The Loma Prieta earthquake that occurred on October 17, 1989 and devastated the San Francisco Bay Area was one of the costliest disasters, both in monetary terms and in terms of loss of life, in American history. With a magnitude of 6.9, the quake was also the first to be televised on the spot during the coverage of that year's World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. In the end, as much as $6 billion worth of property damage had occurred, and 69 persons lost their lives.
Many of those deaths occurred on a section of the Nimitz Freeway (I-880) in Oakland that was a double-deck structure. But even here, in the midst of one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in American history up to that point, miracles happened. Those miracles were the subject of the 1993 made-for-TV movie MIRACLE ON INTERSTATE 880.
Fairly well directed by Robert Iscove, the film stars David Morse, Sandy Duncan, Ruben Blades, Len Cariou, and Scott Hylands as the people who were either trapped in that collapse double-decker roadway or who tried to help. As is common with a lot of made-for-TV movies based on real-life natural disasters, there is the mixture of TV news video footage and the dramatized material. Fortunately, however, the tendency to go into hyper-dramatic overdrive that is common in most films of this nature is missing from MIRACLE ON INTERSTATE 880. The real-life miracle rescues amongst the horror is plenty dramatic enough, warranting a '7' rating.
