Earthquake Storms

by John Dvorak

  Concrete had been used by the ancient Romans to construct many different types of structures, but after the empire passed, its use was limited until the 1870s when French engineer Francois Hennebique pioneered the idea of wrapping concrete columns and of embedding concrete slabs with steel bars to give individual architectural elements a high amount of tensional strength. Hennebique’s idea was quickly adopted elsewhere, most notably in New York and Chicago, but it was regarded with suspicion in San Francisco, where leaders of brick-layer unions, concerned about the employment of their members, dissuaded architects and building contractors from using it.

  That changed after 1906, when it was clear that the few buildings in San Francisco constructed of reinforced concrete had performed remarkably well during the earthquake and the subsequent fire. Though the city still had limits on how high a structure could be built using the new technique, by June 1907, there were 78 reinforced concrete buildings under construction in San Francisco. As far as can be determined, Lawson was the first to use it to build a house.

  He consulted with his friend and Berkeley neighbor Bernard Maybeck on how the house should be designed and how it should be constructed. Maybeck had joined the university faculty as a drawing instructor in civil engineering in 1894. Four years later, showing a remarkable talent in his drawings and originality in design, he was named the university’s first professor of architecture. In 1896, while still an instructor, Maybeck had designed a Gothic-style house for Lawson that was built south of the university and where Lawson and his family had been at the time of the earthquake, the only damage being a collapsed brick chimney.

  Maybeck’s career eventually soared. During his long career, which covered more than 60 years, he would be the chief architect on more than a hundred major projects in the San Francisco area. His most famous design is the Palace of Fine Arts constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This giant rotunda—which during the 1930s housed 18 lighted tennis courts—is one of only a few surviving structures of the Exposition and the only one still situated on its original site. In 2005 it was added to the National Register of Historic Landmarks, and in 2009 a seismic retrofit was completed to insure—it is hoped—that this iconic architectural feature of San Francisco will survive all future seismic shaking.

  Inspired by the idea of combining the Mediterranean-style setting and climate of Berkeley with the fact that Mount Vesuvius had erupted just two weeks before the San Francisco earthquake, Lawson and Maybeck settled on a design for the house modeled on a Pompeiian villa. They kept the imposing cubistic form and large rooms but abandoned the interior mural paintings, replacing them with multicolored diamond patterns scratched into the concrete walls. Instead of a tile roof, they had the building covered with a single large concrete slab angled at a low pitch. Five bedrooms occupied the upstairs floor, each room communicating directly with two sleeping porches.

  The house was constructed on a tract of land called La Loma Park, a wooded area that Lawson and Maybeck had purchased in 1900 and that is located immediately north of the university. This area did not yet have paved roads, so mule-drawn wagons were used to haul the concrete and steel bars and other material to the site. The concrete was mixed by hand in batches of one cubic yard and carried in buckets by a small army of local laborers. The final structure has outer walls that are three feet thick.

  Maybeck covered the outside of the building with stucco that he had colored a light red on the lower part and buff on the upper so that it resembled a Pompeiian villa. He also had muddy water thrown onto freshly painted walls to give the house an appearance of age.

  The building’s resistance to fire was tested decades later on September 17, 1923, when a grass fire in nearby Wildcat Canyon spread into the Berkeley city limits. Lawson was away, attending a college reunion in Toronto. Well-intentioned neighbors broke into his house and removed much of the furniture and many valuable objects. But the progress of the fire was too fast, and the would-be rescuers had to abandon Lawson’s furniture and other valuables on the street, where they were consumed by flames.

  In all, the fire burned through 50 city blocks and destroyed nearly 600 homes. But the Lawson house withstood the flames. Everything inside the house, including his library—he was a collector of rare books—and his personal papers, escaped unharmed. Fortunately for the scientific and bibliophilic communities, the neighbors had only tried to “save” the furniture by removing it from the house.

  The ability of Lawson’s house to withstand strong earthquake shaking has yet to be tested—but it will be. Lawson located his house on a hillside with a grand view of the bay, knowing it was within 200 feet of the active Hayward Fault.

  As the scientific investigation of the 1906 earthquake was progressing—and while he was building his house, which was completed in 1909—Lawson also investigated the effects of other recent earthquakes, notably the 1868 event that had produced the strongest shaking and the most damage prior to 1906. In talking to people who had experienced that event, he was able to uncover the fact that a rupture had formed at intervals along a nearly straight line from the east side of Mills College in Oakland southward through the center of the town of Hayward (which was then known as Haywards), where damage had been the most severe, to the small isolated community of Warm Springs, which today is the home of many high-technology companies and is part of the incorporated city of Fremont.

  From his inquiries, Lawson came to realize that if the trace of the 1868 rupture was projected north, it would pass through a long narrow valley, one that was similar in length and in width to the narrow valley that contains Olema and Point Reyes Station and that the 1906 rupture ran through.* And if the trend of the valley was extended north, it would pass along the western base of the Berkeley Hills.

