100 YEARS AGO APRIL 18,-THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

Gus Ratzenhofer and I were walking along Market Street that day, heading towards the Ferry Building. (We were still in knee-pants back then, of course.) We were just talking of this and that, the way kids do, mainly discussing alternative ways of skipping school that wouldn't get us into too much trouble. We'd almost gotten to Lotta's Fountain, near the corner of Montgomery Street, when the first tremblors hit. The earth sort of shook and the world kind of tilted. Gus shook his head and said, "Man, that's the last time I sneak a sip of the old man's moonshine this early in the morning."

There was an interesting documentary on the History Channel last night. It airs again tomorrow at 8pm.

Farmerman, you may already know this, the photo you posted is only half the original photo which was a panoramic view of the city. The fire destruction was much worse than the photo suggests, and that is bad enough.

ALL I could fit . If they sized it right, itd be too small to see anything. The interesting aspect of thegas service was that much of the lines were marked with pinholes and corrosion from the soil. This led to lots of small gas pockets in the soil that just took off when the initial fires started. The quake was just a tool to set off a fire that was years in the preparation.

Ill have to look for the TV show tomorrow. Was it good?

Precipitous, traumatic urban renewal . . . you got a problem with that?

My father was born in Santa Rosa, a city a little bit north of San Francisco, ten weeks after that earthquake. Lucky boy re timing and location.

The gas main corruption was actually a double-whammy. First, of course, it set off the fires. But the combination of earthquake tremors and gas main explosions also did serious damage to the water mains. As a result, the fires couldn't be put out even when there were enough volunteers to fight them -- the hydrants had been put out of operation.

Farmerman

Considering it's close proximity if the Hayward fault slipped would that have any effect on the San Andreas fault?

There are a bunch of faults that lie transcurrent to the San ANdreas. Some of the really big quakes were already on the Hayward and the MEndocino. Energy can be stored by one fault when its move transcurrent to another..

MA, when the situation really got going badly, the Army was actually starting many fires , with their misconception that they could extinguish fires with slow burning explosives like gunpowder or guncotton. They actually started more fires than the earthquake.

It was a bad coupla weeks all around.

They talked about that in the documentary last night, which seemed very informative. But instead of slowburning explosives, they used tnt (I think that's what was said) and of course, when the exploded debris, all lit up, fell, it only started more fires. It seems so stupid now but this was 1906. We've learned alot since then.

Have we?

You mean, like, FEMA?

well. TNT was available in the US since the 1870s. It would, however , IMO , be an explosive that would better be used to snuff a fire. Im probably all wet . Maybe the actual explosions just blew the existing fores all around and started new ones. The idea was to rob the fire of air, not blow it all over the place.Course the general in charge was a bit of an "overachiever"

I guess it was Van Ness Ave. that provided the firebreak at long last. It's a while since I've read up on the subject but I seem to recall that there was some talk of actually burning down the houses on the West side of Van Ness to provide a backfire. Wiser heads prevailed and most of the property west of Van Ness was saved. Do I have that anywhere near right?

damn

Just finished watching the PBS special on this... It seems that a good part of the blame for the fire, stems from someone cooking breakfast , unaware that their chimney had been compromised.
Try googling "ham and eggs fire"... Interesting stuff.

Sort of like Mrs. O'Leary's cow in Chicago, LTX?

Something like that.

Here's one that I found

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/12/MNGQQUAKE12.DTL

Interesting. Thx for that link, Lion.