Powerful aftershocks
EARTHQUAKES are an unremarkable fact of life in California. The point is made in “L.A. Story,” Steve Martin’s affectionate parody of life in Los Angeles, when we see the diners in a chic restaurant go on chatting, sipping and nibbling as the glassware begins to rattle ominously. Indeed, those of us who live in earthquake country possess a certain swagger about being able to ride the occasional shudder along the San Andreas fault and put the inevitable Big One out of our minds. That’s one reason Los Angeles has been called “Edge City.”
There is another way to think about earthquakes, one that touches on the primal and mythic. The Gold Rush of 1849, a defining moment in the making of the California dream, attracted tens of thousands of hopefuls who imagined they’d remake themselves simply by scratching gold from the ground. Half a century or so later, San Francisco, made wealthy and powerful as the starting point and supply depot for the Forty-Niners, was laid to waste by earthquake and fire. For moral faultfinders, then and now, the temblor and the firestorm that followed could be seen as a kind of karmic payback. “The hand of an avenging God fell upon San Francisco,” recalled a survivor in Simon Winchester’s “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906” (HarperCollins: 464 pp., $27.95).
The centennial of the earthquake, April 18, 1906, has prompted a flurry of titles by historians, scientists, artists, novelists and cultural critics. A certain opportunism among publishers is at work, to be sure, but it’s also true that Californians never really stop thinking about quakes. If we are ever inclined to forget the tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet, the occasional shudder or shake reminds us.
The 1906 quake took place at the moment in history when photography had become a popular pastime, thus making possible several picture books among the new crop. “Earthquake Days: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire in 3-D,” by David Burkhart (Faultline Books: 220 pp., $44.95), for example, is a lavish scrapbook of prints, posters and vintage stereopticon images seen through a 3-D viewer that is included.
“After the Ruins 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” by Mark Klett (University of California Press/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: 134 pp., $49.95) is an even more ambitious project. Klett has painstakingly “rephotographed” contemporary streets from the perspective used to capture the aftermath of the quake and fire. The matching pairs are historical documents, artifacts of urban development, works of fine art and, not incidentally, the palpable result of a magnificent obsession.
The moving force behind “After the Ruins” is historian Philip L. Fradkin, who suggested the idea to Klett and contributes an essay. Fradkin has written a trilogy on quakes, including “Magnitude 8” (1998), “Wildest Alaska” (2001) and last year’s “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself” (University of California Press: 422 pp., $15.95), now in paperback. The latter is the definitive work on the events of 1906 and their aftermath, a must-read to understand what actually happened, what it meant for the men and women who lived there, how it reverberates through California history and the lessons for our times, including the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina.
“I realized how close I had come to the goal of writing an accurate disaster manual for the future,” Fradkin writes in a preface to the new edition. “What I hadn’t realized at the time was that it would be a disaster manual for the very near future.”
The scale of devastation in the 1906 earthquake and fire tends to overwhelm the imagination -- between 3,000 and 5,000 people died, more than 28,000 structures burned, and more than 500 city blocks were leveled by quake, flames or the dynamite charges that were ignited to stop the fires. Yet the authentic drama best emerges when events are viewed at eye level: “The seeds of trauma are scattered within individuals,” Fradkin writes. “All that is needed for them to sprout is a shake of our established worlds, and then, like black bulbs, they bloom again and again.”
The saga has inspired at least one novel, the well-researched and dialogue-driven “1906” (Chronicle Books: 362 pp., $13.95 ) by James Dalessandro. He conjures up San Francisco in the rich and decadent moment before the quake struck. “The Paris of the Pacific, the wealthiest and wickedest of American cities, is now ash and memories,” writes the fictional reporter who is the book’s narrator. “Let me tell you what really happened here, before deception triumphs and the truth is lost forever.”
But the novelist’s invention seems almost superfluous, compared with Fradkin’s historical account. He offers scenes of grandeur, horror and intimacy. “There is a brief moment of pure magic before a large earthquake strikes and all hell breaks loose and fear runs amok across the trembling land,” he writes. “Immediately north of the epicenter an early morning bather in the frigid waters off Ocean Beach quickly swam ashore amid a confused sea. He staggered to his clothes across the surface of the undulating beach. ‘Every step left a brilliant iridescent streak,’ the bather said. He had experienced a type of luminosity that accompanies some earthquakes.”
These books make the point that the 1906 catastrophe was not an apocalyptic event, especially compared with Chile’s death toll of 20,000 when an earthquake struck Valparaiso later the same year. San Franciscans quickly recovered and rebuilt an even more glorious city. Indeed, the disaster seemed to inspire a certain bravado in both builders and scientists -- the San Francisco quake is generally credited as the starting point of the modern science of seismology.
“[T]hanks to the growing understanding of science, it became the first seismic event to awaken mankind to the realization that nature’s whims could perhaps be measured, perhaps one day anticipated, then met and even overcome,” Winchester muses in his discursive, often digressive account on quakes, especially the 1906 one. “It offered the first opportunity for humans to imagine what it might be like if they, and not God or nature, were ever to be in control.”
Starting with the 1906 quake, each new seismic disaster in California prompted improvements in construction materials and techniques and zoning and building codes. “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings kill people,” seismologist Nick Ambraseys quips in “After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet” (Oxford University Press: 322 pp., $39.95), the most reassuring of the quake books.
The scholarly but also highly readable monograph by seismologist Susan Elizabeth Hough and geologist Roger G. Bilham about the science of earthquakes shows that just as fire rather than shaking was the cause of the greatest devastation in 1906, the key to surviving a temblor is over our heads rather than beneath our feet. “[T]he earthquake hazard along the San Andreas fault is without question high,” they explain, “but if one pitched a canvas tent and set up camp immediately adjacent to the fault, one’s risk would be quite low.”
Indeed, the chance of dying in an earthquake in California (as opposed to places like China, Iran, Pakistan and Sumatra, which lack our building codes and inspectors) is statistically remote. “What will The Big One be like?” muse Hough and Bilham. “After decades of measuring and analyzing earthquake shaking, scientists do not believe that the highest-amplitude shaking will be much worse during a Big One than during a Pretty Big One such as Northridge.” Far more dire, they insist, are the threats to life and health that result from what we put in our mouths and whether we put on our seat belts. “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings only rarely kill people -- tobacco and French fries kill people.”
Californians have always lived on the edge in more than the literal sense that the Golden State is riddled with fault lines. And we have always struggled to extract some meaning from the heart-stopping moments when the earth begins to move beneath our feet. For some, an earthquake is a sure sign of our imminent and well-deserved doom, whether by the hand of God or by our own foolish insistence on living and working atop a shifting tectonic plate. For others, the same experience is a source of exhilaration and pride at being tough enough to take it -- and make it -- in Edge City. *
