1906 San Francisco earthquake

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 in the morning on Wednesday, the 18th of April 1906. A resident named John W. Nourse felt the shaking make his house "seem like it would break all to pieces." He looked out and saw a large brick building destroyed in seconds, with fires already visible to his right, in front of him, and to his left. Within days, more than 3,000 people were dead and over 80 percent of the city was in ruins. It remains the deadliest earthquake in the history of the United States. It is also the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history. The questions it raises outlived the rubble. Why did the ground break where it did? Why did flames do more harm than the shaking? Who decided how many had died, and why did leaders play down the quake? And what kind of city rose from the ashes?

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• 2. Fault And Ground

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  The San Andreas Fault stretches about 810 miles through California, from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north. It marks part of the boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate. Motion along it is mostly lateral, with the western Pacific plate sliding northward relative to the eastern one. In 1906 the surface moved by as much as about 20 feet, or 6 metres. Geodetic measurements point to displacements of up to 28 feet, or 8.5 metres.

  No Richter scale existed in 1906, so the quake's size has been reconstructed after the fact. The most widely accepted figure on the modern moment magnitude scale is 7.9, though proposals run from 7.7 to as high as 8.3. The rupture spread both northward and southward for a total of 296 miles. Shaking was felt from Oregon to Los Angeles, and as far inland as central Nevada.

  A strong foreshock arrived about 20 to 25 seconds before the main shock, and the heavy shaking then lasted about 42 seconds. For decades beforehand, northern California had recorded more minor earthquakes than at any other time in the historical record. Researchers once read these as warning signs. They have since found a strong seasonal pattern in them. The favored explanation is heavy seasonal loads of sediment in coastal bays above the faults, left by erosion from hydraulic mining in the later years of the gold rush.

  For years, the epicenter was placed near the town of Olema, in the Point Reyes area of Marin County, based on local measurements of ground displacement. In the 1960s, a seismologist at UC Berkeley argued for an offshore location northwest of the Golden Gate. A tide gauge at the San Francisco Presidio recorded a small local tsunami, about 3 inches in amplitude, which supports an offshore origin. In 2019, researchers used an old photograph and a recorded eyewitness account to refine the hypocenter. They placed it offshore from San Francisco or near San Juan Bautista, and significant uncertainty remains.

  Triangulation surveys taken before and after the quake suggest a rupture about 500 kilometres long. Seismological records support a significantly shorter one. The two can be reconciled if the break traveled faster than S-waves, a behavior called supershear. It has since been recognized in many earthquakes on strike-slip faults.

  Shaking reached XI, rated Extreme, on the Modified Mercalli scale in San Francisco and in northern places such as Santa Rosa. High-intensity shaking ran from Eureka on the North Coast to the Salinas Valley in the south. Andrew Lawson's 1908 report found that intensity tracked the geology underfoot. Sediment-filled valleys shook harder than nearby bedrock, and the strongest shaking struck former bay areas where the soil liquefied. Modern seismic zonation now accounts for these differences.

  Aftershocks were fewer than a shock of this size should have produced, a trait shared with the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. Very few lay along the 1906 rupture itself. They clustered near its ends or on other structures, such as the Hayward Fault. The only aftershock near magnitude 5 in the first days came near Santa Cruz at 14:28 on the 18th of April, at about 4.9. The largest struck at 01:10 on the 23rd of April, west of Eureka, at about 6.7. Another of the same size followed more than three years later, at 22:45 on the 28th of October, near Cape Mendocino.

  Some events were triggered from afar. An earthquake swarm in the Imperial Valley culminated in a quake of about 6.1 at 16:30 on the 18th of April. At 12:31 on the 19th, an event of about 5.0 struck beneath Santa Monica Bay. That second tremor came as the flames in San Francisco entered their second day.

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• 3. Fire

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  Within three days, more than 30 fires set off by ruptured gas mains destroyed approximately 25,000 buildings across 490 city blocks. Estimates hold that at least 80 percent of the total destruction, and possibly over 95 percent, came from the fires rather than the shaking. The cost was an estimated $350 million at the time. The blaze burned for four days and nights.

  The so-called Ham and Eggs fire began on the morning of the 18th at Hayes and Gough Streets, in Hayes Valley. A woman lit her stove to cook breakfast, unaware that her chimney was badly damaged. The fire destroyed a 30-block area, including a college, the Hall of Records, and City Hall.

