All of a sudden the inches-a-year motion of the plate that had been locked for so long was suddenly translated into something much, much, faster: A ripping, tearing movement that was unimaginably fast, as though a glacier had suddenly superheated and been turned in an instant from solid ice into a raging flume of water. The huge bow wave of shock and motion spread up and down the city, up and down the state, roaring along at 7,000 miles an hour, and affecting ever more northerly and southerly towns and villages as they appeared on each side of the spreading rupture in the surface.
One by one the streets of San Francisco rose and fell under the influence of the spreading wave; and one by one the nearby towns and villages were affected and afflicted too. It was as if a plowshare were being driven through their countryside, with the soil on each side of the blade turned up and over, carrying all before it and tossing it contemptuously to each side.
On the western side of the fault rupture, all of this motion occurred beneath the waters of the Pacific—at least, it did where the fault ran close to the ocean, or ran below it, as it did near San Francisco. On the eastern side, however, the bow wave roared beneath the land, passing through houses and streets, across roads and bridges and railway lines, through fields, farms, and fences, and tearing through hamlets, villages, towns, and cities, without care or interruption, and leaving the most terrible and unforgettable damage and destruction in its wake.
AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN
The disturbance lasted 48 seconds. On looking from the window of our hotel, which was badly shattered—two men in fact to right and left of our rooms were killed—I saw the whole City enveloped in a pile of dust caused by falling buildings.
From a diplomatic telegram sent on April 25, 1906, from
SIR COURTNEY BENNETT, His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General,
San Francisco, to Sir Edward Grey, Bart., &c., &c.,
Secretary of State for Foreign and Colonial Affairs, London
Official pronouncements from the governments of the world’s great cities are documents seldom marked by excess of any kind, and, being written by bureaucrats, are rarely colored by sentiment, hyperbole, or dash. But the Municipal Report of the City of San Francisco for 1907, published by the city’s Board of Supervisors—as the law required it to be, each year—has a power and pathos all its own. Paragraph by paragraph, the book-length report recounts the ruin of the great metropolis in tones of unrelieved and detached misery, culminating in a single haunting sentence: “The greatest destruction of wealth created by human hands was that which resulted from the fire which occurred in San Francisco on April 18, 1906, and the three days succeeding.”
Whenever one considers the earthquake that resulted from the rupture of the San Andreas Fault that April morning, one must take into account what followed almost immediately after the trembling of the ground had stopped—and that was a quite astonishingly destructive and long-lived fire. The two calamities have since been almost inextricably linked as the “San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,” and the conflation of the two events has, so far as narrative and investigation is concerned, made for both convenience and confusion.
So when fatalities are spoken of, we have to ask: Did they die as a result of the quake, or in the subsequent blaze? Or when we refer to structural damage: Were the buildings destroyed because of the shaking or because of the fire? Many made much of what could have been a rather fine distinction—not least the insurers, some more eager than others to weasel out of their contractual responsibilities, their obligations to pay up. On all too many occasions homeowners would be icily informed that the damage their particular house had sustained had been due to the earthquake—against which, with profound regret, but do please read the fine print—they had not been insured. On the other hand the fire against which they were financially protected had arrived some hours later, laying waste to what was an already injured and uninsured—and hence suddenly quite valueless—building. And thus, from the insurance point of view, it was all bad news, and such hard luck. There would, thanks to this fine distinction, be no payment.
The simplest way to examine the physical damage caused by the ground shaking is to chronicle the destruction suffered by communities where fire was not so great a factor—at Stanford University, for example, where spectacular harm was done to the newly built university,* all of it very evidently wrought by the shaking of the ground, and yet without a single flame to add confusion or misery to the scene. But up in San Francisco it is well nigh impossible—except later, and forensically—to separate the two events. So it is perhaps best to rationalize this by accepting that everything—the earthquake, all the consequent destruction, all the death, and the outbreak of all the all-consuming fires—had as its ultimate cause the movement and the ground rupture from the fault. The earthquake shook the ground, it broke the buildings, it killed and maimed, and it spawned the fire.
IN THOSE FIRST few bewildering, sleep-fuddled, terrifying moments, scores upon scores of buildings, some grand and famed, most ordinary and unsung, crashed to the ground. Buildings that had long supplied familiarity and comfort and scale to the urban environment cracked, listed, and then fell in heaps of dust and shattered brick. Countless structures—churches, hotels, stores, government offices, libraries, statues, brothels, theatres, mansions, jails, Masonic temples, art galleries, restaurants—which, even if unvisited by most, had been passed by thousands and so became landmarks, simply vanished into jagged piles of crushed masonry and contorted iron. And, as they passed, this most remarkable of cities seemed instantly to shrink and to shrivel. When the morning light flooded the town, one witness was moved to remark that all of a sudden it seemed “no distance, between points formerly too far to walk. Squares thought commodious … dwindled to insignificant enclosures.”
