As I am writing this, approximately a half-hour shy of exactly 100 years since San Francisco was devastated by what’s now called “The Great Quake”, I can’t help but wonder if anyone could POSSIBLY imagine the scope and degree of devastation that was visited on Baghdad by the Bay (apologies to the late Herb Caen)? In this day and age of instant news and 24-hour cable news coverage, an earthquake like this would be covered and parsed to the nth degree. 1906, though, was a much different world, and while we have pictures and some written accounts, understanding what happened is left largely to scholars and our imagination. Even with all of the reading I’ve done over the years about the 1906 earthquake, I still find it exceedingly difficult to wrap my head around the destruction of the quake and the aftermath and cleanup.
In a world were everything was different- communications, construction techniques and materials, search and rescue capabilities- it’s difficult not to view what happened in 1906 through the prism of our own 2006 knowledge and perspective.
In this part of Texas, we have the hurricane that devastated Galveston in 1900, and while we have the pictures and eyewitness accounts of what happened then, we who walk the Earth today have no more knowledge of the reality of what took place than those marking their own anniversary in San Francisco this morning.
I suppose we should all be grateful in a sense for natural disasters like San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and Glaveston’s 1900 hurricane. Without the lessons learned from these disasters and others like them, we would not be as well-prepared as we are today. I just hope the San Franciscans gathering at Lotta’s Fountain this morning have an appreciation of that.
