The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was one of the largest disasters recorded in the history of the state of California. This article will discuss this earthquake, and its impact and consequences.
With all the earthquakes that have happened over the years in the land that is part of the state of California, it is amazing that it still is America’s most populous state and that their economy is so large. Of course, since they understand that they have had earthquakes in the past, and will continue to have them into the future, they do try to require building codes that allow buildings to withstand earthquakes. Even with that, though, there is still damage to buildings, and there is still loss of life. Of all the earthquakes that have occurred in the state of California, there is one that caused more damage and more loss of life than any other earthquake in the state’s history, before or since. The biggest problem is that people weren’t prepared for it, but it did lead to changes in building codes and safety procedures that have helped to reduce the loss of life in earthquakes after that. So, with this being said, let’s talk more about the Great San Francisco Earthquake that happened on April 18, 1906, which caused a loss of 3000 or more lives and excessive property damage and destruction.
This disaster, which is considered one of America’s worst natural disasters, probably alongside the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900, and Hurricane Katrina’s damage to New Orleans in 2005, probably could have been avoided, or should I say, could have been minimized, if the people were prepared, by having building codes that allowed the buildings to withstand the forces of the earthquake, and have safety procedures, where people knew where to go and hide in case it happened. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
The epicenter for this quake was said to have been two miles offshore, but been caused by the San Andreas Fault, which is the main fault line which causes all the earthquakes in California. Although they didn’t have the same type of earthquake magnitude scale in place as we do nowadays, the experts have tried to make educated calculations as to how strong of earthquake this was, and the average answer tends to be that it was about 7.9-8.0 in terms of magnitude. This main fault line, the San Andreas Fault, which separates the Pacific Plate from the North American Plate, runs in a north-northwest/south-southeast direction, running inland south of San Francisco, including the Salinas Valley, runs northwards into the ocean just south of the city of San Francisco, and continues northwards from there. The fact that the city is located right next to the fault line means that it really is important to have building codes that allow for the structures to remain intact when earthquakes do occur.
Along the area of the San Andreas Fault line, there was tremendous slippage, or ground displacement, the most of which was upwards of 26 feet north of San Francisco, in Marin County, close to the Point Reyes National Seashore. In most other places along this major fault line, close to the earthquake, the displacement was less, being around 9-12 feet next to San Francisco Bay. For this reason, for many years, geologists thought that the epicenter to the quake was on the fault line in Marin County. Later geologists, this time with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), known for their mapmaking skills, came to the conclusion that the epicenter was two miles off the coast of Daly City, a suburb just south of San Francisco. This earthquake was felt, particularly in areas close to the fault line, for a distance of hundreds of miles, as far south as Los Angeles, as far north as Oregon, and as far inland as Nevada.
Like many natural disasters, the damage to property and loss of life was multiplied by negative circumstances that conflagrated as a result of that natural disaster. Just like the majority of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was caused not by the hurricane itself, but by the damage to the levees that caused large amounts of the city of New Orleans to become inundated with water, and just like the majority of damage with the recent Hurricane Ike on the east coast was caused not by the hurricane itself, but by the swollen rivers and streams, the same thing was true with the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. There was some damage to the city, damaging its buildings, and causing a loss of life, but this property damage was quite minimal compared to the fires that ended up raging out of control, decimating a large portion of the city. The first fires were started by the rupturing of gas mains which lead to the starts of some 30 fires around the city, but this could have been minimized if it weren’t for human error, and deliberate attempts to start more fires – fire mains in the city were unworkable as a result of being damaged in the earthquake, dynamited houses, which were supposed to serve as firebreaks to stop spread of these fires ended up backfiring to cause more fires, and people were intentionally setting fire to their property knowing that the insurance companies would only pay for fire damage and not earthquake damage. Because of the loss of so much of the housing, a good majority of the population, perhaps up to 60% of the population of a little more than 400,000 people, were left homeless, sometimes spending years in tent cities and temporary housing facilities that sprang up throughout the city.
There were also other consequences of this great earthquake, such as the fact that it caused tremendous strain on the global financial system at the time, particularly the insurance industry, as was present at the time. Because of the vast amount of insurance monies paid out by insurance companies, many of them went bankrupt, while some survived, able to pay out all claims in full. This strain on the financial system, through the large amount of spending required by the insurance industry, caused a rise in interest rates, and some economists believe led to the panic of 1907. Over 400 million in property damage happened. It also lead to changes in insurance law, creating a standard where fire clauses within insurance guidelines did not say anything about earthquakes, meaning that if these events happened again, the insurance company would have to pay for fire damage, meaning also that the cost of possible disaster would be passed on to their customers.
Another consequence of this disaster is that there has been a tremendous desire to learn more about the nature and cause of earthquakes, and the locations which are most vulnerable to earthquakes. It was a few years after this destructive event that a geologist discovered that the fault line that caused the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 extended southward and continued running just west of Los Angeles, leading to preparation for future earthquakes in that area, allowing it to never suffer the same consequences of San Francisco – the worst earthquake to hit the Los Angeles area since then, in terms of fatalities, was the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, in which 115 people died. It spurred on more developments within the science of seismology, including a better system of earthquake magnitude detection.
Besides all that was previously mentioned, there were still other consequences to this earthquake. San Francisco had been the largest city in the west, but its destruction caused industry, business, and population to move farther south, which lead to the rise of the Los Angeles area, which is still the largest metro area in the west today. The earthquake lead members of the art community to seek a new location, which they found in Carmel, over by the Monterrey peninsula.
So, to sum it all up, the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was caused by stresses and pressures within the San Andreas Fault line, caused tremendous damage and loss of life, much through indirect means, and had many consequences, including changes in building codes (which didn’t last), insurance law (which continues to this day), the rise of another western city (Los Angeles), improvement in knowledge and the science of earthquakes and so forth. Big catastrophic events like this one don’t go by unnoticed, or without causing any changes in public policies and understanding the basic natures of events like this one.
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