historical tremors

Ari Kelman had a wonderful post up on Friday at The Edge of the American West, commemorating the anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 18 April, 1906:

It lingered for nearly a minute, an eternity for terrified San Franciscans. In an instant, the ground in some parts of town liquefied; whole blocks of poorly constructed tenements slumped into piles of rubble, entombing those inside. Even monumental buildings, constructed to embody state power or Gilded Age prosperity — the US Post Office; the West’s most luxurious hotels and grandest office buildings; and the still-new City Hall, a Beaux-Arts monument that captured San Francisco’s ostentatious sense of itself at the dawn of a new century — all suffered significant structural damage. It was, without question, the worst disaster in a city whose short history had already been punctuated by earthquakes and fires.

Kelman takes us through the aftermath of the quake—the catastrophic attempts to create firebreaks, the confusion that ensued with a mayor seizing some of the powers of martial law, leaving the devastated city swarming with troops and caught in a legal limbo, and perhaps most appalling, the opportunistic use of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism to persecute the city’s Chinese community. As he writes (making the parallels to more recent ‘natural disasters’ explicit), “The fires demonstrated that although the quake had been natural enough, the disaster would be a byproduct of poor planning, negligence, and the politics of catastrophe.” He ends on a rather ominous note: as ever, we’re still waiting for the next Big One, and for all the time spent talking about it, we may not be prepared.

The 1906 quake occupies a special place in family lore; my sixteen-year-old great-grandmother narrowly escaped being crushed by a falling chimney as she fled the house that morning, and her family spent some weeks afterwards camped out in the Presidio among tens of thousands of their fellow San Franciscans, refugees in their own city. She died in the mid-1980s, when I was five or six, but I have clear memories of visiting her apartment on 32nd Avenue, between California and Clement, down the street from the house where my mother grew up and my grandmother still lives. At that age I was fascinated by earthquakes and volcanoes, and was always eager to hear her retell the story of the Big One. Her descendants still live along the “rim of fire”, and I don’t think there’s a single member of the family, save perhaps the youngest, who doesn’t now have earthquake memories of their own--the biggest I’ve experienced was the 6.8 Nisqually quake in 2001.

Among my assorted childhood obsessions, this one has stuck--New York seems to be set on fairly firm ground (or we wouldn't choose to live in this crumbling building) but I keep falling in love with seismically-active cities. When I finally move the blog to wordpress I should have an 'earthquake' tag. See: on earthquake diplomacy and earthquake politics, which explores the political impact of the 1999 Izmit quake in Turkey, especially with regard to Turkish-Greek relations, and assorted posts on the 2005 Pakistan quake.

(aftershock: how odd that the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone chose April 18th, of all days, to shake up Illinois. Also, I should get around to sharing some excerpts from Pamuk's essay on "Earthquake Angst in Istanbul.")