Historical perspective: the response to the 1906 earthquake

[Windy]

I found this article a fascinating read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08winchester.html

[Miss Mary]

Quoting several parts that jumped out at me.......

>>Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock and took charge.

The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: "San Francisco is in ruins," the cables read. "Our city needs help."

America read those wires and dropped everything.<<



Thanks for the link. Didn't the great fire of Chicago happen the same year ?

Mary

PS - Self Edit......the Great Fire of Chicago happened in 1871. I was off by a few years there....
http://www.prairieghosts.com/great_fire.html

[soonertwister]

There's been a lot of whitewashing in stories about the "heroic response" of those who were victims of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, but glossy stories about what occurred are scarcely the greater reality.

A large part of the reason why three-quarters of the city went up in flames is because the shell-shocked citizens hit the bottle after the quake, filling saloons and looting the entire inventories of liquor stores.

When authorities ordered men to join the fire lines to assist in reducing the spread of the flames, most men refused, too drunk and too overwhelmed by the magnitude of their calamity to contribute to minimalize the effects of it all. The majority who died from the earthquake died in the fires that followed, much as in Katrina the majority will have died from flooding, not from winds.

And sadly, another corollary is repeated there, and in most major disasters: the poor and helpless suffered the greatest loss. In San Francisco there was a massive effort to protect the mint and the mansions of the wealthy, while huge areas of the poorer part of town saw little or no firefighting at all.