The 1906 SF Earthquake I

the 1906 SF Earthquake

I was in a deep sleep on the morning of April 18, 1906 when the foreshock hit San Francisco, but it roused me quickly. It was a kind of trembling, shaking, and it came then stopped. By the way, teenagers usually get to bed later and get up later than adults, and I was a teenage girl in San Francisco when that terrible tragedy struck out city. At a few minutes after five a.m., I think maybe it was more like 10 after or 12 after five because I glanced at my wind-up alarm clock for a second and it was blurred. Then about half a minute later, the big earthquake hit and it roared loudly, shook violently, up and down in thunderous bursts of energy, and literally tossed me out of bed.

I wasn't hurt when I hit the floor but I knew in an instant that others would be injured as the shaking and rattling and pounding force of the earthquake rocked our building in the Mission District and scared all of us half to death. The sensation was like being on a horse that is just getting used to riders, and it bucks and tries to throw the rider off. It was like that.

All the ornaments on our walls crashed down, the plaster came crashing down, and next door to our building I looked and saw nothing but a huge cloud of dust. When the wind blew the dust away, I could see that the building next door was flattened. Anyone in that building was surely killed, I thought to myself, including a boy who I had dated within the past year. And as fire sirens began going off and emergency vehicles tried to drive through the carnage in the streets, I looked for my parents, saw they were safe (my dad was bleeding from his head; something fell on him but my mother had a dressing applied to his head so I believed we had survived the shaking), and we ran through a splintered doorway to the street.

People were screaming in the streets, they were running, carrying personal belongings, one woman was in her nightgown carrying a tiny baby that only had diapers on. "Help us!" A voice came from a building in the next block. "Please, someone help us!" The voice screamed loudly. I ran in that direction and saw the woman with a baby looking out from a window where the glass had shattered in the earthquake. The problem was the ground floor of the building was on fire. She was trapped. No one was trying to get to her. I tried to get someone to help her as the flames rose higher in the building and it looked like she would be killed. I looked around the city and saw that smoke and flames were everywhere.

My father yelled at us to follow him down the street with a huge crowd of people all moving in the direction of Golden Gate Park. (Within two days, my father had secured a tent for us in Golden Gate Park with thousands of other survivors / refugees.) the smoke, the cinders, the people crying as we all watched out city go up in flames -- it was terrifying. I will never forget the fear and agony on the faces of the people as we walked together to get away from the fires that were blazing all around us.

We realized we were all going to be refugees, but my mother kept saying, "We have our lives, we are alive, and so we are the lucky ones!" I didn't feel very lucky, as my school burned to the ground and several of my classmates (we were about to graduate from high school) were crushed in the falling buildings. An aunt was killed in the fire and two cousins were killed by falling buildings. I guess I was lucky.

The fire trucks were very slow to get to the burning buildings, partly because so many people had crowded into the streets to get away from the falling buildings and the fires, and partly because there was so much crumbled concrete and other debris. But there was futility in the fire trucks' efforts because the water mains had all been broken by the violent shaking so when fire trucks tried to put out a building fire, there was no water available. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of the earthquake; watching frustrated firefighters as they watched building after building burn to the ground. To watch as the city burned.