If the epicenter of the earthquake was 2 miles out in the sea on the San Andreas Fault, the focal point of the quake's damage was in the working-class neighborhood south of Market Street. Amidst the noise, all of San Francisco's church-tower bells rang out, sounding an eerie alarm that lasted until the shaking stopped nearly a minute after it had begun. Trees whipsawed, telephone poles snapped and streetcar rails buckled. Bleary residents scurried into streets that were rippling like waves and firing off cobblestones.
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Wooden houses splintered, cracked and collapsed, while poorly reinforced brick buildings tumbled to the ground. Sea captains said it felt as though their boats had run into a sea of rocks. "It grew constantly worse, the noise deafening the crash of dishes, falling pictures, the rattle of the flat tin roof, bookcases being overturned, the piano hurled across the parlor, the groaning and straining of the building itself, broken glass and falling plaster, made such a roar that no one noise could be distinguished." " hurled my bed against an opposite wall," wrote Emma Burke, the wife of a local attorney. The magnitude 7.8 quake arrived in two pulses, the second more powerful than the first. All of that changed on April 18, 1906.Īt 5:12 am, a powerful earthquake centered just off the coast grabbed San Francisco by the throat and nearly shook it to death. There were fashionable department stores, urbane hotels, a new sprawling city hall said to be the biggest in the West, and a Grand Opera House that hosted the greatest tenor of that time, Enrico Caruso. Aspirational locals called it the Paris of the West. Formed out of the gold rush of 1849, it transformed from a rough-and-tumble mining town into a cosmopolitan center of 400,000 people. At the turn of the last century, San Francisco could fairly count itself as one of the world's great cities.
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