It was the morning of April 18, 1906, one hundred years ago. On the night before, the
legendary tenor Enrico Caruso had
turned in a great performance in a
production of Carmen at the Mission Opera House in San Francisco. Afterwards, Caruso returned to his room at the Palace Hotel and went to bed
in a good mood. However, his
contentment was not
to last long. In
his own words:
" . . . I wake up about 5 o'clock, feeling my bed rocking as though I am in a ship on the ocean . . . I get up and go to the window, raise the shade and look out. And what I see makes me
tremble with fear. I see the buildings
toppling over, big pieces of
masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children."
We now know a lot about the event that
roused Caruso from his
slumber. San Francisco had been built next to the
San Andreas Fault, the boundary between two of the great
tectonic plates that
comprise the earth's
crust. At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, a 477-kilometer-long
segment of that fault suddenly
ruptured. The movement was
sideways, with the Pacific plate on the west
shifting northward from two to eight meters relative to the North American plate on the east. The
resulting earthquake, with its
epicenter just three kilometers west of the city,
lasted nearly a minute, had a
magnitude of about 7.8, killed roughly 3000 people,
left 225,000 of San Francisco's 400,000 residents homeless, destroyed 28,000 buildings, and did 400 million dollars in
property damage -- and those were
1906 dollars.
Much of the damage was done not directly by the earthquake, but by the
three-day-long fire that
consumed much of San Francisco. The
Fire Department was nearly helpless: streets were blocked,
water lines were broken and useless, and the Fire Chief was among the
dead. Many buildings that had
withstood the quake were
lost to the fire.
The 1906 quake
relieved much of the stress that had
built up along faults in the area, and there were no more major earthquakes until
a magnitude 7.0 quake in 1989, but activity may be
picking up again.
A repeat of the 1906 quake may not occur for another hundred years, but there are many faults in the area, most related to the
San Andreas system. The
probability of a big quake in the next thirty years, from one or more of those faults, is
thought to be around 67%.
The
timing of earthquakes
is unpredictable, although the dangerous
places are well known. There are ways to provide
a few seconds' warning to most people who are in danger, and there is much that can be done to make buildings
quake resistant and
fireproof. If you live in
a danger zone, the
100th anniversary of the destruction of San Francisco is a good time to think about
what can be done.
For more information:
A summary of the earthquake by the
U. S. Geological SurveyA computer
simulation of how shaking spread from the fault to San Francisco and nearby areas
Eyewitness accounts (stories told by people who were there), including Caruso's complete description
The
Wikipedia article on the earthquake
A broadcast by
PBS, the Public Broadcasting System of the United States, with a transcript, so you can read and listen
Lots of
pictures of the damage
A list of
links related to the earthquake
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