The death of Buck Helm, who amazed rescuers by surviving four days beneath tons of concrete in a collapsed freeway, was a grim reminder of the destruction wrought by the northern California earthquake.
Just 20 hours earlier, residents cheered the reopening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a symbol of recovery from the Oct. 17 quake, which toppled a 50-foot section of the span, killed 67 people and caused $7 billion in damage."I'm sure this will hit a lot of people hard," said Steve Whipple, the state Department of Transportation engineer who found Helm in the early hours of Oct. 21.
"I was under the impression that he was going to make it," Whipple said. "It was just going to take a long while."
Helm, who turned 58 on Nov. 10, died of respiratory failure at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center on Saturday evening, 28 days after his rescue.
The rescue of the burly longshoreman's clerk buoyed spirits of rescuers depressed by the rising death toll in the collapse of Interstate 880 in Oakland _ and cheered people across the country who watched the drama on television.