Earthquake Storms

by John Dvorak

  Members of the California Academy of Sciences did prepare a report about the 1868 earthquake and, though there is some confusion on this point, there may have been an attempt to distribute it, but the report was suppressed. Exactly by whom and whether it was an organized effort is unknown. But no trace of the report has ever been found.

  And yet California continued to be regarded as earthquake country, and those who lived in the state and traveled outside often touted themselves as experts. A case in point was California senator William Gwin, who happened to be in New York City when that city was struck by what is still the largest earthquake in the city’s history.

  It was midafternoon on Sunday, August 10, 1884. The effects were felt from Richmond, Virginia, to Portland, Maine. An indication of the severity of the shaking came from Hoboken, New Jersey, where a 300-pound man, asleep on his bed, was immediately thrown to the floor. Two police officers standing at midspan on the recently completed Brooklyn Bridge reported that the great stone towers at either end of the bridge oscillated visibly several times, the bridge responding as if it had suddenly been struck by a hurricane. And in Brooklyn, John O’Mara of the fire department, who was on duty at the top of City Hall—his job was to spot fires—said that when the building started to sway, he was preparing himself from a quick ride down to the streets below.

  Immediately after this was over, a reporter for the New York Times spotted Senator Gwin standing in front of a hotel. The reporter asked Gwin, “What on earth was that?”

  The senator responded with no great enthusiasm. “That was an earthquake. I was raised on ’em.”

  “Did you consider this a severe shock?” queried the reporter.

  “Yes, it was quite severe, but in California, I’ve been through all the earthquakes since 1849. The severest one was in 1868. Since then we have experienced repeated shocks, but all have been light.”

  “How long do you think today’s shock lasted?”

  “Not over five seconds,” the senator replied. “To persons not used to earthquakes, it probably seemed much longer.”

  Then just before he left, the senator from California turned to the reporter and said, “Oh, yes, I’ve been raised on earthquakes.”

  Three types of people live in California: those who have never experienced an earthquake but hope to feel one; those who have felt a moderate amount of shaking and were intrigued by the ordeal; and those who have felt strong shaking. Ask anyone from the last group what it was like and that person will begin by staring at you in silence, then in deliberate tones take several minutes to recount exactly what they saw, felt, heard, and thought during what was probably only ten or twelve seconds of unbelievable confusion and mayhem.

  For the first 12 years that Andrew Lawson lived in California, he was a member of the first group—his frequent travels taking him often outside the state. The first opportunity to join the second group came in 1898 when an earthquake originated just north of Berkeley. Two railroad bridges were damaged and several buildings in Vallejo, just north of Berkeley, collapsed. Lawson, however, was on a yearlong sabbatical in Europe when that earthquake happened. It was March 30, 1898, and the shaking overturned oil lamps, starting a half-dozen fires in Vallejo. It took a day to bring the fires under control, a harbinger of what was to happen in San Francisco in eight years.

  Lawson was in Berkeley in 1904 when dozens of small earthquakes rocked the area for more than a month. The series began with a mild earthquake on November 27, then four quick ones, in less than ten minutes, on December 1. Those four were enough to cause chandeliers to swing and a few brick chimneys to collapse in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, the three largest cities in the state.

  The main shock occurred at midmonth and it prompted a newspaper reporter to seek out and question Lawson about this peculiar sequence of events.

  “History and records show that earthquakes in this locality have never been of a very violent nature,” the professor said in what can only be imagined was an authoritative tone, “and so far as I can judge from the nature of the recent disturbances and from accounts of past occurrences, there is no occasion for alarm at the present time.”

  Two weeks after he had made that pronouncement, the last earthquake of the series happened, on New Year’s Day, 1905. Newspapers wondered how many of the revelers even felt the event, though the shaking was enough to break some plate-glass windows and to dislodge one of the heavy iron pinnacles atop the City Hall on Larkin Street.

  So once again seismic peace was the norm in San Francisco. But a certain irony creeps into the story here.

  A year later, in January 1906, Lawson and former student Harold Fairbanks, the most recent graduate of the geology program at the university, took a trip to southern California to uncover information about the 1857 earthquake that had been felt across the entire state.

  They started in the Cholame Valley of the Coast Ranges, 200 miles southeast of San Francisco. They talked to ranchers who had felt the earthquake. Some ranchers showed them the “earthquake crack” that had formed during the event.

  Lawson left Fairbanks at midmonth and returned to Berkeley. Fairbanks continued south. With the help of local ranchers, he was able to follow the 1857 rupture through the San Emigdio Mountains north of Los Angeles and along the boundary defined by the Mojave Desert on the north and the San Gabriel Mountains on the south. As Fairbanks would soon write, the 1857 rupture had run along a “uniformly straight course” for more than 200 miles.

  This realization—at this time—is remarkable because barely a month after he returned to Berkeley, a similar rupture, also uniformly straight in its course and also running for more than 200 miles, would form in northern California, abruptly changing the lives of Fairbanks and Lawson and the other half a million people who lived in and around San Francisco.

