The San Francisco Earthquake Quotes

“In San Francisco, two people actually saw the earthquake. Jesse Cook, the police sergeant on duty in the produce market, saw it a moment after he became aware of panic among the horses all around him. Years later Cook recalled: “There was a deep rumble, deep and terrible, and then I could see it actually coming up Washington Street. The whole street was undulating. It was as if the waves of the ocean were coming towards me, billowing as they came.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake

“The rubble of the 1906 disaster was pushed into the Bay; buildings were built on it. Those buildings will be among the most vulnerable when the next earthquake comes.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“On the average, one thousand people settle on or near the San Andreas Fault each day. Nowhere in the United States is the density of population greater than in San Francisco and its environs. Nowhere is disregard of the danger more apparent.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“Finally, in March 1909, a new civic administration permitted publication of The Citizens’ Health Committee Report on Eradicating Plague from San Francisco. Only a handful of people ever knew of the report’s existence. “Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it [the plague] found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was often popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State, and Federal health authorities.” The”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“bolt upright in bed, clutching at his nightshirt with both hands. To Hertz, the singer was in many ways a figure as pitiable as any he had ever portrayed on stage. The earthquake seemed to have visibly shrunk Caruso, “as if the cataclysmic terror had singled him out to obliterate his glory of the previous night; as if Providence had evil designs on him personally.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“No man actually owns a fortune; it owns him.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“There were, to be sure, several on-the-spot executions of looters the first day”—surely a curious denial of the constitutional right to be judged innocent until convicted. Others, conceding that what was done was illegal, have tried to rationalize the killings as no more than what might be expected of hard-pressed soldiers doing a thankless job. But the citizens of San Francisco were under equal stress, and their panic might have caused them to do many things which would have appeared criminal under normal circumstances. Perhaps they deserve understanding more than the soldiers. There has also been a determined attempt to reduce the actual number of killings to a mere handful—and to maintain that in any case, the deaths were those of villains nobody would miss.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“than twenty-eight thousand buildings destroyed. Many of those buildings were homes. Whole communities had been decimated.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster