Forty photographs depicting the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — which occurred 113 years ago Thursday — went up for auction on the anniversary of the devastating quake and fire. The silver prints depict the destroyed buildings, torn up streets, contorted rails, plumes of smoke and teetering homes left after the quake. The collection of photographs was consigned by a dealer who found them as a group. They were probably compiled shortly after the earthquake, said a spokeswoman for Swann Auction Galleries. The 40 prints are by multiple photographers. Some are captioned in the film negative and others were written on with pen or pencil. Advertisement The auction house website showed the winning bid was $2,200 ($2,860 with buyer’s premium). javier.panzar@latimes.com @jpanzar<doc-sep>By Aron Mirwald, M.Sc., Ross S. Stein, Ph.D., and Volkan Sevilgen, M.Sc., Temblor Citation: Mirwald, A., Stein, R.S., Sevilgen, V. (2019), The 5 worst (and 5 best) places to live in the S.F. Bay Area if the great 1906 earthquake recurred today, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.019 The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Despite more than a century of improvement in structural design and construction, if the same earthquake were to strike again, the shaking damage likely would be even greater. That is largely because of the 20-fold increase in population, a significant portion of which occupies homes and offices built on Gold Rush and other artificial fill. While exact repeats of earthquakes are rare, large shocks loom in the Bay area’s future and so knowing your risk will enable you to take action now to reduce it. Few people know what happens after an earthquake strikes a city, and even less are prepared for it. I witnessed this in Mexico City, one and a half years ago, when the 2017 M=7.1 Puebla earthquake killed over 369 people and threw 57 buildings down. There was a severe shortage of first aid kits to treat the injured. Thousands of people were wounded, and the pharmacies were short of supply of the much-needed disinfectant and bandages. The S.F. Bay Area shares elements of Mexico City. Everyone knows—or should know—that there is the risk of an earthquake lurking, but it seems too far away to be worried about. So, let’s use the anniversary of the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake as a way to remind ourselves of the disastrous consequences of such an event, so that it does not befall our families. Destruction in San Francisco by the earthquake and subsequent fire. Source: USGS (https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1996/fs094-96/) The Great San Francisco Earthquake Due to the chaos and confusion that emerged after the disaster, it is not possible to precisely know how many people died, but estimates range from 700 to 3,000 fatalities (Aagaard and Beroza, 2008). Additionally, the earthquake caused a property loss of over $10 Billion dollars and left ~220,000 homeless (using the present value of the dollar; Ager et. al., 2019). An investigation published this month argues that the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake affected the economy of cities in the S.F. Bay Area for four decades after the shock (Ager et. al., 2019). Jack London, the famed author of ‘The Call of the Wild,’ lived in Oakland, and wrote about the earthquake in the 5 May 1906 issue of ‘Collier’s Weekly’: “San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone. Remains only the fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts of what was once San Francisco. On Wednesday morning at a quarter past five came the earthquake. A minute later the flames were leaping upward. In a dozen different quarters south of Market Street, in the working-class ghetto, and in the factories, fires started. There was no opposing the flames. There was no organization, no communication. All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth-century city had been smashed by the earthquake. This train was overturned at Point Reyes by the 1906 earthquake, which requires at least 0.4 g of acceleration, evidence of very severe shaking. Source: Veeraraghavan et. al. (2019) Worst places to live in the Bay area if the 1906 quake were to recur Since 1906, the population in the S.F. Bay Area has increased from 400,000 to 7.7 million people, and property values have risen drastically. The good news—or at least more hopeful news—is that the fire that consumed most of San Francisco is less likely to erupt unchecked today, thanks to greater fire-fighting capacity, technology, and cisterns. But, the damage still can be expected to surpass the one of 1906: Using the intensities reported in 1906, the economic damage would be of the order of $90 Billion with 400,000 people at least temporarily losing their homes, affecting about 160,000 households (Kircher et. al., 2006). Estimated intensities of the 1906 earthquake. The scale is a Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale, in which ‘X’ corresponds to extreme destruction, and ‘I’ to not felt. Source: Aagaard et. al. (2008) In order to make it easier to visualize where this would happen, we used the data shown in the map from Aagaard et. al. (2008)above to compute which cities with a population greater than 100,000 in the Bay area would be most (and least) affected. We used