  ****Such local depressions, which are now known as sag ponds, are commonly recognized along active faults and indicate a place where there is an offset along a fault strand where earthquake movement is stretching the land, thus causing the ground to drop and form depressions. Conversely, in some places earthquake movement can produce a compression, in which case the land is pushed up and forms what are termed pressure ridges.

  Chapter 3

  A Tumult of Motions and Noises

  I stood in the doorway, as that was the safest place.

  —Alice Eastwood, San Francisco, 1906

  In 1906, near the end of a career that others would later characterize as “geologizing” the American West, Grove Karl Gilbert wrote: “It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption, and feel an earthquake.”

  The glacier, so he said, came easy because it “is always ready.” So too the eruption, which “has a course to run.” But the earthquake, “unheralded and brief,” so Gilbert wrote, might elude a geologist for an entire career.

  His encounters with glaciers and eruptions had in fact come easy. In 1899, as a member of a scientific expedition to Alaska, he photographed and mapped more than 40 glaciers, at one point spending three days hiking across the giant rivers of ice that descended from mountains and into the upper end of Glacier Bay. On the same trip to Alaska, he sailed in a small ship within sight of Pavlov volcano—Gilbert was pleased to report that the volcano was erupting from its summit—then spent an afternoon climbing over the steaming crags of Bogoslof Island, which had recently risen from the sea. But the shaking of an earthquake still eluded him.

  Gilbert left Alaska too soon to feel an earthquake that originated beneath Yakutat Bay and produced a 40-foot wave that swamped the shoreline. He had stood on the shoreline a month earlier and, when told of the shaking and of the wave, seemed genuinely disappointed to have missed both. Twenty-seven years earlier, he had been “tantalized,” so he wrote, when on his first trip to the American West and after four months in California and Nevada, he had
returned east just weeks before the 1872 earthquake in Owens Valley that was felt from Oregon to Mexico. But geologic upheaval finally found him. It was during the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, a Wednesday, and he was asleep in bed.

  He had been living in Berkeley since the previous November, having come west at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt, who asked Gilbert to determine whether hydraulic mining should be resumed to extract gold from the hills of loose rock on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. In the end Gilbert would recommend against it, noting that hydraulic mining had a much wider impact than the silting of rivers. It had altered the flow of tidewater into and out of San Francisco Bay and had affected the shape of the tidal bar outside the Golden Gate, which meant it had a negative impact on shipping and commerce in the bay.

  But this report was years in the future. For now, he was asleep in a private room on the second floor of the Faculty Club at the university—a place, he confided to a friend, “the typical Club-man would find dull,” but which provided him with adequate comfort.

  On the fateful morning, Gilbert was awakened by “a tumult of motions and noises.” His immediate reaction was one of joyful anticipation because, as he would write, “It was with unalloyed pleasure that I became aware that a vigorous earthquake was in progress.”

  He soon realized that the noises were coming from the creaking of the building, made of a frame of heavy redwood, and from the rattling of furniture—both sounds diverting his attention from the specific sound associated with the earthquake itself. As he lay in bed the shaking intensified, and he noticed that although the motion came from many directions, the dominant one was a swaying in a north-south direction. Later, after the shaking had stopped, he watched the electric lamp suspended from the ceiling in his room continue to swing in a north-south direction and noted that water from a pitcher and liquid from a chamber pot had sloshed out to the south.

  He rose immediately and inspected his surroundings. Except for the slight movement of furniture, nothing was displaced in his room. He searched other parts of the building and the outside of nearby buildings and saw no damage. Later, a thorough inspection of the university campus done by others would show that some books in the library had fallen off shelves, that a few chimneys had been twisted, and that some glassware in the chemistry lab had fallen and shattered on the floor. But there was no major damage evident in Berkeley.

  After Gilbert left the Faculty Club, he walked the campus grounds. The sun had just risen and he would have noticed the promise of a warm spring day. At some point, perhaps late in the morning, he must have encountered Lawson, and the two men would have exchanged stories. Both had been awakened by the shaking. Lawson felt sure that there had been two distinct shocks separated by a brief lull. The second shock was the more violent of the two, and it had been strong enough to bring down a massive four-flue brick chimney atop his roof, the only damage to his house as far as he could determine. The debris, Lawson noted, fell to the southeast.

  The two men probably sought out Armin Leuschner, a professor of astronomy who was in charge of the two seismographs at the university and also the two at Lick Observatory, 50 miles to the south. These instruments had been purchased to determine how earthquake shaking—even a slight amount of shaking—might affect the astronomical equipment at the university and at the observatory. So Leuschner was already knowledgeable about earthquakes—having experienced the 1898 shaking—and knew what one could do.

  In his case, he had also been at home at the time of the severe shaking. And when it had started, he automatically did two things: He gathered his three children—ages one, four, and eight—in his arms and carried them outside, and as he did this, he also started counting to determine how long the shaking lasted.

  Leuschner had even had the presence of mind—as Lawson had—to recognize that there had been two shocks and that the first one had lasted 40 seconds, followed by a comparative lull of ten seconds, then a second, stronger shaking that ended abruptly after 25 seconds.

  As to the two seismographs at Berkeley, the arrival of the first earthquake wave had hit so hard that the recording drums and needles and driving clocks had been knocked into disarray and the records were useless. Leuschner spent much of the morning repairing and resetting them. For the next few days, the needles vibrated almost continuously, recording the occurrence of hundreds of aftershocks.

  At this point, a question is raised: When did Gilbert or Lawson or Leuschner or any of the people they met that morning realize the severity of the earthquake and where it had originated? Lawson would remark that, from the lack of serious damage to buildings in Berkeley—he had gone off on foot and done a quick personal assessment of the city—initially he doubted whether it had been a significant earthquake. But there were two circumstantial reasons that were leading him to a different conclusion.

  First, by midmorning, columns of smoke could be seen rising from the southern part of San Francisco across the bay. By mid-afternoon, these half-dozen or so columns had coalesced into a huge single billowing black cloud that towered over the city, the top of which was drifting eastward toward Berkeley. Detonations were also heard coming from San Francisco. But exactly what had happened was still a mystery.*****

  There were, of course, rumors coming from people crossing the ferries and landing in Oakland, but their stories did not have credibility and at this point had to be regarded as rumors. Obviously, the shaking had affected San Francisco and had done damage beyond. But how far?

  And then there was the silence. All telephone lines and all but one telegraph wire to San Francisco had been cut off at the moment of the earthquake—and the single wire would be lost later that afternoon. Lawson’s counterpart, geologist John Branner at Stanford University, located 30 miles south of San Francisco and where damage to buildings had been severe, would not be able to send out a message and describe his ordeal for two days. There was also no word coming from north of the city. In Santa Rosa and Petaluma, where some buildings were totally razed, a week would pass before reliable reports from creditable people were sent. The first indication that Lawson or Gilbert or Leuschner received that damage had been widespread and severe in places came to them later when a bicycle rider arrived from Lick Observatory.

  Located atop Mount Hamilton east of San Jose, Lick Observatory was then the home of the world’s second largest telescope and several smaller ones. After the earthquake hit, though there was only slight damage—none to the telescopes—the astronomers decided they should send word to the university in Berkeley that ran the observatory. They tried to use a telephone, but the connection was down. And so one of the night assistants—unfortunately, his name was never recorded—was dispatched by bicycle to place a call from San Jose.

  It is 26 miles from Lick Observatory to San Jose. It is all downhill, but there are scores of tight turns. Upon reaching that community, the rider saw that all was confusion. Gas lines were broken and all but a few buildings had collapsed. There were no telephone lines or telegraph wires to the outside. So the rider got back on his bicycle and rode on.

  It was another 50 miles to Berkeley. He passed through a string of small communities—Milpitas and Fremont, Hayward and San Leandro. In places, he had to dismount and walk his bicycle around gaping cracks in the road. If he had looked inside one of the many ruined houses, he would have seen that most of the plaster and almost all of the wooden laths and cornices had fallen and that loose articles had been violently thrown around. In Oakland, he would have noticed that almost all of the larger buildings, especially schools and churches, were totally wrecked. He reached Berkeley in the late afternoon and reported what he had seen.

  Lawson responded by composing a note to the governor asking that the state of California formally establish a scientific commission to study what had happened. Leuschner remained with his seismographs, keeping them running, and recording whenever he felt the ground shake again. And Gilbert, if he h
ad not yet done so, was now on his way to Oakland to try to find passage on a ferry to San Francisco.

  It was mayhem at the pier. Refugees from San Francisco were already crowding the waterfront. Every place that could be used for shelter was filled. City officials had begun to lead processions of people inland, pressing into service all sorts of wheeled conveyances. Stray household pets, separated from their owners, seemed to be everywhere.

  Gilbert tried to find passage to San Francisco but every captain refused, saying that soldiers on the other side would not let anyone disembark. So Gilbert left and returned to Berkeley.

  He was back in Oakland the next morning. Across the bay, he could see that the entire waterfront of San Francisco was ablaze, with flames shooting up like discharges from a blast furnace. Gilbert could hear the distant rumble of dynamite, indicating that there was a desperate attempt to fight the fire. Reaching the Oakland pier, he saw that a sign had been erected: “Do not furnish passage to a single person to San Francisco until further notice. We cannot handle them.”

  And so, for a second time, he was unable to cross and returned to Berkeley.

  A great earthquake had literally shaken him while he was in his bed, and now he was unable to study it. That frustration, certainly, played on his mind. But there was something else he wanted to see—a woman named Alice. She lived in San Francisco, where reports were now arriving of death and destruction and of people desperately fighting fires—and he must have wondered what had happened to her.

  Born in Colorado, the first year she lived in California, 1893, Alice Eastwood made a solo ascent of Mount Shasta. She carried a backpack of her own design, which she had made by sewing two sheepskin rugs together. Inside was a bedroll, personal effects, and a small container of food—some sausages, canned sardines, a handful of figs, and a few slices of cheese.