On Oct. 17, 1989, Arthur Reyes was in his dorm room at Stevenson College, on the picturesque hilltop campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, when his bed started to shake violently.

"I looked across my dorm room to see books flying off the shelf, the door swung open and the light fixture fell from the ceiling," he recalled.

It was 5:04 p.m. From its epicenter just 10 miles north of Reyes, near the Loma Prieta Peak, the 7.1 magnitude quake roared along a 22-mile stretch of the San Andreas fault through the Bay Area, collapsing a portion of the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Freeway in Oakland, and crushing homes in the Marina District in San Francisco and the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz.

When it was over, 63 people were dead, more than 11,000 homes destroyed and $6 billion in damage done.