The passage of a $980-million bond measure in California's Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco counties has revived an effort to make one of the region's most important transportation systems more resistant to earthquake forces. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (bart) system opened, in 1972, its earthquake engineering technology was considered state of the art. Indeed, bart's noteworthy performance during the Loma Prieta temblor, which occurred in 1989, has been attributed to its sophisticated design. Later, however, as researchers learned more about the faults that crisscross northern California, they realized that the region's infrastructure faced the possibility of a much larger earthquake.
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