the Peak Ground Velocity, which is closely related to the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale depicted, and is considered a good predictor of the damage to homes and medium-rise buildings. Our Top 5 List 5 Worst Cities in a 1906 quake 5 Best Cities in a 1906 quake Peak Ground Velocity (m/s) Peak Ground Velocity (m/s) Daly City 1.22 Fairfield 0.00 San Francisco 0.47 Antioch 0.00 Santa Rosa 0.43 Hayward 0.13 Sunnyvale 0.42 Fremont 0.18 San Jose 0.37 Oakland 0.24 To give a sense of the magnitude of these numbers: 0.5 m/s is strong enough to turn over a train (Veeraraghavan et. al., 2019). While it’s no surprise that San Francisco is on the list of the worst cities, few people realize that Daly City, which straddles the fault in a landslide-ridden area west of the City, towers above S.F. in its vulnerability. In addition, San Francisco is almost in a dead heat with Santa Rosa and Sunnyvale, with San José not far behind. The best cities to live in were the 1906 quake to repeat lie in the East Bay, farther from the San Andreas Fault, on which the 1906 earthquake struck. However, these East Bay cities are vulnerable to earthquakes on the Hayward Fault, which is considered to have the highest probability of suffering a Magnitude ~7 shock in the next 30 or so years (Field et. al., 2019). Topping that list are Fairfield, Antioch and Hayward. Continually Grinding Plates: No end of Earthquakes in Sight This last observation is important: The San Andreas Fault is not the only fault that can render produce deadly earthquakes. At California’s coast, the Pacific Plate is grinding past the North American Plate. The movement between the two plates is accommodated through a set of faults, including the San Andreas. The rate of deformation between the plates is around 5 cm (2 in) per year (Aagaard and Beroza, 2008). Unfortunately, this is bad news for the habitants of the S.F. Bay Area. At the present, scientists estimate that the S.F. Bay Region has a deficit of 4 meters (13’) in slip (Schwartz et. al., 2014), which is about the mean displacement that occurred on the San Andreas Fault 1906. In other words, a quake with 13’ of slip would catch it up. The most recent Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3) estimates that there is a 33% chance that a M>6.7 earthquake will strike on the northern part of the San Andreas Fault, and 53% on the southern part (Field et. al., 2015). A recent investigation of earthquakes in the last millennium found that California is currently in an unusually long period of ‘seismic sleep’ (Biasi et. al., 2019). The scientists point out that the absence of large earthquakes in the last century is exceptional compared to the mean rates observed in the pre-historic record. At best, this shows us that we still have a lot to learn. At worst, it means that the slip deficit is both large and growing, and so we should prepare for large earthquakes now. A fence displaced in a right-lateral sense during the 1906 earthquake (whichever side you are on, the other has been shifted to the right). Source: Aagaard and Beroza (2008) Better Safe than Sorry How should we prepare for an earthquake? Here are four actions you can take today to be safer: Make your house earthquake resilient. If you are a homeowner, consider retrofitting. Luckily, seismic retrofit generally roughly halves the likely damage for most older wood frame homes (Retrofitters). Make sure that there is nothing in your house that can fall and injure you. Are the shelves fixed to the wall? Could anything in your house fall and injure somebody in case of strong shaking? You can engage quake prep consultant to visit your home and help you make these improvements for a modest cost. (Quake Prep providers). Insure your home. Even if your house remains standing, it may be too damaged to live in. Dealing with the chaos and losses after an earthquake will be hard. But you can at least remove the worry of being homeless. (Insurance agents, Jumpstart insurance) Prepare for the time after the earthquake. Be sure to have enough disinfectant and bandages. Prepare for a possible food shortage (canned food) and a period of no power supply. In the case of the earthquake that struck Mexico City, many lives could have been saved this way. In the case of the S.F. Bay Area, hopefully these measures will be useless for a long time. But, we can’t be sure of that, and leaving this important issue to fate would be reckless. References Aagaard, B. T., & Beroza, G. C. (2008). The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake a Century Later: Introduction to the Special Section. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 98(2), 817-822 Aagaard, B. T., Brocher, T. M., Dolenc, D., Dreger, D., Graves, R. W., Harmsen, S., … & Petersson, N. A. (2008). Ground-motion modeling of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, part II: Ground-motion estimates for the 1906 earthquake and scenario events. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 98(2), 1012-1046. Ager, P., Eriksson, K., Hansen, C. W., & Lønstrup, L. (2019). How the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Shaped Economic Activity in the American West (No. w25727). National Bureau of Economic Research. Biasi, G. P., & Scharer, K. M. (2019). The Current Unlikely Earthquake Hiatus at California’s Transform Boundary Paleoseismic Sites. Seismological Research Letters. Field, E. H., Biasi, G. P., Bird, P., Dawson, T. E., Felzer, K. R., Jackson, D. D., … & Milner, K. R. (2015). Long‐term time‐dependent probabilities for the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3). Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 105(2A), 511-543. Kircher, C. A., Seligson, H. A., Bouabid, J., & Morrow, G. C. (2006). When the big one strikes again—Estimated losses due to a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Earthquake Spectra, 22(S2), 297-339. Schwartz, D. P., Lienkaemper, J. J., Hecker, S., Kelson, K. I., Fumal, T. E., Baldwin, J. N., … & Niemi, T. M. (2014). The earthquake cycle in the San Francisco Bay region: AD 1600–2012. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 104(3), 1299-1328. Veeraraghavan, S., Heaton, T. H., & Krishnan, S. (2019). Lower Bounds on Ground Motion at Point Reyes during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake from Train Toppling Analysis. Seismological Research Letters, 90(2A), 683-691. http://temblor.net/earthquake-insights/the-lesson-to-be-learned-from-mexico-citys-building-collapses-5405/ http://temblor.net/earthquake-insights/mexico-city-building-collapses-experts-on-drop-cover-and-hold-on-or-run-5340/ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1996/fs094-96/<doc-sep>
The ground shook violently and woke up the Bay Area on April 18, 1906, but 113 years later, few of the city’s residents stirred for Thursday’s annual commemoration of the great earthquake at Lotta’s Fountain. City officials and residents on Thursday gathered just before 5:12 a.m. at the base of the cast iron monument to sound sirens and hold a moment of silence for the 3,000 souls lost in the 7.9 shaker, which also destroyed 60,000 buildings and left 250,000 people homeless. In the hours before dawn, nearly 100 attendees arrived in front of the golden fountain at the intersection of Market, Geary and Kearny streets, which was illuminated by spotlights and decked with a colorful floral wreath. No jolts were felt Thursday morning as current Mayor London Breed and city officials sounded the ceremonial alarm in commemoration of the 1906 earthquake. Now Playing: Lotta's Fountain Quake Commemoration Video: San Francisco Chronicle Also in attendance were San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Police Chief Bill Scott, Sheriff Vicki Hennessy and former Mayor Willie Brown. The ceremony honored the retiring fire chief and Donna Ewald-Huggins, who for years has helped organize the celebration in costume as Lillie Coit. Bob Sarlatte, the master of ceremonies, read a history and timeline of the catastrophic quake and fires. Elevated on a black platform, high above a mix of history buffs clad in period pieces and shivering city natives donning hoodies and jeans, Sarlatte and Breed reminded residents to be vigilant about earthquake safety. “It’s not a matter of if, but when,” said Breed, who in her first commemoration as mayor was dressed in an emerald dress and black velvet coat of early 20th-century fashion. In 1906, San Franciscans gathered at the fountain following the quake to look for survivors, said Countess Lola Montez, also known as Drag Me Along tour guide Rick Shelton. Shelton has attended the commemoration for years dressed as the late entertainer, who taught 19th century actress Lotta Crabtree how to dance. Crabtree commissioned the fountain for the city in 1875. “I’m very proud of Lotta,” Shelton said. “She became the darling of San Francisco.” Shelton also noted the late Mayor Ed Lee’s contributions to the fountain. “Ed Lee got the fountain operational,” Shelton said, gesturing with white gloves at the gilded monument. The countess gathered her skirts fruitlessly, tulle spilling out into the aisle of a vintage streetcar, which took attendees to the fabled golden fire hydrant that saved the Mission District during the fires. Vipul Gupta, who has lived in the Bay Area for 23 years, made the 40-plus mile trek from Los Altos to San Francisco for the commemoration. He crashed at a friend’s house to make sure he was able to attend the opening ceremony at 4:45 a.m. As a hush fell over the crowd during a moment of silence — punctuated by the wail of mournful sirens — the startup employee and tour-guide-in-training basked in the moment. “When we had that moment of silence, I felt for a moment that I was part of San Francisco history,” he said. Aboard the streetcar to Dolores Park, natives soon turned into tourists as they gawked at the car’s varnished mahogany accents and looked out the glass windows. Gupta leaned against its metal walls and gazed at the wall explaining the vintage streetcar’s history as it chugged along to the golden fire hydrant. “It’s a privilege to sit in here,” Gupta said. “That streetcar got here, but I have to say, it’s slightly delayed,” Hayes-White ribbed Muni director Ed Reiskin, as he approached the hydrant with a canister of golden spray paint. Officials gild the hydrant every year as a testament to its importance in saving historic San Francisco. The last survivor of the 1906 earthquake died in 2016. San Francisco residents and city officials said they would return to the fountain next year to commemorate another anniversary of the fateful temblor. Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu