Early on the evening of October 17, 1989, my husband, Tom, and I were traveling along Highway 880 near San Francisco at 5:02 P.M. , returning a rented car to the Oakland Airport after traveling around California. We had come from the University of Pennsylvania and were about to attend an international conference at Berkeley on the characteristics, including failures, of large technological systems. We little dreamed that we were about to become our own case study.

A few moments earlier I had almost failed to turn onto 880 and off Route 80, which would have taken us over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. That would have been an adventure too. Moments later I felt that the car was getting a flat tire, this brand-new car, for it yawed about—not out of control, but I had to work to keep it straight on the road. The wheels felt as if they were caught in a trolley track and going their own way. That feeling was the earth quaking under us, but we had absolutely no suspicion of that; an earthquake was the last thing we Easterners would think of. I struggled in the fast, quitting-time traffic to cross several lanes and move from far left to right in case an exit mercifully appeared. I was watching anxiously in the rearview mirrors for fear of being struck from behind. Tom, meanwhile, was watching out immediately in front of us. So engrossed were we that neither of us was looking very far in front. But to Tom’s astonishment he saw the cars ahead plunging down onto a highway buckling into accordian folds. At that same instant he spied a small exit and said I’d better take it. I thought I couldn’t possibly get across the remaining two lanes, but he said, “Go for it.” I did. Alternately hitting the accelerator and tapping the brake so that the rear lights would let people behind me know I was in trouble, I somehow made it onto the little exit ramp. Off to our left I observed something appalling about the scene just behind us: the roadway seemed to go abruptly down, then too far up, and several cars were strewn about and stopped on the destroyed highway above, light poles were awry, and over everything hung a sinister pall of gray smoke. The smoke turned out to be concrete dust rising from the highway breakup. We did not see then that the elevated part of the freeway had collapsed onto the part below.

We simply couldn’t take in what had happened. First we thought there must have been a dreadful multiple-car accident such as those you hear about on European autobahns, one so extensive that it had damaged the highway. Or we thought that some unscrupulous highway contractors had cut costs during construction. Our denial and confusion persisted as we slowly proceeded, picking our way around the broken