At 5:12 A.M. On Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the ground beneath San Francisco convulsed. There was a groan of grinding mortar and a thunder of raining brick and stone. Twisting timber shrieked and snapped into splintered kindling. After forty-five seconds, the roiling paused a moment, and then a second shock wave hit, more violent than the first.
From a hundred fractured rooms came cries of shock and pain. Sleepers, hurled from their beds, threw coats over nightclothes, grabbed children and poured into the street. Some yanked frantically on bedroom doors, trapped in shifting frames that no longer fit. Buildings listed drunkenly off their foundations. Wooden cottages collapsed like houses of cards, rows of flats like dominoes. Brick facades peeled off and crashed into the street exposing what looked like a doll's house. Streetcar tracks buckled in serpentine snarls.
South of Market Street, where tracts sat precariously on landfill, the ground liquefied over ancient waterfront and wetlands. The four story Valencia Hotel, a working-class lodging house, sank into its fluid foundation. With only its top story protruding above ground, lodgers on the lower floors were submerged and drowned.
Dozens of small fires burst from toppled chimneys and cracked stove flues. Fire alarms stayed strangely silent. The alarm center on Brenham Place had been destroyed. At on station, fire horses bolted in fear, so firefighters had to tow their engines by hand. When they hooked up their hoses, only droplets trickled out so the firefighters siphoned leaky sewage to spray on the flames.
Steers being herded to the Potrero stockyards were spooked by the shaking and stampeded along Mission Street. To avoid being trampled, bystanders shot the crazed cattle between the eyes.
On Merchant Street, near the federal morgue and laboratory, fish dealer Alex Paladini was unloading the morning's catch when the earthquake disintegrated buildings around him, burying horses, drivers, wagons, and fish under tons of bricks and mortar. The steeds' necks protruded from the debris, their manes caked with dust, tongues lolling. The neighborhood around the morgue was now one giant street of the dead.
The ground shock savaged City Hall. Its regal dome teetered on empty ribs. All around it stretched acres of rubble. Before the day was over, flames devoured municipal records, incinerating all city history before 1906.
Mayor Eugene Schmitz closed saloons, imposed a dusk til dawn curfew and issued an executive order for federal troops to shoot looters on sight. The seat of government was moved from ruined City Hall to the Hall of Justice to the Fairmont Hotel then to a hall in the Western Addition, keeping one step ahead of the flames. The Mayor telephoned Los Angeles, imploring: "For God's sake send food."
Central Emergency Hospital collapsed, killing doctors and nurses. Its patients were moved to the Mechanics' Pavilion where the night before a roller skating tournament. Now it was a war zone, littered with broken bodies and doctors racing about in desperate triage.
As the Palace Hotel writhed and shuddered, beds bucking and chandeliers crashing, the tenor Enrico Caruso, fresh from singing the role of Don Jose in Carmen, was wrenched from his dreams into a nightmare. After throwing on his fur coat, the portly star ran into the street and headed north toward the St. Francis Hotel, where his opera colleagues had been staying. Some say he wept. "Hell of a place!" Caruso cried. "I never come back here." Upon his return to Italy, he kept his promise and never sang in the city again.
In Hayes Valley, a woman tried to cook breakfast on a broken stove and succeeded in igniting the walls of her frame house. The resulting blaze, called the "ham and eggs fire," ate quickly through the wooden Victorian neighborhood, growing into a major conflagration. Crossing Van Ness Avenue, it torched church steeples in its path, burning on to the Civic Center, where blowing cinders lit the roof of the Mechanics' Pavilion. As smoke seeped into the makeshift hospital, doctors again evacuated patients. As afternoon turned to evening, the "ham and eggs fire" roared south and merged with a fire in the Mission district.
A drunken munitions man, John Bermingham, carted explosives into Chinatown to demolish the wreckage and ended up starting sixty fires. As witnesses watched in horror, he lurched around setting charges that blew up buildings with people still trapped inside. Bodies flew fifty feet above the rubble, falling back into the flames below.
Atrocities were rumored - of jewel thieves cutting the fingers and ears from corpses, of bloodthirsty troops bayoneting innocent citizens. As teams of rescuers clawed frantically to free the injured from rubble, some lost a race with the approaching fires. One man, hopelessly pinned down by debris, begged his rescuers to kill him before the flames burned him alive. A gunman stepped from the crowd, gravely confirmed the trapped man's last wishes, drew a pistol, and fired. He then turned himself in to the mayor, who commended his humane act.
And all this after six years of battling bubonic plague in the city. Just when they thought they had control of the Chinatown rat population, which carried bubonic plague fleas, the earthquake hit and the rat population soared and spread throughout the city. It would be three more years before the last case of bubonic plague was seen in San Francisco.The book was a great historical read and depicts how racism, political corruption and greed in city and state government can bind the hands of science and hinder solutions to health and social problems. Its no wonder that San Francisco was thought of as "Sin City" before Las Vegas at a time when Las Vegas was nothing more than a dry desolate desert.
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