The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
Wikimedia CommonsIn less than a minute, the earthquake nearly destroyed the city.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 arrived without warning or time for people to prepare. Most were still asleep when the 7.9-magnitude tremor shifted the grounds beneath them at 5:12 a.m. on April 18. With a tectonic slip along 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault, the shaking was felt from Los Angeles to Oregon.
While other towns near the fault line, such as San Jose, Salinas, and Santa Rosa, endured destruction, none suffered the apocalyptic devastation seen in San Francisco. There, fires started almost as soon as the earthquake itself was over.
The natural disaster hit San Francisco shortly after dawn with a noise described “like the roar of 10,000 lions.” Cable cars across the city stopped in their tracks as critical infrastructure was destroyed. City Hall crumbled into the street while the iconic glass roof of the Palace Hotel shattered into the courtyard below.
Wikimedia CommonsThe fire in the Mission District during the Great San Francisco Earthquake.
The following inferno spread from south of the Market District to Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, and North Beach. More than 500 blocks comprising four square miles in the middle of town were razed to the ground, with the relentless blaze continuing until fortuitous rainfall extinguished it four days later.
While the initial death toll was estimated at 700, later analyses concluded that more than 3,000 people had been killed. Up to 400,000 residents were left destitute and relegated to tent cities in Golden Gate Park, as scavenging opportunists waded through the rubble of homes to steal valuable items from fellow townsfolk.
More than 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed in the earthquake and conflagration, with a total property value loss of $350 million. Photographs taken by the U.S. Army captured the pop-up soup kitchens and discouraged faces of survivors before federal relief shipments of food and clothes and tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid arrived.
Fortunately, most of San Francisco was rebuilt to be earthquake- and fire-resistant, with the whole world arriving to marvel at the results during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Yet the 1906 San Francisco disaster remains the deadliest day in American history caused by an earthquake.
