Spin on the Quake

A curator at the City Museum of San Francisco, Gladys Hansen, spent decades researching the casualities of the 1906 Quake in San Francisco. Our correspondent Jack London makes a memorable description of the quake and fire here.

They held on longest to their trunks, and over these trunks many a strong man broke his heart that night. The hills of San Francisco are steep, and up these hills, mile after mile, were the trunks dragged. Everywhere were trunks with across them lying their exhausted owners, men and women. Before the march of the flames were flung picket lines of soldiers. And a block at a time, as the flames advanced, these pickets retreated. One of their tasks was to keep the trunk-pullers moving. The exhausted creatures, stirred on by the menace of bayonets, would arise and struggle up the steep pavements, pausing from weakness every five or ten feet.

Research for her book, and the documentary, suggests that there was an enormous cover-up: the dead were 3000, perhaps 6000, not 400, and more. Something like 500 alone may have been shot dead by law enforcement- note the picket lines in the quote above. The primary damage was the quake, not the fires, a spin due to a quirk of insurance claims - you can't claim fire damage if your building fell over first. Under orders from city fathers interested in spinning the disaster into momentum for rebuilding, many records of the disaster were hidden or destroyed, many photos, some of the most publicized and famous, were altered heavily to hide the damage, unlike the jaw-dropping kite based aerial photos here. (Be sure to enlarge the image and take advantage of the incredible detail in old-school giant panoramic negatives). The damage estimate was far off: the often reported figure of $300 million was actually "many billions" of 1906 dollars.

My favorite detail from the documentary - building codes were actually relaxed after the quake to stimulate construction, and it took 50 years to toughen them; a house built in 1905 was probably safer than one built in 1950.