRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: When an earthquake happens, nothing works, you're on your own and your life just changed. And all three of those rules apply to the San Francisco earthquake. San Francisco has a lot of big, old wooden homes. They're tinderboxes; and all you had there was this pile of wooden rubble aflame. The flames were knocked down fairly early on, but there were still gas leaks everywhere. There were still small fires popping up everywhere. And every time we would hear the fire engines go by, maybe it was a small fire or maybe it was the beginning of another conflagration. And so you lived that again and again for the first couple of weeks after the earthquake.</s>KEVIN ROCKWELL, CNN VIDEOGRAPHER: This was not an earthquake that was going to be hard to cover. There was almost too much to cover. There was something everywhere. There was the freeway collapse in Oakland. There was the chunk of the Bay Bridge was gone -- I drive across that bridge every day, and it was suddenly, that was gone. The nightmare of rebuilding the freeways in San Francisco and Oakland areas, and those projects took a long, long time due to a variety of reasons. But I would say there's still some rebuilding that's being done, so we're still living with the effects of it.