This is Later with Lee Matthews The Lee Matthews Podcast More what you Hear weekday
Afternoons on the Drive. Matthew Davenport is a contributing writer for The Wall Street
Journal book review on Salon dot com. His first book, First Over There,
was a finalist in the Guggenheim Lehrmann Prize of Military History. His newest
chronicles The Longest Minute, and It All happened at five twelve Pacific time,
April eighteenth, nineteen o six. Matthew Davenport, what did happen on that
fateful day in time? Well, thank you for having me On that day.
San Francisco was the ninth largest city in the United States, the largest
west of Saint Louis and Chicago, and it was almost totally destroyed, not
just by the earthquake, but by the three day firestorm that followed. More
than twenty eight thousand buildings and approximately three thousand more people were killed. This
was not the strongest earthquake to ever hit the continental US, but it was
the strongest to ever hit that area. And I imagine unlike anything, who
were, unlike anything the people living in San Francisco had ever seen. Ever,
it was they had experienced strong earthquakes before, but it was the strongest
at least in the recorded history of the state, and still the strongest to
this day, although another one is inevitable given the two faults that run alongside
of both sides of San Francisco. At the time, did they know anything
about plate tectonics. They did not. They had not even developed connil drift
theory. Yet they just knew that they were prone to earthquakes. They had
dealt with a major one in eighteen sixty eight, which before this one was
called the Big One, so they knew that they were coming, and they
knew they were prone to it. The problem is city planners just were more
beholden to the profit of developers and a private water company than to the safety
of their residents, and they left a lot of them on soft fill land
in very shaky structures. But they didn't realize that that was going to cause
a problem down the road. Well, I think they had plenty of warnings
and they ignored them and put them off the longest minute, Matthew Davenport the
Great San Francisco earthquake and fire of nineteen o six, What were people doing
this about this time? Were they sitting down to dinner, Were they going
out to the saloons? Were they packing up to go hunt for gold.
No. At this time, most of the city of just more than four
hundred and twenty five thousand people were asleep. Most people were caught in their
beds. There were a few people working out on the on fishermen's work with
the fish market, and a few produce merchants up and police officers, but
other than that, most of the city was asleep. The earthquakes I've experienced,
my first reaction is, why is there a helicopter landing in my backyard?
It makes that kind of choppy sound, and then you start feeling the
vibration, and the vibration gets more and more intense, and then it kind
of subsides and you can almost feel it Doppler effect away from you. Did
you have any diaries of how people heard or felt this earthquake? Absolutely,
letters, diaries, journals. I tried to each of them, addressed all
five senses, and people did talk about the sound. One person described it
as a thousand violins playing off key, and the sound, they said,
was something that you would never forget. That's the first thing that struck me
about an earthquake. It never occurred to me that it made a sound.
That's right, As the shockwaves moved through the ground and hit surface waves and
start destroying structures, it makes an awful sound, and just about everyone who
talked about it later would recall the sound above anything else. The Longest Minute
Matthew Davenport the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire of nineteen oh six. I
have read that an earthquake can be intense enough where there are actual you actually
see waves in the ground. Was that present in this particular quake. It
was a police officer that was walking a bead at five twelve a m.
Felt it coming. He turned around and looked up the steep hill, and
there's plenty of those in San Francisco up the steep street, and said that
the waves of the earthquake were coming down the street at him, the pavement
of the street like waves of an ocean, popping paving stones out. I
imagine that added to the terror of it. We're talking about the seven point
nine intensity earthquake San Francisco, April eighteen, nineteen six, and the longest
minute from Matthew Davenport and I guess it was about a minute, or maybe
a little longer. It was about a minute. At the time, there
were estimates as low as forty eight seconds, and now the USGS is estimated
it's probably between sixty and eighty eighty five seconds. Has the USGS been able
to go back because they didn't have Richter scales back then, but have they
been able to go and find geological evidence of this quake, Absolutely, because
it broke to the surface. So actually you could see the break along the
Sana and Drea's fault nearly three hundred miles from north and all the way down
south of the city, and they have been able to pinpoint it around a
seven point nine and moment magnitude, And the length of the fault break.
Wasn't just the earthquake that did so much to destruction the fire afterward. This
wasn't at a time when there were a lot of gas lines or were there.
There were gas lines, and there was also electricity in homes that had
been retrofitted in the homes that were not built with conduits, so there were
a lot of fire hazards, especially in commercial spaces, and the firestorm is
what destroyed the city. It wasn't the earthquake. Most of the deaths and
most of the destruction was the result of the firestorm. And that's the whole
point of this, that this was a natural disaster, but it led to
unnatural devastation. And how long did the fire last? Three days and three
nights the firefighters had to fight it. It destroyed five hundred city blocks,
and how many perished in the flames. The estimates of the time were downgraded
around five hundred, and since then city archivists and librarians and have worked to
uncover all of the depths, and we'll never know the number. It's probably
above three thousand, that's the current estimate. And because there were so many
immigrants and transient laborers and widows and people that didn't have anyone to notice or
more in their loss, we'll never know the exact number. Matthew Davenport the
longest minute. Some good things came out of this, as I understand.
Legend holds that's where Salvation Army got together with a big kettle in the middle
of a community and asked anybody who had anything to bring to the kettle,
and they made a big community dinner out of it. And thus the Red
Kettle campaign was born, if history is serving my memory correctly. But there
were some other good things that did come out of this. Yes, the
American Red Cross was set was deployed by President Roosevelt, private organization, but
he gave it national import by sending them out there. And they assist to
the soldiers of the presidio that were out there helping with the recovery and the
rebuilding. And it taught a lot about the science and the need for strength
and buildings and foundations and fireproofing and thankfully, learning from this disaster, emergency
management personnel and first responders have worked for more than a century to make sure
that while another big earthquake will hit the area, it won't be another nineteen
oh six. And you read all about it in his new book, The
Longest Minute, Matthew Davenport. It's available everywhere you get books. Thank you
for joining us, and thank you for bringing us the story. Thank you
so much for having me. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews,
the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons
from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation