"On Wednesday, April 18th, at 5:14 A.M. I was wakened by the crash of falling furniture, and a rocking, heaving house. Jim was sleeping in the next room, but I am used to slight earthquake shocks, so I lay still. The meteorological record has announced later that there were seven shocks in ten minutes, seventeen in the whole day, and numerous slight shocks every day since. I felt very calm, paralyzed perhaps, but I thought, "This is the worst thing I ever knew, and we may be going to be killed, and I want to die together." It was as much as I could do to walk across the floor, because it heaved so, and it made me very sea-sick. Jim always wakes slowly and dazed, and when I opened the door he thought the walls were falling in." (From a letter by San Francisco resident, Mrs. Eleanor Watkins.) Available online here.The exact time of the first foreshock to the "Great Quake" is recorded as 5:12 A.M. on 18 April 1906. About twenty seconds later, the earthquake began and lasted for forty-five to sixty seconds. The quake occurred along approximately 290 miles of the San Andreas fault and was felt from southern Oregon to Los Angeles and as far inland as central Nevada. Measured by our current earthquake scale, the San Francisco earthquake measured from 7.7-8.3--one of the largest ever recorded in North America and the first of twenty-seven separate quakes that day--but the quakes were just the beginning of the destruction.
The damage done by the earthquake alone was estimated to be 80 million in 1906 dollars. But the earthquake was not the most destructive force; the subsequent fires that devastated San Francisco pushed the total damages to over 400 million dollars. The quake ruptured many gas lines and overturned lamps and stoves, starting fires in various parts of the city. A housewife starting up her stove to prepare breakfast started what was known as the "ham and eggs" fire.
On top of all this, the fire alarm system for the city was destroyed by the earthquake, and the fire chief was killed by the first temblor. When the firemen reported to their posts, there was little or no water to fight the flames, as most of the water-mains for the city had burst during the quake. The firemen stood by helplessly and watched many parts of the city devoured by fire. The fires lasted three full days and destroyed 2,831 acres of the city. It consumed thirty schools, eighty churches and left over 250,000 of the city's 400,000 people homeless.
The municipal government initially reported a death toll of less than 500 people, because they were afraid that any larger number would scare away investors and hinder the re-building of the city, but the actual numbers were probably more than 3,000 killed by the quake and fires. The exact death toll will never be known because so many bodies were incinerated in the fires and almost all of the city records were destroyed.
As you search for information on the effects of San Francisco earthquakes and fires on your ancestors, you have many sources at your disposal. Here are some convenient online sources where you can begin your search.
The Library of Congress has digitized and placed online several films of San Francisco before and after the Great Quake and Fire of 1906.
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