I stumbled upon this title nearly twenty years ago while touring my community college’s library and checking out what it had to offer. I found a couple of titles (Disaster! and Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco’s Twenties and Thirties) that I enjoyed so much that I later bought my own copies. Recently while contemplating any possibility of inflicting some order on one bookcase, I spotted this and wound up giving it a re-read. It’s a narrative & oral history of the Great San Francisco fire, which destroyed over 80% of the city. The fire began in the immediate aftermath of a significant earthquake, which also compromised the city’s water infrastructure and made it extremely difficult to staunch the flames. The city’s fire chief had been warning against this possibility, but he died from wounds inflicted during the quake and was not able to tell the mayor “I told you so.” The story of the quake, fire, and chaotic week of death and confusion that followed them is told here through the reports of those who witnessed it — a cross-section of humanity that includes newlyweds, a corrupt mayor, a desperate Chinese immigrant, an aspiring banker, and an Italian opera singer who couldn’t believe he escaped the flames of Vesuvius just to wind up in another disaster. On my first reading of this, I absolutely loved the immersion into the world of 1901, and the strange characters living in San Francisco. For me, it was a dive into what living in a 20th century city was like, and the photographs helped. Reading this again as an adult, I was mostly struck by how much death and mayhem was inflicted by the state itself, specifically through the Army troops who were illegally ordered into the city to restore order, but who themselves became agents of chaos. Countless citizens witnessed soldiers looting stores all the while shooting any citizen suspected of doing the same, without even bothering to ask things like “Hey, bub, is this your house?”. The casual shooting quickly escalated so that people were shot for letting their horses drink from open hydrants or ‘refusing’ to join work details and clearing streets. At the same time, the general who had declared his own martial law in the city was also having them blow up block after block, sometimes creating fires in the process or blowing themselves up because they were stumbling drunk at the time. There are “hope spots” in the text — people helping one another across racial lines, opening their homes to those in need — the constant unnecessary death-by-government makes the book increasingly grim. Although I enjoyed this re-read, adult me is more sensitive to the book’s need for editing: the structure could be tighter, and details were sometimes repeated unnecessarily. This is a fairly fast read. There’s a modern book called San Francisco is Burning which I may try to see if contemporary scholarship has added any new insights.

Related:
Disaster 1906: The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Edward F. Dolan. Purchased while trying to find this book.
Isaac’s Storm, a history of Galveston being flattened by a tornado.
Disaster by Choice: How Our Actions Turn Natural Hazards into Catatrophes