Many are convinced that the Southern Pacific Railroad sought through a cover-up to soften the impact of the crisis because of its vast landholdings and hauling business in California generally, and San Francisco in particular. One theory is that much of the material was lost or displaced in the great Berkeley fire of 1923.
How did this happen? No one knows for certain. What if San Francisco was suddenly earthquake prone? As a confidence-boosting project, the city hired writers to craft positive stories, sometimes ignoring claims of human death, and downplaying the connection and effect the earthquake had on the fires.Īlthough Mayor Eugene Schmitz created a committee on history and statistics to compile a scrupulous earthquake history, no official report was ever produced from the voluminous material collected, and now virtually all that material has vanished. Financial institutions would invest in a city that suffered a fire (such as Chicago in 1871, which quickly rebuilt) because all urban clusters are subject to fires, but an earthquake was a different matter – a capricious act of God that could no more be predicted than comprehended. Reporters were asked to describe the disaster as a fire, and not an earthquake. There was an immediate effort following the event to reduce its negative publicity impact by controlling how and what information was disseminated. The Great Earthquake was followed by the Great Cover-Up. Of the 400,000 residents of the city, over half were homeless. The ferocious shaking knocked out most gas and water lines, which created a perfect three-day storm of fires with hardly any water to extinguish them.Īfter the earthquake there was an urgent need for the city to reassure potential developers and settlers that San Francisco was still a thriving urban area dedicated and able to sustain dynamic growth. The shock waves are estimated to have been as high as a magnitude 8.3 on the modern Richter scale. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was regarded as the greatest American natural disaster until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The number of victims of the earthquake will never be known.” ~ Jack London, The Fire, 1906
All vestiges of them were destroyed by the flames. “An enumeration of the dead will never be made. If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.” ~ James Dalessandro, San Francisco historian “Everything you knew about the 1906 earthquake was a lie or an inaccuracy.
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