The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906: a century ago, the American West's greatest city was nearly destroyed.

* OBJECTIVE

Students should understand

* that San Francisco, then the most important city in the rapidly growing American West, was nearly destroyed by an earthquake and resulting fires in 1906.

* BACKGROUND

The first Europeans to arrive at what now is San Francisco were the Spanish, who in 1776 established Mission Dolores and a fort in an area that later became the Presidio (an area of San Francisco, once a military base, that is now part of the National Park Service). In 1835, an English captain put up the first permanent residence in Yerba Buena Cove. U.S. sailors arrived to claim the town in 1846 and, on January 30, 1847, it was named San Francisco. At the time, it had about 400 people. Then came the boom. In slightly more than half a century, San Francisco's population grew to more than 400,000.

* CRITICAL THINKING

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Why might the death of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan be considered tragic? (Sullivan was killed at the moment he was most needed. Also, the city's neglect of Sullivan's proposed firefighting reforms had made the fire damage much worse than it might have been.)

* ACTIVITIES

UNDERSTANDING PRIMARY SOURCES:

Have students research and give a dramatic presentation of an eyewitness account of the San Francisco earthquake and fires. (There are many. See sfmuseum.org/1906/ew.html for just a few.) Ambitious students may want to draw their own maps.

FINDING SOLUTIONS: Is the area where you live in danger of an earthquake? How would you prepare for one at home? at school? Have students research and give a presentation on the subject.

STANDARDS

SOCIAL STUDIES, GRADES 5-8

* People, places, and environments: How a natural disaster happens suddenly, and what people do in response.

* Time, continuity, and change: How a famous event changed the course of a great American city.

RESOURCES

PRINT

* Wilson, Kate, Earthquake/: San Francisco, i906 (Steck-Vaughn, 1993). Grades 6-12.

* Winchester, Simon, A Crackin the Edge of the World (HarperCollins, 2005). Advanced readers.

WEB SITES

* The U.S. Geological Survey quake.wt.usgs.gov/info/1906

* The Virtual Museum of San Francisco www.sfmuseum.net/1906/ 06.html

As it so often does, disaster struck at one of the most peaceful moments of the day. April 18, 1906, dawned a calm spring Wednesday in San Francisco, California. While most of the city slept, Police Officer Jesse Cook walked his beat in the cool morning air. At the eastern end of Washington Street, near San Francisco Bay, he stopped to talk with a merchant at his vegetable stand.

Suddenly, at 5:12 a.m., there was "a deep and terrible rumbling," as Cook later said. Looking up, he thought he saw the ocean spilling onto the street. "The earth seemed to rise under me," he remembered. "At the same time, [the street] opened up in several places, and water came up out of these cracks.... I saw the top story of the building at the southwest corner of Washington and Davis streets fall and kill [a man]."

Similar scenes took place across the city. Cobblestone streets rolled like a tidal wave. Buildings came crashing down. City Hall, which had taken $6 million and 26 years to build, quickly became a pile of rubble. So too did 95 percent of the city's old brick chimneys. One of them fell into the home of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who later died from his injuries.

Finally, the earth stopped shaking. People who had run out into the streets held their breaths. The great earthquake of 1906 had lasted between 45 and 60 seconds. But for San Francisco, the devastation was just beginning.

"The Greatest City"

San Francisco was still a young city in 1906. But the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad had transformed it into a boomtown. "San Francisco was by now indisputably [without question] the greatest city in the American West," writes historian Simon Winchester.

The city also had many problems. Crime and corruption were everywhere. While the rich lived in palatial homes on San Francisco's hills, the poor were crammed together in Chinatown, the Mission District, and other neighborhoods.

Then there was the San Andreas Fault. A fault is a long, deep break in Earth's crust between two tectonic plates (see Geoskills, p. 22). Geologists believe that earthquakes happen when two or more plates slide past one another along a fault. The San Andreas Fault cuts a slice more than 800 miles long through the coast of California--and right by San Francisco.

There had been earthquakes in San Francisco before. But city officials had not taken the threat seriously enough. Many buildings had been hastily erected without making them earthquake-proof. Also, most of the structures south of downtown, including many in the Mission District, had been built on fill earth. This was simply sand and earth dumped over marshland--and very unstable.

Then, on the morning of April 18, the Northern Pacific Plate and North American Plate shifted off the coast of San Francisco. No one was prepared for the disaster that would follow.

Fire From Everywhere

As soon as the earthquake ended, a new danger took its place: fire. Fire came from everywhere. Gas pipes broke. High-tension electrical lines toppled from utility poles. Hot coals and kerosene spilled onto wooden floors. According to legend, one woman's stove blew up as she was making breakfast. San Franciscans would later call this the Ham and Eggs Fire.

As if that were not bad enough, firefighters found that they had no water pressure from the fire hydrants. The city's water pipes had burst.