  Fire chief Dennis T. Sullivan, who would have coordinated the fight, was gravely injured at the first shock. He and his wife were sleeping in the engine house beside the California Hotel on Bush Street when bricks crashed through the roof. He later died of his injuries. The interim chief sent an urgent request to the Presidio for dynamite. Firefighters untrained in its use tried to demolish buildings to create firebreaks, and the dynamited buildings often caught fire.

  Insurance practice made the fires costlier still. Insurers widely covered San Francisco properties against fire but not against earthquake damage. A resident of Boulder Creek, writing five days afterward, noted that companies "will insure against fire, will not insure against earthquakes." Some owners deliberately set fire to damaged buildings. Captain Leonard D. Wildman of the U.S. Army Signal Corps reported that he "was stopped by a fireman who told me that people in that neighborhood were firing their houses...they were told that they would not get their insurance on buildings damaged by the earthquake unless they were damaged by fire".

  The Palace Hotel, built in 1875 and financed largely by Bank of California co-founder William Ralston, burned down and was later rebuilt. Ralston was known as the "man who built San Francisco." In April 1906 the tenor Enrico Caruso was staying in a Palace suite, in town with the Metropolitan Opera Company for performances at the Grand Opera House. The night after he sang in Carmen, a strong jolt woke him. Clutching an autographed photo of President Theodore Roosevelt, he fled the city by boat and then by train, vowing never to return. The company lost all its traveling sets and costumes.

  Alice Eastwood, curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences, is credited with saving the Academy's entire plant type specimen collection. The rest of the largest botanical collection in the western United States was destroyed. Biochemist Benjamin R. Jacobs lost his whole laboratory and every record of his research into the nutrition of everyday foods. The original flag from the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt at Sonoma, stored in a state building in the city, burned as well.

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• 4. Voices And Images

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  Lewis A. Spitzer of San Jose wrote the most immediate account, at midnight on the day of the quake itself. He had spent the previous night at a mineral spring in the mountains and was thrown against the wall at 5:15 while putting a pan of water on the stove. Electric cars had stopped, so he hired a farmer to carry him home by buggy. His house stood with only cracked plaster, but he found San Jose "in ruins" and San Francisco nearly all in flames. His son and family could not be reached. "I have seen many heart rending scenes in my life," he wrote, "but never any such a terrible scene as this. In my opinion it will take fifty years for this State to recover from this awful affair."

  In Santa Rosa, the entire downtown was essentially destroyed. C. A. Duffy of Owensboro, Kentucky, was staying at the St. Rose Hotel and was trapped in the ruins for five hours. He finally made his location known by poking a lath through a hole left by a falling steam pipe. Duffy estimated that about 300 people died in the town's three hotels alone and not less than 500 in the whole town. He said the business section collapsed in about five minutes, and then fire started at each end of town and burned toward the middle. He recalled two arms protruding from the debris, waving frantically before the flames swept over them. "The sight sickened me and I turned away."

  Mathias Forestburg, a former journalist, wrote from Boulder Creek, eighty miles south of San Francisco. His house rocked like a boat, with timbers creaking and everything thrown to the floor. He spent the morning dismantling a cracked chimney balanced on three bricks, which one more aftershock would have brought down. Shaking continued every day and night, business had stopped, and all who could afford to were leaving for the east.

  Mrs. C. C. Baughman of LeMars, Iowa, passed through San Francisco ten days after the quake. A stove stood in front of every house, because residents were not permitted to cook indoors. Market Street had sunk several feet in places, and one point four blocks from the Ferry lay five feet below the sidewalk. Cable car rails were warped and twisted. "The sights of the ruins are awful," she wrote. She and her husband had planned to settle in California but left with "no desire to locate there permanently."

  Willard Worden, a photographer working to establish his career, used a handheld film camera and a four-by-five-inch view camera with glass negatives to record the fire and its aftermath. He also photographed damage at the Stanford University campus. His pictures fed the public's appetite for sensational scenes, but seismologists, architects, and urban planners valued them too. They appeared in the 1908 report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California later collected his gelatin silver prints. This was the first natural disaster of its magnitude documented by photography and motion picture footage. In 2005 the National Film Registry added a newsreel of the event to its list of American films worthy of preservation.

  Worden's best-known subject was the Alban N. Towne mansion on Nob Hill, where only six marble columns and a lintel survived. Seen from the right angle, the empty porch framed the smoldering ruins of City Hall. In 1909 the columns and lintel were moved to Golden Gate Park, where they became Portals of the Past, a monument to the city's grief and endurance.

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• 5. Soldiers And Shelter

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  General Frederick Funston had already decided that federal troops were needed when the interim fire chief's plea for dynamite reached the Presidio. He telephoned a San Francisco police officer to send word of his decision to Mayor Eugene Schmitz. Then he ordered troops from nearby Angel Island into the city. Explosives were ferried across the bay from the California Powder Works, in what is now Hercules.