  In all, Lawson realized that a second active fault—the Hayward Fault, as he called it—ran along the entire length of the east side of San Francisco Bay. As to the risk of building a house right next to an active fault, even after the 1906 disaster, Lawson shared the opinion of many others: The seismic damage caused to buildings in 1906—as well as in 1868—had been the result of poor construction. If a house was built, in Lawson’s words, of “honest construction,” then any house could be made “practically earthquake-proof.” And that idea could be extended, so he argued, to any other type of structure—even one that was built near an active fault.

  As a case in point, one of the most imposing structures constructed during the two decades that followed the 1906 earthquake was a football stadium at the University of California, dedicated as California Memorial Stadium. Even before its completion in 1923, it was known that the stadium straddled the Hayward Fault. So the architects, of a practical bent, designed the stadium as two halves that would slide apart in the event of a major earthquake.

  But Lawson’s house—which was, essentially, a concrete bunker—and California Memorial Stadium—where specially designed joists were used—were exceptions. For the most part, San Francisco was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake without consideration of what a future earthquake might do to the city because, as seemed evident—and was certainly pragmatically true—the city had been destroyed primarily by fire, not by earthquake shaking.

  So new fire codes were written and approved, but regulations that required the construction of earthquake-resistant buildings were not, because it was generally agreed that such requirements were already covered by regulations that buildings withstand wind gusts.

  This was the general thinking behind construction in San Francisco at the time—until it came to the most challenging construction project of the era in California. In that case, concern about the San Andreas was of paramount importance because the project involved the building of a great bridge to span the mile-wide entrance to San Francisco Bay known as the Golden Gate.

  The narrow strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean was once a river gorge that formed during a
low stand of the sea during a recent ice age—the ocean shoreline then far to the west. During those frigid times, a large cap of ice covered much of North America and Europe. The subsequent melting of the ice cap caused the level of the sea to rise, drowning what, along the central California coast, were coastal hills whose tops are now the Farallon Islands. It also drowned the river gorge, giving us what is one of the most picturesque land and seascapes in the world. Eventually, the drowning of the gorge produced something else, something uniquely human: a temptation and desire to span the strait with a bridge.

  In 1921, Joseph Strauss, a prominent Chicago engineer and noted bridge builder, printed and distributed, at his own expense, a brochure entitled Bridging “the Golden Gate.” In it, he described how such a bridge could be built. Years followed as he revised his designs and lobbied for the necessary local, state, and federal approvals. Finally, on December 4, 1928, the state of California established the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, which would oversee the building of such a bridge. Less than a year later, on August 15, 1929, the board of directors of the highway district officially named Strauss as its chief engineer.

  Early on, the state of California realized that the bridge would have to be financed by private money by the selling of public bonds. Thirty-five million dollars would be needed. But to issue such bonds, the state required the approval of voters. And it was Strauss who led the charge to get such approval.

  With money supplied by the highway district, he bought newspaper advertisements and billboard space to promote the bridge. He convinced local politicians to make speeches in favor of the bridge. Newspaper publishers were paid to print editorials in support of the bridge. Strauss hired experts to produce massive reports that attested to the bridge’s utility in expanding the region’s economy and in providing people with more mobility, now that private automobiles were popular. Eventually, a key question was asked: Would the proposed bridge, which would be the longest single span ever constructed, survive a major earthquake?

  Less than a generation had passed since the 1906 earthquake, so memories of that event were still in people’s minds. But Strauss knew there was a highly regarded local authority who had the expertise to prepare a geology report and that the public would accept immediately what he said. So Strauss hired Andrew Lawson as his geology consultant.

  The Berkeley professor set upon doing the work in his usual diligent and thorough style and presented the report to Strauss on February 12, 1930. The chief engineer exploded when he read it.

  In the report, Lawson described the rocks exposed on the opposite sides of the Golden Gate. At Lime Point, on the north side, was dense basalt that would provide a stable and strong platform for a bridge pier. But on the south side, at Fort Point, the ground was covered by a soft, easily eroded, slippery green rock known as serpentine.*

  No excavation or deep drilling had yet been done, so Lawson did not know how far downward the friable green rock extended. But he was concerned about the stability of any massive structure built on this site. In his opinion, he wrote in the report, the south pier of the bridge would “have to be designed to depend upon the dead load rather than upon the tensile strength of the rock.” He continued by reminding that “once or twice a century, it may reasonably be assumed the region of San Francisco Bay will be shaken by a violent earthquake,” and added, again as a crucial reminder, that the trace of the San Andreas Fault, “upon which [there was] a sudden slip in 1906, with disastrous results to the City of San Francisco,” was just a few miles west of the proposed bridge.

  Those statements were enough to put into question whether the construction of a bridge was technically feasible—and whether Strauss should receive the 35 million dollars to build it—but it was what Lawson wrote next that worried Strauss more.

  Lawson confined himself not only to a consideration of the geology of the site but also to the severe weather conditions. The bridge would be exposed to salt-laden air and battered by strong winds and the occasional Pacific storm. Such conditions, in his opinion, meant the bridge “would have to be replaced once or twice a century owing to deterioration by rust.”

