At every corner, San Francisco is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the April 18, 1906, earthquake that marked one of the worst natural disasters in US history.

A small band of aged survivors are making public appearances, including at the start of a recent baseball game. Museums and public halls are holding retrospectives, and construction and insurance companies are promoting their services against future earthquakes.

The city has staged a new ballet titled "Earthquake" which includes sounds of seismic movements amid a sculpture producers say represents the Richter scale.

A century later, the people who felt the ground rock that Wednesday morning tell the story best.

"The prelude, or opening, was a very low rumbling noise, like distant thunder."

"The solid earth took on the motions of an angry ocean."

"Buildings were tumbled over on their sides, others looked as though they had been cut off short with a cleaver."

"From the moans and cries coming from below it was evident that a considerable number of people were trapped. And all the work of less than a minute!"

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the main city of the western United States, a shining metropolis built on the promise of silver and gold with little thought to the destruction rock could also produce under enough pressure. After April 18, 1906, neither San Francisco nor a United States just learning about the natural and man-made hazards of urban life, could ever again be so wilfully innocent.

It was 5:12 am and most San Franciscans were still in bed when the quake hit, first as a foreshock that sent people scrambling. The main temblor, its epicentre offshore from the city, arrived with such fury that it flattened crowded rooming houses, was felt as far away as Oregon and Nevada, and in 28 seconds brought down the City Hall it had taken 27 years to build.

From cracked chimneys, broken gas lines and toppled chemical tanks, fires almost immediately broke out and swept across the city, burning for days. Ruptured water pipes left firefighters helpless, while families carrying what they could fled the advancing flames to parks that had become makeshift morgues.

Taking in the devastation afterward, Jack London wrote: "An enumeration of the buildings destroyed would be a directory of San Francisco. An enumeration of the buildings undestroyed would be a line and several addresses. An enumeration of the deeds of heroism would stock a library .... An enumeration of the dead will never be made."

Unknown death toll

Researchers are still trying to set a death toll for the disaster that ranks as one of the costliest in US history, a benchmark to which later calamities are compared. Reliable estimates put the loss above 3,000, and possibly as high as 6,000.

Meanwhile, other scientists and historians, facing better than even odds that another Big One will hit Northern California by 2032, work to separate facts from the folklore that envelops the 1906 quake like San Francisco fog.

When the next big quake happens, structural engineer Chris Poland believes "everything built since the 1970s is going to perform in a safe manner." Less certain is the fate of the 70 per cent of all structures built before then, which were not retrofitted because of cost.

Gladys Hansen, a retired city archivist, has spent decades trying to come up with an accurate death count the official toll has long stood at 478 deaths in San Francisco, 64 in Santa Rosa and 102 deaths in and around San Jose. Complicating the task is that turn-of-the-century San Francisco attracted a transient, ethnically diverse population. She thinks the uncounted dead included many immigrants whose bodies were incinerated and forgotten.

No single view of the city struggling to rebuild emerges today.

It could be a harsh place. Mayor Eugene Schmitz issued an order authorizing soldiers and hastily deputized "special police" to shoot anyone suspected of looting. Xenophobic policies directed at segregating Japanese immigrants got so bad that President Theodore Roosevelt intervened to prevent a diplomatic crisis.

But what of the decorum that reportedly reigned, too as glimpsed in photographs from the period showing survivors smiling as they cooked meals on the street and children playing in refugee camps?

"It's not that there weren't heroic things happening, but at the same time there were a lot of terrible things happening," said Charles Wollenberg, a history professor at Vista College in Berkeley. "You can find the same thing in New Orleans today.

"When a disaster of this magnitude occurs, you are going to find both the best and worst in people."

Source:China Daily