tinyurl.com/9qe7h -> alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/November_2005/Fault_lines_of_1906.asp
Fault lines of 1906 There's new evidence that San Francisco's political civil war caused a human-made catastrphe as damaging as the earthquake itself. By Kevin Starr THE KATRINA CATASTROPHE has reprised what has fortunately been an infrequent event in our national history: the destruction of an Americ an city by natural disaster. Such destruction happened to Johnstown, Pen n-sylvania, in 1889 by flood; In April 1906, through earthquake and fire, it happene d in spades to San Francisco. At 5:12 on the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the Pacific and the North American plates suddenly lurched past each other, moving as much a s 21 feet along the 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault. Shock waves sped across the terrain at 7,000 miles per hour. The first shock wave hit Sa n Francisco with a magnitude of 77 to 79, according to later estimates , and shook the city in two phases for 45 seconds. Within the hour, ther e would be 17 serious aftershocks. City Hall and numerous other unreinfo rced masonry buildings, together with many crowded tenements south of Ma rket Street, collapsed instantly. Facades fell from homes, revealing the furniture within. Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan was pinned beneath debris and scalded by escaping steam in his home on Bush Street, and died four days later. Innumerable water mains were broken, impeding fire fighting on the first day of the disaster. Then came a second wave of fires, originating most likely from an overturned cookin g stove, which compounded the growing conflagration. Regular Army troops under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Funston assumed contro l of the city, despite the lack of any clear legal mandate to do so. In anticipation of the centenary of the destruction of San Francisco, thr ee noted writers have re-examined the San Francisco catastrophe: Philip Fradkin, who shared a Pulitzer Prize while on the staff of the Los Angel es Times; former New York City firefighter Dennis Smith, an acknowledged expert in firefighting techniques and catastrophe management; and Simon Winchester, an Oxford-trained geologist, biographer, and highly respect ed cultural critic. Fradkin and Smith offer disturbing revisionist inves tigations as to the reality of San Franciscos response to earth-quake an d fire, while Winchester gives persuasive evidence that an equally power ful earthquake is due to hit the Bay Area by the middle of this century. What followed in the three days after the earthquake has, until the publi cation of these studies, remained obscure in detail and highly mythologi zed. Was it Mayor Eugene Schm itz, or did he merely bend to the inevitable? Was it necessary to dynamite so many downtown buildings to halt the fire? The official figure always hovered around the mid-300s, yet the photographs of the city in the aftermath of the two great fires that followed the earthquake evoke images of the bombed-out cities of Berlin, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in th eir total devastation. In 1989 Cameron & Company published a pioneering study, Denial of Disaster, by San Francisco city archivist Gladys Hansen and retired fire chief Emmet Condon, that through a meticulous examinat ion of primary documents upped the casualty figure to something surpassi ng 3,000. That figure had been squelched and kept secret by an establish ment eager to rebuild the city and that wanted to disconnect it from its reputation as a dangerous place. Did the denial of these casualty figur es suggest other denials as well? Former firefighter Dennis Smith sees the second-greatest catastrophe, aft er the earthquake itself, as the loss of Chief Dennis Sullivan. Had Sull ivan survived, Smith argues, San Francisco would have confronted the fir es (some 60 in all) under the unified and highly competent command of it s first-rate fire chief. As it was, the regular Army and the National Gu ard assumed responsibility for the fire fighting, with disastrous result s As the grandson of a San Francisco fireman on active duty at the time , I, along with so many others, was more than willing to believe that th e two great fires destroyed the northeastern quadrant of the city despit e the heroic efforts of the fire department. As Smith and Fradki n clearly demonstrate, San Francisco was literally burnt to the ground t hrough ineptitude. First of all, the fire department was almost totally neutralized by burst water mains, although the Navyunder the steady comm and of Lieutenant Frederick Freeman, the true firefighting hero of the t hree-day ordealdid manage to lay hoses inland from the Embarcadero. When fire broke out, the worst possible decision was made: to fight fire with fire, to dynamite buildings to create a firebreak or, failing that, to create counter fires that would beat back the advancing holocaust. S mith places primary responsibility for this dynamiting on General Funsto n, who had no background whatsoever in fire fighting but who, in the imm ediate aftermath of the earthquake, had assumed de facto control of the city. He ordered regular troops with fixed bayonets into the city, despi te the fact that only the president of the United States was authorized to do so, and only under precisely defined circumstances. For two days, the Army and a reluctant but bullied fire department seemed determined to destroy San Francisco. Dynamited buildings merely provide d fuel for the fire to advance. The black powder used to level many buil dings actually turned them into Roman candles. Still, the more this tech nique failed, the more it was employed. The Army even used artillery to level certain buildings. Worse, one of the gentlemen in charge of the dy na-miting and artillery appeared to be heavily under the influence of al cohol as he banged away at buildings that otherwise could have been save d The photographs of the devastated city that we all know so well docum ent not a fire out of control, but two fires that were systematically fe d for two days by incendiary dynamiting or the laying down of convenient channels across which the firestorms could advance. The mayor authorized it bu t lost control of the process as soon as it began. Authority to dynamite dispersed itself through Army and militia units, fire battalions, and e ven civilian volunteers who fell into a kind of frenzyas if they were tr ying to destroy their city, not save it. Fortunately, the Navy never bou ght into the strategy and saved the Embarcadero. Certain residents of Ru ssian Hill, risking being shot by soldiers for not abandoning their prop erties, never bought into it and saved their houses. Although Funston sent his troops into the city from the Presidio, it was Mayor Schmitz who issued the absolutely horrific order that any and all looters would be shot on sight, despite the fact that there was no evide nce whatsoever of wholesale looting, or even a looting problem, in the h ours following the earthquake. Fradkin writes that many of Schmitzs advi sors were initially shocked by the order, which likely resulted from Sch mitzs distrust of certain sectors of the populationminorities and visibl y unassimilated immigrants in particularalthough one trigger-happy speci al deputy did shoot an oligarch. Fradkin puts the total number shot at o nly around 15 and suggests the order sprang from the city establishments deep sense of social anxiety. That same anxiety, he says, motivated the untrue but widely heard accounts of human ghouls roaming the city bitin g earlobes to secure earrings from corpses or biting off fingers to secu re rings. Dennis Smith claims a higher number of people were shot but agrees that f or three days San Francisco came under the control of soldiers and Natio nal Guardsmen, many of them drunk or themselves looters, together with e qually hostile specially sworn-in deputies. The deputies turned the city into an unconstitutional nightmare for ordinary citizens trying to defe nd their property from the flames or retrieve belongings from the ruins or smoldering ashes of their houses. Funston repeatedly pointed out that the mayor, not he, was in charge of the city, and that he was only making the Army available as a supplementary force to assist the police...
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