The charm and loveliness of today’s San Francisco derives mostly from its setting and its climate. Its architecture is modest at best, its planning less worthy than it might have been. Hence the regret over the speed with which the city was re-created after 1906, and the fact that it was re-created so very much in its own earlier image. Maybe Burnham’s plan was not ideal, or without its shortcomings; but it did offer the city a chance for civic greatness, and more than a few today lament that this chance—which was offered, uniquely, by the tragedy—was so swiftly and thoughtlessly passed up.
GETTING SAFELY OUT OF DODGE
Unlovely though so many of San Francisco’s replacement buildings may have been, the more substantial of them were at least designed and built in ways that made them less vulnerable to the kind of ruin that was suffered by so many of their predecessors. Architects and contractors learned a lot from 1906 about the way that rigid buildings behave when the earth below goes insane. The new commercial buildings of the city’s downtown—and of other cities around the world, for the implications of San Francisco were global, in all kinds of senses—were made stronger and more resilient as a result—better able to keep standing when the world’s foundations were shaking deep below. Building science is a discipline that advanced hugely in the wake of the disaster: The use of reinforced concrete supports, steel skeletons, fire-protection systems all rapidly eclipsed the gimcrack building practices of before; a host of other structural reforms were implemented and new building codes were written and rigorously enforced, often with great dispatch. And the city has not suffered a disastrous fire since.
There has, however, been another earthquake, as inevitably there was bound to be. This came in 1989, when a section of a small fault that runs parallel to the San Andreas ruptured near a hitherto-unknown Santa Cruz mountain called Loma Prieta and sent powerful shock waves to San Francisco, Oakland, and beyond, as well as to all the smaller towns close to the epicenter. Officially—because modern earthquakes are always timed in Greenwich Time—it took place on October 18; in local terms it struck the day before, Tuesday, October 17, at four minutes past five in the afternoon.
It was not as strong as the 1906 event—it is believed to have had a moment magnitude* of 6.9, compared to around 7.9 (or 8.3, depending on the science of the day) of the earlier event. Nor was there nearly as much ground displacement. The twenty-one feet of earth movement that was seen in Olema in 1906 was matched nowhere in this later quake: A displacement of only about five feet was recorded, at a spot some twenty-five miles south of the 1906 epicenter.
The damage, however, was quite phenomenal: 63 people died, nearly 4,000 were injured, and the cost of all the destroyed buildings and collapsed roadways and bridges was estimated at some $6 billion, a record for a natural disaster at the time. And yet—the improvements in building techniques did save the greater part of the cities that were shaken. Virtually none of the structures in the city center of San Francisco was badly damaged—a friend of mine staying in a hotel at the corner of Sansome and California Streets was shaken, but he was able to stay in his room watching coverage on television, and his room-service order was completed once a small fire in the kitchen had been put out, with only a trivial delay.
Generally speaking, only those structures that had not been made sufficiently strong and flexible suffered; and only those parts of the city that were on freshly made, reclaimed land saw their building subside, their gas lines break, and their water pipes rupture. San Francisco’s Marina District, with its pretty houses hastily and greedily thrown up on land so unstable that it pulped thixotropically the moment it was shaken (just as the notorious “made-ground” areas of landfill liquefied in 1906), was particularly hard-hit.* The great San Francisco Bay Bridge—over which half a million commuters pass each day—was broken by the shuddering; and an entire section of double-decker roadway in Oakland pancaked down upon itself, flattening all the cars that at that moment were passing on the lower roadway.
The victims in all three of these particular tragedies died or were hurt because builders had not fully learned the lessons of 1906. Elsewhere in the city, and in Oakland and most parts of Santa Cruz—which was very badly damaged—builders and architects seemed to have absorbed the realities, and the structures they had created were tempered well enough to withstand the shaking. In general, they survived.
The most worrisome aspect of the 1989 earthquake goes beyond the imperfect nature of Northern California’s construction industry. The most troublesome reality seems not to have sunk in fully: The Loma Prieta Earthquake was not a result of a rupture along the San Andreas Fault.
The physical characteristics of the 1989 rupture, which have been measured and examined by geophysicists ever since, turn out to be very different indeed from the signature patterns of the San Andreas. And so the comforting thought that the 1989 event might have been the big fault suddenly blowing off steam, suddenly relieving itself a little of the pressure that must have been building up since it was last relieved by the dramas of 1906, has proved ill founded. There is, sad to say, no such comfort available.
The San Andreas Fault is still sitting above (or is caused by, or is the superficial manifestation of) two tectonic plates that have been moving relative to each other at a fairly constant rate of (in places) as much as an inch and a half a year. If the assumption about Loma Prieta is correct, then the last time the San Andreas Fault moved in Northern California was not in 1989 but in fact a very long time ago, back in 1906—which means that, with the steady annual movement of its foundations, the two plates are now nearly 150 inches, more than 12 feet, out of kilter. This means that an unimaginably enormous amount of kinetic energy is currently stored in the rocks of the Bay Area; one day, and probably very soon, this energy will all be relieved, without warning.
