San Francisco 1906

1906 San Francisco

Magnitude: 7.7-7.9

Ignited several fires around the city that burned for three days and destroyed nearly 500 city blocks.  The earthquake and fires killed an estimated 3,000 people and left half of the city’s 400,000 residents homeless.  The largest aftershocks occurred at the ends of the 1906 rupture or away from the rupture entirely; very few significant aftershocks occurred along the main-shock rupture itself.  It generated a tsunami wave only approximately 10 cm in height.

Del Monte (last survivor alive) didn’t remember much about his family’s dramatic escape, but “was told that his mother bundled him up after the shaking stopped and ran out to the street where his father commandeered the rig, which they rode down to the waterfront as flames licked at them from all sides,”. “After being forced out of his home in North Beach after the 1906 Great Earthquake and Fire as an infant, he ultimately witnessed our City’s rise from the ashes more than a century ago seeing it rebuilt better than ever,”.

Rose Barreda: “Many burned-out people passed our house with bundles and ropes around their necks, dragging heavy trunks. From the moment they heard that fatal, heart-rending sound of the trumpet announcing their house would be burned or dynamited, they had to move on or be shot. As the sun set, the black cloud we watched all day became glaringly red, and indeed it was not the reflection of our far-famed Golden Gate sunset.”

After the earthquake had occurred, over 20,000 people were left without a home. The military built 5,610 relief houses to help out the civilians. The houses were packed close to one another, and they charged people $2 a month for rent. Some things that the San Francisco area had to achieve to prevent themselves from another catastrophe, were to redesign so that when it happens, not all buildings would be demolished. They want to issue a standard called shelter-in-place, which means that the house would be damaged, but not enough to where the people cannot live in it anymore.

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