In Popular Culture
- This disaster was included as one of several different disaster scenarios in the 1993 video game SimCity 2000. The game's designer Will Wright used his experience of rebuilding his life after his home was burned down due to the fire as basis for the concept of the best selling computer game in history, The Sims.
- The story of the Oakland fire is a major plot element of the children's book "Tikvah Means Hope", by Patricia Polacco. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1994. ISBN 0-385-32059-0
- The 1993 TV movie Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland was based on the Oakland hills fire. It incorporated actual Oakland fire footage as well as audio from radio transmissions made by the fire crews on the scene.
- The book "Almost Home: America's Love-Hate Relationship with Community" contained a chapter of critical assessment of the social aftermath of the fire. It highlighted how the selfish and individualistic desires by some of the victims of the fire overwhelmed any preliminary voice of community togetherness, including fraudulent and greedy practices towards charity and insurance claims.
- The fire is a theme in author Maxine Hong Kingston's novel The Fifth Book of Peace.
- Live footage of the fire was shown on the NFL on CBS telecast of the game between the Detroit Lions and San Francisco 49ers, played across the bay at Candlestick Park. As with the earthquake two years earlier, the blimp shots provided many people with first word of the disaster.
Read more about this topic: Oakland Firestorm Of 1991
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)