Nature not entirely at fault

Amid the recent flurry of quakes up and down the West Coast, it is strangely soothing to read Philip L. Fradkin’s tense and terror-filled saga of the San Francisco earthquake of ’06 -- “the Big One that lurks in the back of the American mind” -- and not only because San Francisco is, after all, still here. Even more reassuring is the author’s insistence that “San Franciscans, not the inanimate forces of nature, were primarily responsible for the extensive chaos, damage, injuries and deaths in the great earthquake and firestorms of 1906.”

Fradkin, a former reporter for The Times, offers “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906” as the final volume in a trilogy that also includes “Magnitude 8: Earthquakes and Life Along the San Andreas Fault” and “Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay.” But according to Fradkin, it was fire rather than quake that resulted in what he calls America’s “greatest urban catastrophe,” not excluding the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

Tremors were familiar enough to the Forty-Niners who settled in California, but Fradkin argues that they did not pay enough attention to fire. On six separate occasions during the Gold Rush, San Francisco was ravaged by fire, and when water ran out, firefighters were reduced to blowing up buildings in the path of the flames. But the boom-and-bust ethos of the age prompted the citizenry to regard a fire as nothing more than an opportunity to build an even bigger and better city. “Nil Desperandum” (“Never despair”) was the slogan that one optimistic landowner carved on the facade of his house after rebuilding for the fourth or fifth time.

What they failed to understand was the special ferocity of fire in the confined spaces of a city, the so-called synergistic phenomenon of extreme burning, as fire historian Stephen J. Pyne puts it. When many small fires converge and convective winds of more than 100 miles per hour are generated, an urban fire is a holocaust: “Given the intensity of the toxic gasses and the radiant heat, people die from asphyxiation, burns, and the inhalation of poison gasses such as carbon monoxide.”

Then, too, San Francisco was especially vulnerable to fire on the eve of the 1906 quake. Ninety percent of its buildings were wood-framed. The highly congested urban center, with its tall buildings and narrow streets, was surrounded by farmland and near-wilderness. The peninsula was swept by strong winds from the sea. Yet the burghers of turn-of-the-century San Francisco neglected to install such modern fire-prevention measures as sprinklers. A commission of the National Board of Fire Underwriters reported in 1905 that “San Francisco has violated all underwriting traditions and precedent by not burning up.”

Not until April 18, 1906, that is. At 5:12 a.m., a quake lasting between 40 and 65 seconds, the first of several strong tremors, rumbled just off the northern San Mateo County coastline. The captain of an inbound steamer thought he had struck a rock: “The ship seemed to jump clear out of the water,” his chief engineer reported. And yet the earthquake was “not a truly great or megaquake,” as Fradkin puts it. “Larger temblors had occurred in California during historic times, namely in rural southern California in 1857 and the distant Owens Valley in 1872.”

Rather, the real crisis began when the fires began to break out and the firefighting resources of San Francisco were found to be nonfunctional. Alarms and telephones had been knocked out. No water ran through pipes, hydrants or hoses. In this respect, the damage the earthquake had done hardly mattered: “[E]ven without disablement of the supply,” the underwriters’ postquake report insisted, “the Fire Department would have found itself hampered for lack of water in the presence of even half a dozen simultaneous fires.” And as it turned out, more than 50 fires were already threatening San Francisco.

“Within half an hour after the earthquake shock,” reported a mining journal 10 days after the quake, “a hump of dark smoke appeared over the City, growing during the succeeding hours until it rose through the quiet air like the clouds made by a volcano. When night came, the whole front of San Francisco was ablaze.... “

Fradkin conjures up a nightmarish yet strangely compelling scene. A fireworks factory ignited and ornamented the conflagration with a pyrotechnic show. Cattle that had been on its way to the stockyards ran wild through the streets, and a cowboy calmly picked them off with a Springfield rifle. An off-duty reporter who had been playing cards and drinking beer in the Valencia Street Hotel watched as the building lurched off its foundation and “telescoped down on itself like a concertina” only moments after he had reached the street. “The margin between a charmed life, a crippling injury, and death was infinitesimal,” writes Fradkin. “Who slept in which adjoining bed could make the difference. The owner of the Valencia was never found; his wife was uninjured.”

If human nature contributed to San Francisco’s vulnerability, it also played a role in the carnage that followed. Panic-stricken at the prospect of looting (which would turn out to be “minor or nonexistent”), the acting commander of the Presidio put the city under martial law on his own initiative, and the mayor took responsibility for issuing a bloodthirsty order to the troops: “[W]e would not take any prisoners; we must stop looting, and therefore ... shoot anyone caught looting.” Fradkin writes that these “infamous and illegal orders” amounted to “one of the principal tragedies of the disaster.”

No aspect of the catastrophe escapes Fradkin’s attention -- and no aspect of San Francisco was untouched by the catastrophe. Race, religion, politics, architecture, science, journalism and much else come under the author’s gaze. Perhaps the most surprising episode in “The Great Earthquake” is Fradkin’s account of the prosecution of Abe Ruef, a Jewish lawyer and political operator who was convicted (after “questionable investigative techniques” and the third degree) of graft in the aftermath of the quake. In an extended coda, Fradkin shows how “[t]he traumatic disaster of the earthquake and fire,” along with anti-Semitism and raw politics, turned Ruef into a scapegoat: “San Francisco,” he concludes, “was truly gripped by madness.”

Yet Fradkin also uncovers moments of comedy and courage. One Amadeo Peter Giannini, founder of a tiny bank that would one day become the Bank of America, transferred $80,000 in gold and silver from the vault to a couple of wagons from his produce business, concealed the money under crates of oranges and headed out of San Francisco to his home in San Mateo. When he returned to the city two days later, Giannini put a bag of gold “on a plank laid over two barrels on the Washington Street wharf” and started making rebuilding loans. “For weeks afterward,” writes Fradkin, “the money smelled of orange juice.”

Indeed, for all its horrific incident, “The Great Earthquake” proves an inspiring, even endearing book, full of colorful anecdotes and charming details, encyclopedic in scope and powerfully evocative of San Francisco in its golden age. The panorama Fradkin offers the reader is so sweeping and so vivid that one might be tempted to call his book cinematic, were it not for the fact that all those disaster movies seem so bland by comparison. *