Streets were choked with clouds of impenetrable dust from the falling brickwork, and for a few minutes after the initial shock no one could be certain of anything. As the shaking continued, people generally stayed put—those who tried to move would be shoved back and forth across their rooms, unable to withstand the enormous forces from below. But the moment that there seemed a lull, or perhaps the blessed peace at the end of the shock sequence, they poured out into the streets, stunned into what all who remember that moment insist was an eerie silence. When people did talk to one another, it is said they did so in whispers.
The miasma of brick dust tended at first to muffle the screams of the trapped and injured; and buildings, weakened and tottering, continued to fall, crushing people, horses, cattle, and any other living creatures that happened to be in the open, no matter that the quake itself, in a proper sense, was now over. Later on people expressed their relief that the quake had happened when so many people were still indoors; had it occurred at noon, when crowds thronged the streets, they would have been hit by the falling brickwork, making the casualty figures unbearable. But at the time there were no thoughts of relief—instead the whole world seemed to consist only of the stunned silence of the mob, the dust-laden darkness, the half-heard cries of pain, the crashing of masonry as cornices and chimneys and walls kept on falling, falling, falling.
Police Officer Edmond Parquette,* as we have seen, had experienced the first shocks at the Central Emergency Hospital in the basement of City Hall. Now it was busily collapsing all around him: And twenty years later, the image still vivid, he wrote in a publication called the Argonaut about the destruction that was evident in those immediate postquake moments. The hospital patients, particularly those in the locked insane wards, were not nearly so quiet as the mobs out on the streets:
Even when the quaking and twisting ceased, the lumps of masonry still kept falling; and above all these noises of crashing and breaking, and the bellowing and thundering of the quake itself and the thuds of the pillars and the cornices as they hit the ground, there were the shrieks and yells of the lunatics, and the moans and cries of the other patients. Everybody seemed to be yelling and shrieking at the top of his voice.
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Very quickly after the shocks ceased, the dust began to clear away or settle down, and stopped choking me. The cries died down too, though many of the poor creatures kept on shrieking from terror or moaning from hurts and apprehensions. As soon as these cries and howls had quieted down a little, and I could see a bit through the gloom—the dawn light was able to filter the chinks in the fallen masonry, and so through some of the upper parts of the windows—I made my way as best I could to the room of the matron, Mrs. Rose, whom I found safe and unhurt.
The U.S. Geological Survey, which later sent its best sleuths into the area to take a dispassionate look at the disaster, succumbed, just as the Board of Supervisors had, to uncharacteristic hyperbole. “The whole civilized world stood aghast,” their team of scientists wrote, “at the appalling destruction.” But they quickly pulled themselves together, and in short order produced a sensible analysis of how the various buildings had fared. Such was the violence of the shock, the report’s authors wrote, that
only structures of first-class design and materials and honest workmanship* could survive. Flimsy and loosely built structures collapsed like houses of cards under the terrific wrenching and shaking, and many of the structures which withstood the earthquake were subjected to a second test in a fire which surpassed all the great conflagrations of recent years. Some of these structures that successfully withstood the first test failed signally under the second, by reason of inadequate fireproofing. A very few withstood both tests successfully.
In this regard concrete proved to be king. There were precious few buildings in San Francisco built of this newfangled material, in part precisely because it was so newfangled. (The local Bricklayers’ Union took a dim view of it, imagining it part of a plot to take work away from its members.) The first high-rise concrete building had been constructed in Cincinnati only three years earlier, and, though the century would later be dominated by the demand for reinforced and prestressed concrete, in 1906 it was all very new, and even if employed in the East, little known in the West. Nonetheless, those buildings that were made of concrete tended to survive well. If there were tie bars and metallic reinforcements in a structure, then it survived also. If the building was on firm ground and its foundations were solidly anchored, then—even though the shaking inside might have been terrifying, with most of the belongings inside the house broken—the structure as a whole quite probably survived, too.
But otherwise San Francisco was a devil’s playground. Its countless unreinforced brick buildings, its scores of city blocks crammed solid with gimcrack wooden buildings (which, as a local insurance company put it, had been “hastily built, to sell”), its thousands of structures that had been hurriedly hauled up on landfill (which had been carted into the dozens of streams, rills, and nullahs flowing down from the hardrock hills of the town, in order to increase the acreage on which developers might build)—all leveled on every side, within microseconds of the shock wave hitting.