The estimates made by the scientific community that works with this assumption make for deeply disturbing reading. They begin with the stark reality that there were seven major earthquakes along the entire length of the San Andreas Fault in the recorded years before 1906, and there have been only five such earthquakes since, and not one of those has been in Northern California. In 2003, working from this assumption, the U.S. Geological Survey—not a body known for making outlandish claims—issued a formal forecast: Sometime before the year 2032, along one of the seven fault systems that belong to the San Andreas cluster and that spear their way through the Bay Area, there is now a machine-computed probability of 62 percent that an earthquake with a moment magnitude of 6.7 or greater will strike. There will be damage and casualties on an impressive scale.
It is not a question of whether a big earthquake will occur, nor even a question of precisely where it will hit. There will be a quake, it will be considerable, it will be somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco, it will more than likely affect the San Andreas Fault or one of its cadet branches—and it will take place, most probably, before 2032. The only true unknown is the precise year, month, day, and time.
Which is why now all the communities in and around San Francisco—as well as agencies like the American Red Cross—have published big, fat, and very comprehensive manuals telling all who are authorized to know what their duties and responsibilities are in the event of the most statistically likely major disaster that is anticipated in the region—and that is a very, very large earthquake.
The city of San Francisco has drawn up detailed response plans for dealing with many possible scenarios: various earthquakes of various magnitudes, and with the involvement of various faults, all taking place at various times of day or night or season. The two faults that, if ruptured, will inevitably do damage to the city are the San Andreas—which runs from offshore at Daly City to a point two miles off the Golden Gate Bridge—and the Hayward, which courses up through the mountains to the east of Oakland and Berkeley. The response plan’s best estimates for a modern rerun of the 1906 earthquake, involving the San Andreas, hold that some $15.3 billion in damage would be done to the city’s buildin
gs (nearly 30 percent of them would be wrecked) and some $24.7 billion in direct economic damage would result. Some 30,000 people would be dislocated. Bridges, tunnels, rail links, communications would be injured—though perhaps not disrupted as comprehensively as in the 1906 event.
There may well also be extensive damage to entities of kinds that did not exist in 1906—to oil terminals, to centers for advanced biological research, to laboratories that study genetic engineering and nuclear weaponry (much exotic research of this nature continues at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in the hills above the East Bay, for example). There are public plans for dealing with very obvious challenges to the system, and there are secret plans for dealing with those aspects of society that already lurk in the shadows. And the various cities and counties that have jurisdiction in the region, and over the lives of many millions of people, have all agreed to work in concert if and when a major catastrophe engulfs any one of them.
THE HOLIEST OF GRAILS, sought essentially by all who perform research on the deep mysteries of the earth, is the ability to predict with some accuracy where and when an event will strike. But no one, despite claims that occasionally excite the newspapers, has yet succeeded in making such a forecast. Thus far there seems, in short, no measurable certainty that earthquake prediction is anything more than a long-sought chimera.
All manner of possible early-warning indicators are being examined—from the behavior of birds and snakes to the release of gases deep in the earth, to changes in chemical mixes of groundwaters and to the appearance on seismic records of small, machine-gun-rapid microearthquakes, looking and sounding like the rivets ripping from a ship’s stressed hull. Such events, when examined in retrospect, do indeed all seem to be the precursors of major seismic events. But where will the earthquake of which these might be the auguries actually strike? And when? And how big will it be? So far such questions are utterly impossible to answer, and there is no real possibility of anyone, anywhere, being so bold as to try to warn anyone on the basis of what is and can currently be known.
Would they even dare, considering just what is at stake? Would a member of the staff at the U.S. Geological Survey, or at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, or at one of the numberless agencies and university departments whose business it is to analyze and decode some of the ceaseless flow of puzzling data from the earth, ever formally dare to ask the elected or appointed chieftains of any city to shut it down, evacuate, take to the hills? And then to shoulder the blame and anger and unimaginable cost for having predicted incorrectly? Earth’s immeasurable capacity to surprise permits the earth, and only the earth, to order up the when and the where of its great interruptions.* Humankind has merely the ability to prepare for them and to respond to them as best it can; and then once more, when the dust has settled, to go back to the records and attempt to work out why.
And then there is, ever present, the hubris—which is surely humankind’s greatest failing when it comes to its dealings with the world. The plans so carefully laid by all the administrators and all the seers can help, of course; but they can be rendered quite worthless if, for reasons born of pride or insouciance or both, the inhabitants forget, ignore or otherwise calmly assume that there is no danger, or that the risk is too small when balanced against the comforting notions of hedonism, beauty, and pleasure with which Northern California, so earthquake prone, is peculiarly endowed.