Fire Chief Sullivan had argued for years that San Francisco was a tinderbox, a place in danger of easily catching fire. He had begged the city to build a firefighting system using ocean water, and to repair and refill its aging cisterns. No one had done those things.

Now it seemed as if everything that could go wrong did. Fires from different directions connected, turning into huge walls of flames. In some places, firefighters tried to make firebreaks. This meant dynamiting a group of buildings in the path of the fires, in the hope that the flames would die out in the rubble. But the fires were moving too fast, and the firebreaks just added to their fury.

"Impassable With Wreckage"

Starting that morning, tens of thousands of people--now without homes--took to the streets. One survivor described the sight. "The sidewalks, already almost impassable with wreckage, were filled for miles ... with household goods of every known variety." Families carried all their worldly possessions with them. Another survivor remembered "two bicycles with a bedspring and mattress between them on which an invalid woman was carried along."

There were many acts of bravery. Without time to put on his uniform, Brigadier General Frederick Funston dashed up and down the burning streets, taking charge. Soon, the General wired Washington, D.C., requesting tents for the newly homeless.

No one was braver than San Francisco's firefighters. They waged one losing battle after another against the raging flames. Neighborhood residents did the same. Banding together, they used buckets of water, wet towels or drapes, or whatever they could to fight each fire as it approached.

A Fact of Life

For three long days, the fires burned. From the start, they had been concentrated in downtown San Francisco and the working-class area south of Market Street. The fires consumed poor neighborhoods, where wooden houses were pushed together like firewood. They also raced up the streets of Nob Hill, where millionaires, including railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, had built their mansions.

Just in time, soldiers created firebreaks at Van Ness Avenue, which stopped the flames from spreading to the city's Western Addition. Three days after they started, the fires finally burned themselves out.

The stricken city took stock. More than 28,000 buildings had been completely destroyed. At least 500 people had been killed; some estimates have run as high as 3,000. More than 225,000 were left homeless.

Immediately, aid began pouring into San Francisco. In Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and Congress joined forces to send emergency supplies and millions of dollars. Millions more poured in from other countries.

San Francisco rebuilt to become the great city it is today. In 1989, it suffered another major earthquake. While the damage was extensive, it was far less severe than in 1906. Still, the possibility of major earthquakes remains a fact of life in San Francisco (see sidebar). For many San Franciscans, it is simply a price to be paid for living in the beautiful City by the Bay.

WORDS to Know

* boomtown: a city that undergoes quick economic and population growth.

* rubble: a pile of rock fragment.

* cistern: an artificial reservoir filled with water.

* tectonic plate: a section of Earth's crust.

RELATED ARTICLE: Not if, but when.

The earthquake of 1989 was a wakeup call for many San Franciscans. Measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, it killed 63 people, injured 3,500, and left more than 12,000 homeless. Many people now believe the question is not will another earthquake shake the city, but when will it?

Bill Bryant, a senior geologist at the California Geological Survey, is one of the experts keeping track of the situation. A recent study, he says, estimates a 62 percent probability of another earthquake of 6.7 or higher along the San Andreas Fault within the next 30 years. Other nearby faults are also in danger of rupturing.

Yet California has learned how to prepare from past experience, Bryant says. "Earthquakes are kind of nature's lab experiment," he tells JS. "Each earthquake ... has a potential for advancing the scientific understanding." The 1906 earthquake significantly added to knowledge about what really causes an earthquake, Bryant adds. "Before that time, [scientists] weren't really sure what the relationship between faults and earthquakes was. The 1906 quake kind of allowed them to observe a large surface-rupturing earthquake and put the two things together."</p> <pre> Your Turn WORD MATCH 1. boomtown A. without question 2. fault

B. pile of rock fragments 3. indisputable

C. fast-growing city 4. rubble D. deep break in the earth 5. tectonic plate E. section of Earth's crust </pre> <p>ANSWERS

1. C

2. D

3. A

4. B

5. E

THINK ABOUT IT

1. What caused the San Francisco earthquake of 1906? What caused the fires that followed?

2. Are there any lessons from the earthquake that could apply to modern disasters? Explain.

EARTHOUAKE FACTS AND SAFETY TIPS weatherwizkids.com/earthquakel.htm

QUICK QUIZ

* Use a word from this list to correctly complete each sentence.

Beaufort scale, boomtown, cistern, downtown, Fault, fill earth, firebreak, five days, ghost town, Highway, one week, Plate, Railroad, Richter scale, Theodore Roosevelt, sawdust, six days, Dennis Sullivan, William Howard Taft, three days

16. The San Andreas--runs through San Francisco.

17. After the 1849 California Gold Rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad, San Francisco became a--.

18. Many downtown buildings had been erected on unstable ground made from--.

19. The fires set off by San Francisco's April 1906 earthquake burned for--.

20. The city government had long ignored safety improvements urged by Fire Chief --.

Answers

16. Fault

17. boomtown

18. fill earth

19. three days

20. Dennis Sullivan