San Francisco marks earthquake centennial

SIRENS wailed through the city before dawn yesterday as residents marked the moment 100 years earlier when the Great Quake shattered the city, killing thousands as it levelled buildings and touched off fires that burned for days.

A handful of centenarians who survived that devastation joined hundreds of residents for a moment of silence and a memorial ceremony to remember one of the worst natural disasters in US history.

“What an extraordinary example, the pioneering spirit that defines our past, I would argue defines our present and gives me optimism of the future,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom. “San Francisco, a city of dreamers. And San Francisco, a city of doers.”

Most of the city’s 400,000 residents were still in bed when the magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck at 5:12am on April 18, 1906.

The foreshock sent people scrambling and the main shock arrived with such fury that it flattened crowded rooming houses. The epicentre was a few kilometres offshore of the city, but it was felt as far away as Oregon and Nevada. In 28 seconds, it brought down the city hall.

From cracked chimneys, broken gas lines and toppled chemical tanks, fires broke out and swept across the city, burning for days.

Ruptured water pipes left firefighters helpless, while families carrying what they could, fled to parks that had become makeshift morgues.

Historians say city officials, eager to bring people and commerce back to the city, radically underestimated the death toll.

Researchers are still trying to settle on a number, but reliable estimates put the loss above 3,000, and possibly as high as 6,000.

In any case, it ranks as one of the costliest disasters in US history, a benchmark to which later calamities are compared.

Bob McMillan, 37, who walked to the memorial event early yesterday with his wife and two-year-old daughter, said: “There is a sense of the tragedy, but there is also that San Francisco optimism. It’s kind of like, ‘We’re still standing’.”

Communities up and down the San Andreas fault commemorated the earthquake yesterday.

San Jose, which was also hard-hit, has staged a geology exhibit called It’s Our Fault, Too. At the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, an artist sculpted a quivering San Francisco neighbourhood in jelly.

Historians generally agree on one point: that San Francisco will fall again in a future quake. But they disagree over whether people should love the city or leave it.

A recent study determined that a repeat of the 1906 temblor today would cause 1,800 to 3,400 deaths, damage more than 90,000 buildings, and displace as many as 250,000 households.