Chimneys were the most frequent villain. Most buildings had one—open fires and furnaces and boilers were invariably fueled by wood, or soft and sooty coal—and they were a menace. Tall, unsupported, weathered, ugly, and fragile, these great hollow columns of brick shook, wobbled, and fell in the thousands. The enormous chimney, for example, that loomed above the cable-car powerhouse at the corner of Washington and Mason Streets, where just a few moments before an unseen man had turned a crank and set the cables running, broke and crashed through the building’s roof, wrecking it. Time and again this happened—so often that fully 95 percent of all San Francisco’s chimneys collapsed, the War Department later said in its own review of the event. The experience of the newly appointed diocesan of Grace Church,* Bishop William Nichols, at 2515 Webster Street, was typical:
I arose and made a hasty inspection … the house had stood solidly, though as developed later one chimney had tossed out so that the top went through our roof, and the center through the Beaver’s roof next door; the two other chimney tops were moved from the base, and several courses of bricks were thrown out of the front gable, caroming on the stone parapet outside Clare’s room and going through the open window into her room, fortunately all choosing that open entrance rather than the two closed windows beside it.…
A look out of the windows brought evidence of the disasters abroad, in streets littered with fallen bricks, tall chimney stacks toppled over, the streets ominously astir with refugees from houses, and a general sort of anxiety in the air. And when I went to take my bath and no water ran, another phase of what had happened dawned on me.
His Eminence got off fairly lightly. Falling chimneys killed innumerable sleeping men and women that morning, most infamously (and, in a practical sense, most inconveniently) the city’s fire chief, Dennis Sullivan. It will be remembered that he had presided over the fighting of two smallish fires in the wee hours of the morning, and at about 3:00 A.M. had gone back to his wife, Margaret, and his bed in his small third-floor apartment on Bush Street between Grant and Kearny Streets, which housed on the first two floors the city’s Chemical Company No. 3.
When the shock wave hit, the fifty-four-year-old Sullivan was out of bed in a flash, and he ran to his wife’s room, presumably to help her to safety. But then the enormous mass of towering chimneys that dominated the turreted roof of the California Hotel next door toppled and hurtled down sixty feet on top of the little fire station—covering the Sullivans with bricks and smashing them and everything else down through to the ground floor. Margaret Sullivan survived, little injured; but the fire chief, his skull fractured, his lungs punctured by broken ribs, and, worst of all, his entire body scalded by steam from a broken radiator on which he landed, was fatally hurt, and died four days later in the Southern Pacific Railroad Hospital. A memorial plaque still stands on Bush Street; and, at a ceremony held at dawn every April 18, the Fire Department dips its ladders respectfully to the memory of this thoroughly agreeable man. “Dead on the Field of Honor” says the plaque, subscribed by grateful Californians. “Her Hero and Her Son.”
In the rough-and-ready residential quarters south of the Market Street Slot, the flimsy clapboard row houses slumped and lurched drunkenly as if they were toys tossed carelessly around by a child in a tantrum. Outwardly, many seemed little harmed—just dramatically moved, or tilted to one side, hopelessly out of plumb, or shifted wholesale from one side of a street to the other. But in fact inside they were wrecked, their floors torn and broken, their backs fractured, their residents trapped under beams and spars. And besides, it would not be long before the fire would get them, and turn recognizable ruin into charred and blackened wreckage.
North of Market Street, where the city’s commercial buildings were concentrated, brickwork by the thousands of tons was hurled into the street, as building after unreinforced building was broken and brought crashing down.* City Hall, the grandest structure in the city, dominated the ruin, the sides of its tower torn away, its cupola precariously balanced on top of a spiderweb of bent iron, its elaborate arrays of columns, lintels, cornices and caryatids cracked and smashed and flung into the street. The Geological Survey report on its state was almost contemptuous, noting a basis of construction somewhat less noble than that of the Sistine Chapel. The grandest-looking of San Francisco’s monuments was revealed in fact to be no more than “a brick building … consisting of steel floor beams and corrugated-iron arches with cinder-concrete filling” that was (deservedly, one can hear the report’s authors implying) first wrecked, then gutted:
A prominent feature was a central tower, surmounted by a dome built over a structural steel skeleton. Grouped around the dome were a number of cast-iron columns of half-inch metal filled with brick concrete supported on brackets. Some of these columns in falling broke into small pieces. The brickwork was completely shaken from the central tower. The cement-plastered brick walls were laid in lime mortar of generally poor quality and without adequate tie to the steel work. In some places there was an absence of any mortar, but in other
s it was very good, the brick walls falling in large masses and the broken bricks showing the mortar to have been the stronger. The massive architectural ornaments were top-heavy and lacked adequate bracing. The ceiling was formed of corrugated metal against which the mortar plaster was pressed, with intermediate brick partitions where the span of the beams was too great. The expansion … caused … the arches to fail. The building was a monument of bad design and poor materials and workmanship.
The rest of the report offers a grim catalog of structural failures across the city. The Academy of Sciences building was “completely destroyed.” The Aetna Building, occupied by a hardware wholesaling firm, stored tons of tin on an upper floor, and it all came crashing down to the basement. Parts of the Bullock and Jones Building were “haunched” and “badly spalled”; the ironwork had “buckled.” The frames of the Jackson Brewing Company’s plant, which was being built at the time, were held together by “an insufficient number of bolts,” fell apart and left the plant completely wrecked. The Hall of Justice was entirely ruined, the skeleton of its iron dome dangling horizontally over the wreckage.
A Crack in the Edge of the World Page 27