  Under Major General Adolphus Greely, Commanding Officer of the Pacific Division, over 4,000 federal troops served during the emergency. Soldiers patrolled the streets to discourage looting and guarded the U.S. Mint, the post office, and the county jail. They helped the fire department dynamite buildings in the path of the flames. The Army also took on feeding, sheltering, and clothing tens of thousands of displaced residents. Police officers, firefighters, and soldiers regularly commandeered passing civilians for work details to clear rubble and help in rescues. On the 1st of July 1906, non-military authorities took over relief efforts and the Army withdrew.

  On the 18th of April, after riots among evacuees and looting, Mayor Schmitz ordered a proclamation posted. It said that "The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to kill any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime". Accusations that soldiers themselves looted also surfaced. Retired Captain Edward Ord of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, appointed a special police officer by Schmitz, wrote to his mother on the 20th of April. He called the "Shoot-to-Kill" order troubling and described the "despicable" behavior of certain soldiers of the 22nd Infantry who looted. He made clear that the majority of soldiers served the community well.

  Between 227,000 and 300,000 people were left homeless out of a population of about 410,000. Half of those who evacuated fled across the bay to Oakland and Berkeley. Newspapers described Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, the Panhandle, and the beaches between Ingleside and North Beach as covered with makeshift tents. More than two years later, many of these refugee camps were still operating.

  Relief money passed $5,000,000 in the first days after the news spread. London raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000, and the Parliament of Canada made a special appropriation of $100,000. The United States Congress quickly appropriated 2.5 million dollars for supplies, including food kitchens and many thousands of tents. Those funds could not put families back on their feet, and wealthier residents proved reluctant to pay for rebuilding homes they had not destroyed. All residents could eat daily meals at communal soup kitchens. Citizens as far away as Idaho and Utah sent daily loaves of bread, with the railroads coordinating shipments.

  The Army built 5,610 redwood and fir "relief houses" for 20,000 displaced people. John McLaren designed them, and they were grouped in 11 camps, packed close together. They were painted navy blue, partly to blend in and partly because the military had large quantities of that paint on hand. Each cottage cost about $100 to build, and tenants paid $2 a month toward a full purchase price of $50. The camps peaked at 16,448 residents, but by 1907 most people had moved out. The last official refugee camp closed on the 30th of June 1908. At least 30 cottages survive, including a restored pair in the Presidio and several built into private homes around Bernal Heights. One modest 720-square-foot house sold in 2006 for more than $600,000.

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• 6. Counting And Concealing

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  Early death counts ranged from 375 to over 500, but hundreds of fatalities in Chinatown went ignored and unrecorded. Later reports gave totals from 700 to more than 3,000. Most deaths occurred within San Francisco, and 189 were reported elsewhere in the Bay Area. In 2005, the city's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for a resolution written by novelist James Dalessandro and city historian Gladys Hansen. It recognized 3,000-plus as the official total.

  California Governor George Pardee gave the first public statement, and it avoided the subject entirely. "This is not the first time that San Francisco has been destroyed by fire, I have not the slightest doubt that the City by the Golden Gate will be speedily rebuilt, and will, almost before we know it, resume her former great activity". The earthquake is not even mentioned. Political and business leaders feared losing the outside investment the city badly needed, and fatality and monetary damage estimates were manipulated. Property losses have been put at more than $400 million in 1906 dollars.

  In 1913, John C. Branner, who had begun studying the San Andreas Fault in 1891, complained that the federal government had not carried out the serious studies the West Coast needed. Public discussion was being stifled, he said, by fear that acknowledging earthquakes would drive away investors. Geologists were told not to gather information about the 1906 quake, and certainly not to publish it. Some people denied that it had happened at all. Branner wrote: "The only way we know of to deal successfully with any natural phenomenon is to get acquainted with it, to find out all we can about it, and thus to meet it on its own grounds. That is the way mankind has succeeded thus far, and it is safe to conclude that it is the only way it will ever succeed."

  H. G. Wells had just arrived in New York on his first visit to America when the news came. What struck him was that the quake "does not seem to have affected any one with a sense of final destruction, with any foreboding of irreparable disaster." One man he met was glad that Chinatown would be cleared out for good. Another worried chiefly about Millet's painting Man with a Hoe.

