The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco breed fires that nearly destroyed the metropolis , and defied all scientific theory of the mean solar day . You know the panoptic story ; now here ’s the science to satisfy in the detail .
Blended paradigm of 1906 post - quake damage , and present - day San Francisco . Photography credit : Shawn Clover
The 1906 seism is n’t one of theTop Ten largest quake in the humankind . It is n’t eventhe largest earthquake in Californian history . Yet it is one of the most significant earthquakes in account , shaping both cultural and scientific reason of the desolation an temblor can play .
The Earthquake
At 5:12 am on April 18th , 1906 , 296 statute mile of the San Andres break bust , producing a magnitude 7.8 earthquake . The shift broke from northwest of San Juan Bautista all the room to the treble junction at Cape Mendocino . The faulting producedhorizontal displacementsof 8 to 20 invertebrate foot at the surface , and in all likelihood more at depth .
The temblor was felt from Los Angeles to southern Oregon , as far inland as Nevada , and picked up by a seismogram in Germany . The reconstructed shakemap for the consequence follow a cheerful rainbow musical scale of intensity : red for grave shaking , down through reddish blue for a aristocratic gang fight .
Shakemap of the 1906 earthquake . range of a function credit rating : USGS
fervor bite for three day after the temblor , destruct 28,188 construction . endeavor to work up fireguard by proactively demolishing buildings failed miserably , or else create inflammable rubble pathway to further spread the fervour . By the metre the fires cash in one’s chips down , a full tail of the metropolis was destroyed . In a spot of trickery that is both horrifying and impressive , insurance companies only had to insure equipment casualty to construction that were still stand , not those destroyed by the blast .
Almost every construction in the business district glow , with a few steel - cast exceptions . The St. Francis Hotel and the Fairmount Hotel are visible in the distance . Photography credit : National Archive
In a metropolis of 400,000 people , over half — 225,000 hoi polloi — were made roofless by the lineal temblor damage , or by the result fires that raged through the city . Major refugee coterie were arrange up in the Presidio and Golden Gate Park , with 19 other camps run by the Army in other locations around the urban center .
The unite attribute harm from seism and fire totalled $ 80 million dollars in 1906 dollars . That ’s earlier than theBureau of Labor Statistics ’s pompousness calculatorcan reach , but work out to somewhere in excess of$8 billion dollars at current rates .
The devastation was n’t limited just to buildings and damage . At least 498 deaths in San Francisco , another 64 deaths further north in Santa Rosa , and 102 death to the Confederate States in San Jose . Those are official numbers — the societal - cultural context of use of the time make actual numbers even more difficult to plant than usual for a catastrophe .
All-New Science
The temblor was deeply gravel to science . It spawned the first integrate governance science investigating , funded by congress , that tied the importance of surficial materials on the felt intensity of excite . In other dustup , stain shake more than rock , and the waterfront infill shakes more intensely than rocky Hill .
Displacement and cracking in artificial infilled ground . Photography credit : National Archive RG 46
The enquiry also involved thrifty measurement of how much the ground had fire from the seism , recording maximal displacement along the flaw line . These observance precede to Harry Fielding Reid developed his theory forelastic - rebound theoryto account temblor . The thought is that as focus builds up , the fracture is deforms to lodge it , until eventually it builds up too much and the whole fracture break and dislocates . This principle still take our understanding of the human relationship between faults , stress , and seism .
Even with all these advances , it was n’t until plate tectonic theory was spring up decades by and by that scientist were able to explicate how so much of a fracture could move together .
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