A Year: Day to Day Men: 18th of April
On a Bed with Black Pillows
The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 happened on April 18 at 5:12 AM.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of northern California on April 18 with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). Heavy shaking was felt for a distance of 370 miles along the coast of California.. Devastating fires started and lasted for several days. As a result, over eighty per cent of the city of San Francisco was destroyed and up to 3000 lives lost.
The San Andreas Fault is a continental fault that forms part of the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American plate. The 1906 rupture propagated both northward and southward fo a total of 296 miles. The observed surface displacement was about 20 feet; geodetic measurements show displacements up to 28 feet. Shaking was felt from Oregon to Los Angeles, and inland as far as central Nevada. Between 227,000 and 300,000 people were left homeless out of a population of about 410,000 residents.
As damaging as the earthquake and its aftershocks were, the fires that burned out of control afterward were even more destructive. It has been estimated that up to 90% of the total destruction was the result of the subsequent fires. Within three days, over 30 fires caused by the ruptured gas mains destroyed about 25,000 buildings.
Almost immediately after the quake (and even during the disaster), planning and reconstruction plans were hatched to quickly rebuild the city. Rebuilding funds were immediately tied up by the fact that virtually all the major banks had been sites of the conflagration, requiring a lengthy wait of seven-to-ten days before their fire-proof vaults could cool sufficiently to be safely opened.
The Bank of Italy had evacuated its funds and was able to provide liquidity in the immediate aftermath. Its president also immediately chartered and financed the sending of two ships to return with shiploads of lumber from Washington and Oregon mills which provided the initial reconstruction materials. In 1929, Bank of Italy was renamed and is now known ad Bank of America.
Reconstruction was swift, and largely completed by 1915, in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition which celebrated the reconstruction of the city and its “rise from the ashes”. Since 1915, the city has officially commemorated the disaster each year by gathering the remaining survivors at Lotta’s Fountain, a fountain in the city’s financial district that served as a meeting point during the disaster for people to look for loved ones and exchange information.