America is no stranger to natural disasters. We’ve seen it all: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, earthquakes. Only last month, Florida experienced two hurricanes back-to-back (Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton) and the damage and lives lost from these two disasters combined was devastating.
Whether due to Mother Nature’s temperament or human error, disasters seem to come in packs. In the case of the above-mentioned Hurricane Milton, damage was caused not only by the winds and floods it brought but also by the tornadoes that formed even before the hurricane hit the ground. Looking back in history, this is not something we can blame on climate change or global warming. One of the worst natural disasters in the history of Northern California endured a back-to-back disaster: the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. While there is no doubt that the earthquake itself caused a lot of damage in San Francisco and smaller cities along the coast, reports show most of the damage (nearly eighty percent and some sources state it was closer to ninety-five) happened because of the fires that followed.
The facts of the earthquake are well-documented, and I go into them in the author’s note included in my upcoming Adele Gossling Mysteries book. The earthquake began on April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m. in, ironically, the ocean. But it quickly moved to land and tore up cities along the coast, including San Francisco (though to call it the San Francisco Great Earthquake is misleading, since many smaller cities in the area, including Santa Rosa and San Jose, suffered massive damage). The magnitude of the earthquake has been debated, but most experts put it at 7.9-8.25 which stands today as the biggest quake in the area. The strong shock lasted about 45-60 seconds. While that might not seem like a long time, it was enough to completely incapacitate the entire city. The quake broke gas and power lines, damaged water pipes, and made telegraph lines useless. Houses and buildings of the time were made of wood (and still are, so they easily crumbled with the strong tremors, especially in the downtown area. There were a few buildings that withstood the disaster and survive even today in their more-or-less natural state, including the Flood Building (a majestic-looking office building on Market Street) and St. Mary’s Cathedral.
Photo Credit: Residents looking toward the downtown at the fires breaking out during the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake, 1906: U.S. Geological Survey/Flickr/CC0 1.0 Universal
While the earthquake did its damage to buildings, infrastructure, and pavements, leaving some places with such huge cracks that horses fell through them, many argue the majority of the disaster came not from the tremors but from the multiple fires that broke out in the city almost immediately after the earthquake. Gas lines broke all over the city and ignited fires that were difficult to stop. There’s the famous “Ham and Eggs Fire,” for example, where a housewife in Hayes Valley turned on her gas stove to make breakfast for her family soon after the earthquake. Little did she know the chimney had been damaged by the quake. The stove ignited a fire that spread throughout the downtown area. Before it was finally quenched, it had destroyed some of the city’s most important and iconic buildings, including City Hall. To add insult to injury, water lines were broken so firefighters had trouble getting water out of the pipes to put the fires out. And human error had a hand in it as well. When water was clearly not going to be the answer to putting out the massive flames, the military resorted to dynamiting buildings (in an effort to prevent the fires from spreading), but their lack of experience in this area only made the fires worse.
Photo of San Francisco downtown area after the earthquake and fires had ceased, taken from a camera attached to a kite and suspended some 1,000 feet from the air. The large street going down the center is Market Street. Note how nearly all the buildings on either side are completely destroyed.
Photo Credit: Taken by George R. Lawrence, 28 May 1906, Panoramic photographs, Library of Congress: Grook Da Ogre/Wikimedia Commons/PD US
All told, by the time the fires had subsided (and it would take four days for this to happen), they had claimed three thousand lives across the Bay Area and eighty percent of San Francisco. It took two years for the city to rebuild.
My book, Murder Among The Rubble, features this disaster and focuses on the rebuilding phase just a few weeks after the earthquake (featuring a murder, of course). You can pick up a copy on preorder now at a special price here.
I’ll be talking more about the 1906 San Francisco Great Earthquake, its aftermath, and the effect it had on the lives of the residents in my newsletter as the release date for this book gets closer in December. You won’t want to miss that! If you’re not already signed up for my newsletter, I encourage you to click here and do so. You’ll get lots of free goodies, including my book The Missing Ruby Necklace (not available anywhere else!) if you do.