  The psychologist William James was teaching at Stanford and traveled into San Francisco to see the aftermath firsthand. He was most impressed by the survivors' positive attitude and by how fast they improvised services and created order out of chaos. That impression became the chapter "On some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" in his book Memories and Studies. Eleven days after the quake, the New York Highlanders, soon to be the Yankees, played the Philadelphia Athletics in a rare Sunday baseball game to raise money for survivors. New York did not allow regular Sunday baseball until 1919.

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• 7. Insurance And Panic

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  Insurers faced claims of $250 million and paid out between $235 million and $265 million, often for fire damage only. At least 137 insurance companies were directly involved, with another 17 acting as reinsurers. Twenty companies went bankrupt. Lloyd's of London reports paying all claims in full, more than $50 million, thanks to the leadership of Cuthbert Heath. Insurers in Hartford, Connecticut, report paying every claim in full as well. The Hartford Fire Insurance Company paid over $11 million, and Aetna Insurance Company almost $3 million.

  Those payments rippled through the international financial system. Gold moved from European insurers to policyholders in San Francisco, which pushed interest rates up. Loans became scarce, and the squeeze ended in the Knickerbocker Trust Company crisis of October 1907, which led to the Panic of 1907.

  Reinsurers pressed for a legally airtight way to exclude earthquake hazard from fire insurance contracts, hoping for one uniform rule for fires that earthquakes caused. Until 1910, a few countries, especially in Europe, answered the call. In the United States the public was traumatized and fiercely opposed the idea. In the second half of 1909, the California State Legislature enacted the California Standard Form of Fire Insurance Policy, which contained no earthquake clause. Insurers would therefore have to pay again if another earthquake was followed by fire. Other earthquake-prone countries followed California's example.

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• 8. Rebuilding And Remembering

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  Rebuilding money was frozen at first, because virtually all the major banks had burned and their fire-proof vaults needed seven to ten days to cool. The Bank of Italy, now Bank of America, had evacuated its funds and could provide liquidity. Its president chartered and financed two ships to bring back lumber from mills in Washington and Oregon. That cargo supplied the first building materials.

  Daniel Burnham, a famed urban planner, offered an ambitious vision. It called for Haussmann-style avenues, arterial thoroughfares radiating across the city, and a massive civic center of classical buildings. It also called for what would have been the largest urban park in the world, running from Twin Peaks to Lake Merced. Real estate investors and landowners opposed it, partly because the city would have had to buy so much land. The plan was dismissed. Yet the original street grid returned alongside many of Burnham's ideas: a neoclassical civic center, wider streets, a subway under Market Street, and Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.

  City leaders also tried to move Chinatown to the edge of the county, but its Chinese occupants prevailed. Chinatown was rebuilt in the newer Western form that exists today. The loss of City Hall and the Hall of Records let thousands of Chinese immigrants claim residency and citizenship, creating a backdoor around the Chinese Exclusion Act. They could then bring relatives from China.

  On Nob Hill, the James C. Flood Mansion was the only mansion to survive the quake and the dynamiting. The wealthy looked west, to cheaper land with better views, and Pacific Heights developed as a result. A 2017 study found that burned blocks gained nonresidential land use relative to unburned blocks by 1931. Single-family houses accounted for most of the lost residential share, so large shocks can permanently reshape urban settings.

  The quake also changed medicine in the city. Before 1906, the faculty of the University of California's San Francisco school cared for patients at the City-County Hospital and had no hospital of its own. After the disaster, more than 40,000 people were relocated to a tent city in Golden Gate Park and treated by faculty of the Affiliated Colleges. In April 1907, one building was renovated for outpatient care with 75 beds. That created a need for nursing students, so the UC Training School for Nurses opened.

  Before the disaster, San Francisco was the ninth-largest city in the United States and the largest on the West Coast. It was the busiest port on the coast and the "gateway to the Pacific." Though it rebuilt quickly, trade, industry, and population growth drifted south to Los Angeles, which became the West's largest urban area in the 20th century. Lawson's 1908 report had shown that the same San Andreas Fault ran close to Los Angeles too. Many of the city's leading poets and writers retreated to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where they established the arts colony reputation that continues today.

  Reconstruction was largely complete by 1915, in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which celebrated the city's "rise from the ashes." Since 1915, the city has marked the disaster each year by gathering survivors at Lotta's Fountain, a meeting point where people had searched for loved ones during the disaster. Eleven survivors attended the centennial commemorations in 2006. Irma Mae Weule, born in 1899, was the oldest at her death in August 2008, aged 109. Herbert Hamrol, born in 1903, died in 2009 at 106. William Del Monte, born in 1906, died in 2016-11 days shy of his 110th birthday. He was thought to be the last survivor.

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