Like Ukrainian cities shattered by war today, S.F. was reduced to rubble in 1906 earthquake

More than 3,000 people died as a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire; 28,188 buildings were destroyed; nearly 500 blocks were leveled.

Just as rockets and artillery fire destroy buildings and kill people, so did the temblor that struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906, leaving a random trail of destruction. The difference between being killed and walking away unscratched was often a matter of inches or seconds.

When the tectonic plates under the ocean off Daly City slipped at 5:12 a.m., they released energy equal to almost half a million tons of TNT. The shock waves created raced at 7,000 miles an hour toward San Francisco, furrowing the earth as they came. They arrived four seconds later.

Police Officer Jesse Cook was on duty atthe old Columbo produce market at Washington and Davis streets.He noticed that the horses all around him were panicking. An instant later, he heard a “deep rumbling, deep and terrible, and then I could actually see it coming up Washington Street. The whole street was undulating. It was as if the waves of the ocean were coming toward me, billowing as they came.”

Cook ran for safety toward a building on Davis Street. Suddenly, he later recalled, “a gaping trench that I think was about six feet deep and half full of water” opened in the street. All across the city, especially atop filled marshes, old branches of creeks or other “made land,” streets were literally ripping apart and cracking open.

The Columbo market stood on what had once been shallow Yerba Buena Cove. As Cook leaped across the trench, he saw the brick Ivanovich Building on the opposite corner crumble “like a house of sand.” Two men running out of the building were crushed to death under 6 feet of bricks, oranges and produce.

Across the city, untold numbers of buildings simply collapsed when the quake hit. More structures fell down in the crowded working-class South of Market area, most of which stood on marshy soil from reclaimed Mission Bay, than anywhere else in the city. In the worst single disaster of the entire earthquake,three large wood-framed rooming houses on the west side of Sixth Street between Howard and Natoma collapsedwhen the soil under them liquefied. At least 300 people were killed. “The cries of the people who were being killed, especially the women, were dreadful to hear,” a survivor recalled.

Across town in the Mission District, another horror unfolded at the Valencia Hotel at 19th Street and Valencia.The hotel had been built atop a buried branch of a creek that once ran down from Twin Peaks, near the site of the Willows, a 19th century pleasure garden renowned for its water-fed willow trees.

At 5:12 a.m., Henry Powell, a policeman working the Valencia Street beat, was looking in on the building. A few men were playing cards in the hotel lobby. Powell had just walked out of the hotel when “Valencia Street … began to dance and rear and roll in waves like a rough sea in a squall … it sank in places and then vomited up its car tracks and the tunnels that carried the cables.” The night clerk and one of the card players managed to make it out of the hotel.

“As we ran we heard the hotel creak and roar and crash,” Powell recalled. “I turned to look at it. … The hotel lurched forward as if the foundation were dragged backward from under it, and crumpled down over Valencia Street. It did not fall to pieces and spray itself all over the place, but telescoped down on itself like a concertina. This all took only a few seconds.”

The five-story Valencia Hotel had become a two-story building in just seconds. In those seconds, most people on the three bottom floors were crushed to death. Those who weren’t killed were drowned when a burst water main flooded the wreckage. Those who survived that were burned to death by the fire that soon consumed Valencia Street. More than 100 people died.

All across town, the facades of buildings broke off and fell into the street. The hail of falling masonry and timbers during those first few seconds killed or maimed anyone walking below.

Many of the people killed in the moments after the earthquake hit, including the majority who were inside and in bed, were crushed by falling chimneys. A 16-year-old boy named Charles O’Day, who was living with his family at 324 McAllister St. between Hyde and Larkin, survived such a collapse by seconds. He was sleeping on a cot in a little room off the kitchen when the house shook violently. He jumped up and got to the door that led to the kitchen. “I stepped through, I turned around, and that little room was full of brick, right to the ceiling, from a brick chimney at the front door,” he recalled.

Others were killed by falling cupolas, spires and cornices. San Francisco’s fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, was asleep in his third-floor apartment above a fire station at 410 Bush St. When the quake hit, he rushed into the adjoining bedroom where his wife, Margaret, was sleeping. The room was filled with a cloud of dust, created when the thin cupola of the California Hotel next door fell through the roof of the firehouse and tore through the floors below. Margaret, tightly wrapped in her sheets, fell in her bed more than 40 feet to the basement. She survived, but Chief Sullivan was not so lucky. He didn’t see the gaping hole in the floor and fell into it, plunging to the basement floor. His skull was fractured, his ribs broken, and he was scalded by steam from a broken boiler. He died four days later. His death deprived the city of the one man whose skill and knowledge might have saved it from the fires that were about to complete its destruction.

Tectonic plates have no intentions, but many San Franciscans felt strangely betrayed. Call reporter James Hopper walked down Post Street among other survivors. He wrote: “All of them … had a singular hurt expression, not one of physical pain, but rather one of injured sensibilities, as if some trusted friend, say, had wronged them, or as if someone had said something rude to them.”

Those were some of the scenes in San Francisco, in those terrible moments when nature turned on it with the ruthless savagery of an invading army.