  That last statement—in which Lawson had clearly exceeded his expertise and had gone beyond what Strauss had requested of him was enough for the chief engineer to refuse the entire geology report. The next day, March 7, 1930, Lawson announced that he was resigning as consulting geologist on the project to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Strauss was not a man of charm or diplomacy, but he knew that an unfavorable geology report was better than no geology report at all. So on March 8, the day after Lawson resigned, Strauss sent one of his assistant engineers, Charles Derleth, who was also chairman of the Department of Engineering at Berkeley, to talk with the geology professor and get him “to modify his position.”

  Derleth and Lawson met for two hours. Lawson refused to change the report. Desperate to keep Lawson on as consulting geology, Derleth offered a compromise. The report would be accepted in its entirety if Lawson agreed to add a sentence at the end that read: “Any earthquake so violent that it would destroy the bridge would also destroy San Francisco.”

  Lawson agreed. And the report was published.

  On November 4, 1930, after a half-million-dollar campaign blitz was waged by Strauss in favor of the bridge, voters gave their approval by a margin of three to one to have public bonds issued to finance the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-eight months later, on Sunday, February 26, 1933, at a ground-breaking ceremony on the grounds of the Presidio, Strauss was given a spade and turned over the first patch of earth that officially began construction of the bridge.

  Between the time Lawson was initially hired by Strauss to be consulting geologist and the day of the ground-breaking ceremony, his life changed in a dramatic way. It began with the death of his wife while he was preparing his geology report.

  Ludovika von Jansch, the daughter of a judge, was born in 1864 in Brunn, Moravia, in what is today the Czech Republic but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, and it was there that she and Lawson met and married. Ludovika never learned to speak English and conversed with her husband only in German. Lawson’s sister Katherine, three years his junior and the same age as Ludovika, considered her sister-in-law to be “a nervous creature.” No one in the Lawson family ever got personally close to her. After nearly 20 years of marriage and the raising of four children, she and her husband started arguing frequently. Ludovika finally moved out and left Berkeley and found a house in Carmel. Lawson remained at his job, continuing an intense schedule of teaching, research, and travel. In 1929, Ludovika became seriously ill and, after a prolonged hospitalization back in Berkeley, she died on Christmas Day.

  Four months after her death—and after completing his geology report and having it reluctantly accepted by Strauss—Lawson left California for several months. At age 70, he still presented the aspect of a spry and energetic man. His friends commented on his ability to maintain a slender figure and a muscular tone. His hair was now white, though thick with only a little bald on top, and his eyebrows bushy. He wore a wide walrus mustache, having recently cut off his beard, which he would not let grow again for another ten years. On this trip, he first went to Morocco, where he stayed for several months working with two French geologists who were studying the Atlas Mountains. After that, he stopped in Canada to attend a scientific meeting and to see a lifelong friend, William Collins, director of the Geological Survey of Canada.

  Unknown to Lawson as he prepared to return to Berkeley, his friends had decided that they would shower such affection and warmth on him when he returned that he would forget about his deceased wife. But he had a surprise for them. When he returned to Berkeley, he announced that he had remarried.

  She was Isabel Collins, William Collins’s daughter. She and Lawson had first met three years earlier on a geological expedition in Canada led by her fath
er and for which she had been the expedition’s assistant cook. It was her first time on such a trip and Lawson had taken the time to instruct her on some of the pleasures of such journeys, such as how to handle a canoe. On his stop in Canada during his return to Berkeley from Morocco, they resumed their acquaintance and an intense romance developed. They secretly married; she informed her parents by telephone after they left Canada and were driving to California. Isabel Collins was then in her last year of college at McGill University in Montreal, where her major course of study was home economics. She was 21 years old.

  Once they arrived in Berkeley, their May-December romance and marriage became a frequent topic of gossip, whispered about by neighbors and occasionally finding its way into the pages of national newspapers. The new bride moved into Lawson’s earthquake-proof and fireproof house near the university, but she thought the thick walls and the limited lighting were depressing, so her husband had a new house of standard design and construction built and that was where they resided. But eventually she tired of Berkeley, so a third house was bought in Carmel, and that was where Isabel lived during the summer months, swimming and writing long letters to her husband, whom she affectionately called “Skipper,” while he responded to her letters by sending her poetry.

  It was during this time, during the early years of their marriage, the question arose: Given its proximity to the San Andreas Fault and the unstable character of the green serpentine, should the Golden Gate Bridge be constructed?

  For a variety of reasons, mainly economic and engineering, involving controlling costs and dealing with the reality of the finite strength of materials that would be used to build the bridge, the central span of the proposed bridge, which would be a single-suspension structure, could not exceed 4,200 feet. Simple arithmetic showed that in order to cross the mile-wide strait, one of the piers had to be built at least 1,000 feet from shore. Soundings showed that out from Lime Point on the north side, the water deepened quickly to more than 300 feet, so the north pier had to be built on land. But on the south side there is an underwater shelf that slopes slightly, so that at 1,000 feet from shore, the water depth is only 60 feet. It was there, at the edge of the shelf, where the south pier had to be constructed. That meant not only would the south pier rest on serpentine, which Lawson in his geology report had described as “in a rather badly sheared condition,” but the foundation for the bridge had to be excavated to a yet-to-be-determined depth underwater!