[dragonwriter]

> Actually the 89 earthquake did a surprisingly small amount of damage to the bay area (in SF primarily the marina and small but significant damage to the bay bridge

Also, SR-480, I-280, and US 101 all saw significant damage and closures requiring reconstruction and redesign (either of the freeway itself, or of transport networks because, as in the case of SR-480, the freeway was just deleted entirely after the damage.)

> In addition, the reconstruction was spread over a long period (for example they haven't finished with the bay bridge).

The Bay Bridge damage from the earthquake was repaired fairly quickly; the seismic retrofit to make it better able to survive future earthquakes (and, more specifically, the replacement of the Eastern Span as part of that retrofit) has taken longer.

[gumby]

Yep. My point was that none of those was responsible for any sort of economic "uplift" (in quotes because of the broken windows fallacy).

BTW after writing that comment I just walked by the old chemistry building on the Stanford campus which was closed by the earthquake (I was actually in that building a earlier that summer). They've finally started work on fixing it -- more than a quarter century after it was declared unsafe!

[dragonwriter]

> My point was that none of those was responsible for any sort of economic "uplift" (in quotes because of the broken windows fallacy).

The damage to SR-480 (the Embarcadero Freeway) might be a significant counterexample to that, since it was the earthquake damage that provide the impetus to overcome the resistance to demolishing it that had stopped that from happening two years before the earthquake, and allowed the improvements in that area that took place once the freeway was removed.