San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. At 5:12 A.M. on 18 April 1906, an earthquake estimated at 8.3 on today's Richter scale shook a great portion of northern California for forty‐five seconds, setting in motion the nation's largest natural disaster ever. Many San Franciscans found the jolt itself rather benign; some deep‐sleepers in structures built on bedrock never even awoke. With few exceptions, such as collapsed buildings erected on landfill and the toppled City Hall, it was the ensuing fire that made 250,000 people homeless, destroyed 28,000 structures over four square miles, and caused $500 million in property damage. Within hours of the tremor, several isolated fires united in the city's southern districts, then progressed northward and westward. Only a shift in wind and the dynamiting of wood‐framed houses along Van Ness Avenue finally halted the three‐day inferno. San Francisco's official list of deaths totaled 500, though the actual number of disaster‐related fatalities likely reached 3,000.

Immediately following the calamity—as tramps and capitalists stood in the same bread lines—“social leveling” seemed to force intimate contact of San Francisco's heterogeneous population, stirring fears of urban disorder and crime. San Franciscans quickly set out to replicate the city's precrisis social order. To handle the predicted chaos, the San Francisco police, the U.S. Army, and local volunteers closed saloons and shot looters on sight. While distributing earthquake aid, relief workers restored San Francisco's established social hierarchy by offering loans only to those with a high pre‐earthquake status. In their attempt to prove San Francisco's resilience, civic boosters quickly reproduced the city's prefire street configuration and district layout. Yet despite its quick repair, San Francisco declined in mercantile rank as Los Angeles and nearby Oakland built new competitive seaports.

Bibliography

William Bronson , The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned, 1959.
Gladys Hansen and and Emmet Condon , Denial of Disaster, ed. David Fowler, 1989.

James L. Mallery