It's hard to get a picture of an earthquake. Here we see Jean Louis Agassiz, Swiss Naturalist, knocked off his pedestal at Stanford during the "big one" in 1906.
In 1986 the Bay Area celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the construction of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and two years later, on 10/15/89, a segment of the upper roadway collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake. One motorist was killed when she appeared to panic and drive over the edge.
I
was in the garden pulling up weeds when the ground moved under
our feet. The weeds seemed to pop out of the earth, suddenly
soft. It was another of those hot, dry fall days. (See photographs.)
Here's how
it looked on the Seismograph in the Earth Science Building on the
UC campus, 60 miles north of the epicenter. In it's graphic
appearance, with its paroxysmal onset, it ressembles the EEG in epilepsy. 
The San Andreas...
and Hayward Faults
Each morning I commute North from my house on Highway 13. Aptly numbered, it follows the ominous Hayward fault at the foot of the East Bay Hills.
It's like musical chairs - who knows when the music will stop and where we'll be when it does. At any moment a Californian may be subducted or uplifted. I try to follow the advice to keep drinking water, flashlight and batteries, a crowbar (prying up debris) and sturdy shoes (stepping over it) in the car.
And generally, its a good idea to avoid collapsible structures.
Hospitals are notoriously prone to falling down as did this stairwell at a VA Hospital in the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Earthquakes don't kill people: human structures do. Overbuild is a good rule. Making a virtue of necessity, this retrofit of Berkeley's Municipal Parking garage, celebrates the security of welded steel.
42 of the 62 deaths associated with the Loma Prieta Quake were due to the failure of I-880.
View of Downtown from Russian Hill, 1906
Image on left is in .gif format, 19 K; on right in .jpg format, 10 K. It only took me six months to realize you get twice the size for half the size with jpg! So that sent me back to Adobe Photoshop to convert dozens of gifs to jpg's.
And From the East Bay