Color Photos of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

[RJBowman]

http://www.retronaut.com/2011/03/colour-photographs-of-san-franciscos-earthquake-and-fire/

With the color, and without evidence of period fashion or vehicles, you might think that these photos were taken in Detroit today.

[Arabella Periscope]

It is shocking how contemporary they look.  If I lived in San Francisco, I would feel a little more threatened by the potential for another quake.

[RJBowman]

The building codes were upgraded after the 1906 quake, so it is unlikely that such devastation would occur again.

[Hurricane Annie]

Co incidently  with in  72 hours of your post  Northern California had a  6.9 mega thrust earthquake. 

 Thank heavens they upgraded the building codes  a century ago



 

[RJBowman]

I control the Earth's seismic activity.

[Clym Angus]

An impressive rep for a avatar of cute puppy made of plastic. You are obviously the elder god; Pehlakey-poupeh-coot!
And we should all immediately stop talking to you before we are driven irredeemably insane.

"O dark lord of barking, who gifts unfathomable cuteness unto the world, sated are we by your joyous yapping and beseech you to attend to your astral duties. Go our lord, go with our thanks and in the hope of speedy return."

Ok it looses something in the translation from the ancient Simarian, but I'm hoping the sending ritual will do the job.

[FenrisWolf]

The building codes were upgraded after the 1906 quake, so it is unlikely that such devastation would occur again.

You have to remember that the quake did very little damage to property... the main cause of the fires and destruction was human in its making.

Insurance wouldn't cover 'Acts of God' which earthquake damage would come under, so people lit fires to cause damage to the properties which would be covered by the insurance.

Problem was, the fires got out of control.

[Mr. Boltneck]

Actually, while fire did a lot of damage in San Francisco, seismic building codes have helped reduce damage a lot since 1906. One of the biggest changes is that, here in California, at least, unreinforced masonry buildings are no longer generally permitted. Some still exist, of course—although a number of them collapsed in Santa Cruz and elsewhere in the Loma Prieta quake—and others have been upgraded with new metal framing constructed inside old walls, as in a number of buildings at Stanford University. Without those upgrades, much of the Stanford Quad and at least one residence hall would have been disaster areas in 1989.
This comes up fairly often when people visit the Bay Area from the UK or Europe. They always wonder why so much architecture here is relatively low, and somewhat conservative in design. The fact of the matter is that much of the area is not on the kind of bedrock enjoyed by most of, say, Manhattan, and when you throw in the likelihood of 7+ earthquakes, it can often be prohibitively costly to engineer anything really tall or exotic in shape. Lower and wider is safer, and architects tend to focus on trying to make the enormous diagonal steel bracing look more graceful.

[RJBowman]

It isn't mentioned in the text of the article, but some three of these photo pairs are actually stereoscope images, and if you have that rare skill of viewing such images without a viewer, you can view the carnage of the earthquake in full-color 3-D, the next best thing to being there.

[hardlec]

Most of the big private buildings had pools, mostly as an emergency source of water against a fire. 
Water mains were made of wood.  Fire fighters would dig holes and bore into the mains to get water to fight fires.  When the fire fighting was over the fire fighters would plug the hole in the water main, fill the hole and mark the location of the fire plug. 

The 1906 quake breached many of the private reservoirs, broke many water mains, and destroyed a lot of firehouses and killed and injured many firefighters outright.  This added to the people setting fires etc. to recoup losses and made the city a ruin. 

When I was last in San Francisco, many buildings had memorials to human courage and reminders of how carelessness and ignorance cause so much misery.

For alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears...