San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
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Firestarter: reliving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
REVIEWS BY LYNN HAMILTON Overlooking San Francisco's Alamo Square stands a row of oft-photographed Victorian houses, the so-called "Painted Ladies." These architectural gems withstood both the April 18, 1906, earthquake and the catastrophic fires that followed. In anticipation of the quake's centennial, two books revisit that fateful morning. Feeding the flames Heralded as the worst conflagration to assail a city in peacetime, the 1906 San Francisco fire was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people and the destruction of 522 city blocks, according to firefighter turned writer Dennis Smith in his new moment-by-moment chronicle of the fire, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires. Smith's book argues that bureaucratic bungling allowed the fire to spread much further and wreak more havoc than it had to. Even in an age when emergency water arrived by way of horse and wagon, the fire could have been contained, Smith believes, but for gross errors in municipal leadership. Dynamite, for instance, could have been used to create fire breaks. Instead, untrained personnel blew up burning buildings, disseminating embers that started new fires nearby. Smith blames the entire destruction of Chinatown on this practice. Perhaps the most unfortunate domino in the chain of destruction was the demise of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who was fatally injured in the initial earthquake. For years, Sullivan had warned his superiors in government that the availability of water for firefighting was not up to par. With water pressure low and fire wagons traveling by hoof, his department's hoses weren't even capable of watering the top floors of the emerging skyscrapers. Smith challenges the popular mythology of a runaway fire unstoppable by merely human forces. In fact, the fire spread relatively slowly, he thinks, and could have been minimized—in the presence of competent leadership. Unfortunately, with the death of Sullivan, such knowledge was absent. Piece-able planet In A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, Simon Winchester covers the same historic territory, but devotes considerable attention to the science of shifting tectonic plates which bring about earthquakes. Winchester puts the entire episode into the context of science's relatively new Gaia theory, which proposes that the entire planet is a living entity. Winchester parts company with Smith on a number of key controversies. Unlike Smith, who believes much of the fire's destruction was avoidable, Winchester writes of an apocalyptic blaze that defied any human attempts to thwart it: "No fire department anywhere in America, or probably anywhere in the world, could have possibly dealt properly with this conflagration, had they all the water that they could use. The 1906 fire was essentially uncontrollable . . . " he writes. Winchester thinks dynamite was well managed to create fire breaks that did slow the spread of fire. Winchester draws heavily on first-person narratives of the time, noting that many who lived through the earthquake and subsequent fire had the presence of mind to write down their observations. Alexander George McAdie is noteworthy in this regard. Awakened from his slumber by the giant quake, the first thing he did was to note the time on his fob-watch. From there, he proceeded to time the quake's duration—all of 40 seconds.
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