Methods to Survive a Devastating Earthquake—and Firestorm

Let’s say you You want to take a tour of San Francisco at its warmest, most energetic. You want to see the port city after the Gold Rush swelled foggy backwaters to become the largest city west of the Mississippi—back when it was home to the West Coast’s tallest buildings and beautiful brick architecture. You want to see San Francisco as it was before the Golden Gate Bridge filled California’s great gap, when escaping the peninsula meant waiting for the ferry.

So you travel back to April 18, 1906, and with a big day ahead of you, you arrive in the early hours of the morning while most of the city is still asleep and gas lamps provide the only light.

After completing your research, begin your tour at the site of the city’s founding: Mission San Francisco de Asís, also known as Mission Dolores, founded when Spanish missionary Francisco Palóu arrived on the sandy, hilly, isolated peninsula in 1776.

When Francisco named the church, he named it after nearby Dolores Creek. This may surprise you, because you don’t see a stream. But the old creek bed lies there, under the foundations of churches, stockyards and houses, buried under a mixture of turf and rubbish thrown into the swampy area by pioneers for building on. As you take in the scene at exactly 5:12 a.m., you feel a sharp, sudden jolt beneath your feet.

It’s amazing.

It’s harmless.

It’s a warning.

you have to walk

The jerk is a foreshock. It is the first energy wave to penetrate the earth’s crust and heralds the main event, which in this case is the largest earthquake ever to strike a major US city. Testimony from survivors suggests the foreshock arrived about 30 seconds before the actual tremors began, meaning you have about 30 seconds to take shelter before a magnitude 7.9 quake shakes a city that’s been completely wiped out unprepared for it. Many buildings collapse. Almost every building suffers serious damage. Bricks, steeples, balconies and towers rain down on the streets below. water pipes burst. Gas lines explode and almost everything that isn’t shaken to its foundations burns in a four-day firestorm. In terms of the number of lives lost to natural disasters in the US, the 1906 quake is comparable only to the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas. In terms of economic damage, there is no comparison. Over the next four days, three quarters of the city will be reduced to rubble and ash. At least 200,000 people are homeless. More than 3,000 die.

But that all comes later.

If you feel the foreshock, you’ll have to get off the road because you’re surrounded by buildings of dubious construction, their foundations shaking on an old pioneer rubbish pit. But strangely enough, the safest way is to get inside one. The only place more dangerous than inside a rickety building is next to it, because in 30 seconds almost all of the city’s chimneys, steeples and domes will collapse onto the streets below.

Of course, you shouldn’t just run into any building. Use your 30 seconds and consider your options: barns, factories, stockyards, and other buildings with large open spaces and few interior walls are more likely to collapse than residential buildings. (In 1906, nearly all warehouses in San Francisco collapsed.) Instead, look for houses, offices, or apartments—anything with lots of interior walls.

Avoid brick buildings and the structures next to them. Unlike timber-frame structures, brick buildings shatter rather than sway, and they often throw off walls rather than collapse, saving those inside but posing great risks to those beneath. Many of the fatalities, including San Francisco Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, occurred when a building collapsed onto the roof next door.