No greater monument to hubris can be found than in a pretty little town forty miles south of San Francisco, where people have lately made untold millions from their work on designing computers and the vitals that make them work. The town is called Portola Valley, and it was formally created in 1964 in a fold in the green and pleasant coast hill ranges that keep the Pacific fogs at bay. Some 4,500 people now live there, in circumstances of what appears to be unalloyed delight. The weather is warm, the fields are green, the trees are noble. There are pleasant little shops selling exquisite and costly goods; Volvos hum quietly along winding country roads; there are bicycle trails and horse paths and golden retrievers, and when runners come out in the evening cool, all of them seem good-looking and tanned with that peculiarly honey-colored skin that will seem so well suited to a Brioni evening at the quiet cocktail parties held later underneath the redwood glades and the star-filled skies.
But all is in fact nowhere near so well as it looks. The town of Portola Valley, it turns out, has been built exactly astride two of the most active traces of the San Andreas Fault. It is a deeply dangerous place, liable to be destroyed at any moment. Much of the community is quite uninsurable, and many of its houses and offices deserve to be evacuated and abandoned.
For the last twenty years geologists—fascinated by the hubris that they seem to encounter more than most, and shaking their heads at humankind’s insistent folly in living in places where they shouldn’t—have been arriving on Portola Valley’s elegant doorsteps, making risk analyses and recommendations, some of them called for, some not, and all, in essence, telling the townsfolk they are errant blockheads for remaining where they are. One report says the town hall must be moved. Another suggests the school be shifted. The firehouse has to be somewhere else. The water lines, the electricity cables, the sewers—all are at risk from this trace or that trench or that area of expected liquefaction. But as to where each and all should go—a hundred yards this way or that, a mile away, ten miles away—no one ever agrees.
Certainly everyone purports to care. All of the various reports are read, digested, and discussed, and town meeting are staged and PowerPoint presentations are made—quite possibly by the very same scientists whose millions permitting them to live in so pleasing a place were made from inventing PowerPoint and the machines on which the presentations are shown in the first place.
But then the reports are quietly shelved, and another bottle of sauvignon blanc is uncorked, and Portola Valley’s well-contented and outwardly happy residents settle down once more to watch the stars come out, and to reflect perhaps on how splendidly American is their way of life. It is a way of life quite unrivaled in its quality anywhere in the world, and certainly is in no way like the lives of those countless thousands in more obviously earthquake-prone places like Bam or Agadir or Tangshan or Banda Aceh—or even, for heaven’s sake, like the lives of those who had perforce to go off to live in the great tent cities of San Francisco almost a hundred years before.
EPILOGUE
Perspective: Ice and Fire
Fell Giesar roar’d, and struggling shook the ground;
Pour’d from red nostrils, with her scalding breath,
A boiling deluge o’er the blasted heath;
And, wide in the air, in misty volumes hurl’d
Contagious atoms o’er the alarmed world.
ERASMUS DARWIN, The Botanic Garden, 1791
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF MAY 2004, AND I HAD FINISHED MY spring term of teaching in San Francisco. I packed up—the paltry amount of luggage I had brought with me from Massachusetts somehow having expanded alarmingly—then pointed my car northward to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. From there—no northbound toll, I was pleased to see—I drove briskly off homeward, though somewhat indirectly, since I was adding an extra 4,000 miles going by way of Alaska.
I had long cherished an ambition to drive through early-melting snowfields along the entire length of the Alaska Highway. But now there was more than a little geological resonance to making such a journey—not least because two of America’s largest-ever earthquakes occurred in the state in 1964 and in 2002, with the latter taking place on a fault system that has provable links with the San Andreas. The connection between the events of San Francisco and Alaska serves as a reminder—in just the way the Gaia theory likes to suppose—that everything that happens in the natural world is connected in one enormous and living global system.
Everyone who is old enough and who was there remembers every last detail of the first, the great Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 that ruined Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska. No
t all who experienced it chose to stay. When I was on the San Andreas Fault, investigating a site south of Mendocino close to where the pygmy redwood trees grow, I went flying with an Alaskan, a pilot who told me he had lived through it. He had fled but was still disturbed, still undergoing a prolonged period of therapy, and still terrified by the sudden onset of anything unexpected.
His memory is vivid and indelible. He remembers being parked by the side of the road in his parents’ Ford station wagon, maybe five miles south of the city. He recalls, as though it were yesterday, being thrown out of the car onto the road, and then holding on to the asphalt with his fingers for what seemed to him like five full minutes while the road bucked and kicked like a bronco beneath him, never giving up, roaring with the sound of a typhoon. Today, forty years later, he is terrified by any sudden noise, and he feels sick crossing bridges and standing beside tall buildings, anything that looks as though it might be vulnerable to an almighty quake. Only when he is aloft, far from the danger that the earth can bring, does he feel perfectly safe.
The Prince William Sound Earthquake of March 27, 1964, as the Anchorage quake is officially known, remains the second largest ever recorded in the world, with a moment magnitude of between 8.9 and 9.3—far more powerful than San Francisco’s. It was only marginally less gigantic than the 1960 earthquake in Chile, which holds the record for all modern observed events: This had a magnitude of 9.5, killed 2,000 people, and left 2 million homeless. It was slightly stronger than the Sumatran submarine quake of 2004, which killed more than 275,000 with its terrible tsunamis.
A Crack in the Edge of the World Page 35