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by Charles River (Author)
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the disasters made by survivors, firefighters, police officers, and more *Includes bibliographies for further reading *Includes a table of contents On April 18, 1906, most of the residents of the city of San Francisco were sound asleep when the ground started to shake around 5:15 a.m., but what started as fairly soft tremors turned into a violent shaking in all directions. The roar of the earthquake unquestionably woke up residents, at least those fortunate enough not to be immediately swallowed by the cracks opening up in the ground. The earthquake lasted about a minute, but it had enough destructive force to divert the course of entire rivers and level much of the 9th largest city in America at the time. Unfortunately for San Franciscans, the worst was yet to come. During the earthquake, the city's gas mains and water mains were ruptured, which had the effects of starting a number of fires and preventing the residents from being equipped to fight them. Without water to truly fight the blaze, the city's officials actually resorted to demolishing buildings in hopes of containing the fire, and witnesses reported seeing San Franciscans trapped in the burning buildings being shot by authorities instead of letting them burn alive. The fires lasted three days, and by the time they were done, 80% of the city was in ruins, about 60% of the residents were homeless, and an estimated 3,000-6,000 were dead. In fact, the fires were so devastating that contemporary San Franciscans called the disaster "The Fire." Although the resulting fires may have done the most damage, the widespread destruction made clear to city leaders that the new buildings would need better safety codes and protection against subsequent earthquakes. The city reinforced new buildings against earthquakes and fixed older surviving buildings to better deal with future earthquakes, and the city also created the Auxiliary Water Supply System to prevent a repeat of the 1906 disaster. On October 17, 1989, millions of Americans tuning in to watch the Oakland Athletics face the San Francisco Giants in the World Series watched the cameras suddenly start to shake violently for several seconds. The national broadcast had just caught an earthquake registering a 6.9 on the Richter scale striking the Bay Area, and by the time the earthquake and the resulting fires were over and dealt with, over 60 people were dead, making it San Francisco's deadliest earthquake since the 1906 earthquake and fire. The damage and devastation across the Bay Area was widespread, despite the precautions and changes that the region had made in the wake of the 1906 calamity. After that disaster, San Francisco began the process of reinforcing new buildings and seismic retrofitting of old ones to help structures brace for earthquakes, but even in the 1980s they were still more concerned about potential fires resulting from an earthquake. Furthermore, after the earthquake in 1906, San Francisco created an Auxiliary Water Supply System that could distribute water to any section of the city, and the city built it with stringent codes in the event of an earthquake. In fact, just a few years before 1989, San Francisco created a Portable Water Supply System and upgraded the fire departments. San Francisco's water supply systems worked perfectly, quickly allowing firefighters to put out a fire in the Marina District before it spread, but this time the biggest problem was "liquefaction," in which saturated soil literally melted away as it was unable to hold any more liquid. The shaking of the earthquake then created cracks in the liquefied soil, and attempts to protect buildings from the violent movements could not safeguard them from the land melting away from under it. The most noteworthy damage occurred to several sections of highways in the Bay Area that did not hold up during the earthquake.
