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The '06 quake shook the East Bay plenty — as the Berkeley Gazette said at the time, "not a chimney was left standing from Hayward to Martinez" — but it largely escaped the devastation that left San Francisco in ruins.
For many East Bay cities, it was far less traumatic than the other "Great Quake" — the one that shook the Hayward fault in 1868.
Instead, the biggest impact of the 5:12 a.m. shaker was the influx of refugees that flooded across the Bay.
In the days following the disaster, about 78,000 San Franciscans came to Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda, arriving by train, ferry and anything else that floated, including Chinese junks and Italian fishing boats.
BERKELEY
'People really, really came together'
Traumatized by the shaking earth and the flames that followed, weary San Franciscans straggled to safety after hours without food and water.
"Most of the people were in monstrous shape," says Richard Schwartz, a Berkeley general contractor turned historian and author. "They were in shock. (At the time), it was the biggest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history."
Many refugees still wore their nightclothes and carried an odd
"(Berkeley resident) Herbert Kling saw his grandfather arrive in his best top hat and (carrying) a special tree frog in a glass jar that was popular then," says Schwartz, who started researching Berkeley's past a decade ago after rescuing a 1 1/2-foot stack of 100-year-old newspapers being tossed out by the Berkeley Historical Society.
Schwartz captures the mood and mayhem that followed the magnitude 7.9 earthquake through these anecdotes and other nearly lost tales in "Earthquake Exodus, 1906: Berkeley Responds to the San Francisco Refugees" (RSB Books, $24.95).
In Berkeley, a 100-foot water tower toppled, an explosion at a cooking oil factory threatened to spread fire throughout the industrial district and a crack opened up toward the west end of University Avenue stretching for several blocks. One workman picking up lumber at a West Berkeley wharf reported being swept into the Bay by a 4- to 5-foot wall of water that hit approximately 10 minutes after the earthquake.
Around town, 5,000 chimneys suffered damage or turned to rubble, including that of geology professor Andrew C. Lawson, who had recently named the San Andreas fault.
Noting that not every community welcomed refugees — San Jose, for instance, declined the honor — Schwartz came to admire the generous spirit and efficiency of Berkeley's voluntary, citizen-led relief effort.
Nearly every resident opened the door to friends or strangers, and University of California, Berkeley, students gave up their sorority and fraternity houses to shelter the refugees. Others camped in tents on university sports fields.
At the time a town of 26,000, Berkeley took in 8,000 displaced San Franciscans in the first two days following the earthquake. At its peak, the city housed 15,000 refugees.
"People really, really came together," Schwartz says. "They (gave away so much that they) were running out of food. They were giving away their finest quilts."
Refugees feasted on bean sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and whatever cheese and meats could be scrounged from neighborhood grocery stores. Maria Verges, owner and cook for the French restaurant Villa des Roses, at 2012 Fourth St. near University, housed 60 refugees and fed many more, including longtime customers. She never asked for a penny, Schwartz says.
Hospital supplies, boiled potatoes, oranges, oats and clothing eventually rolled into town from around the state and across the nation.
Ten weeks after it started, the Berkeley relief effort formally ended.
"There was no thought of looking to the government for something," Schwartz says. "They did what needed to be done, and they did not hesitate."
- Richard Schwartz will discuss "Earthquake Exodus, 1906" and show period photographs at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. in Berkeley. Admission is $15. Call (510) 841-2242 or e-mail baha@berkeleyheritage.com.
— Monique Beeler OAKLAND
'(It) was heart-rending in the extreme'
Survivors of the 1906 earthquake took their duties as recorders of history seriously. And some of the best documents are personal letters sent to relatives in parts further east.
One such letter is a gripping nine-page, typewritten and single-spaced account written by a former Oakland Herald reporter believed to be named Joseph Hine. The Oakland Herald, one of the many Bay Area newspapers that flourished in the early 1900s, provided the printing presses for the first post-earthquake joint publication of the San Francisco Morning Call, Examiner and Chronicle.
In the letter, Hine describes the earthquake: "I was awakened by a nameless something ... everything in the room was dancing and the house was being rocked from side to side." Of the ensuing fire, he wrote: "Hot cinders were falling around us, burned scraps of paper were flying through the air and our faces burned with intense heat." The anxiety: "There is a general belief out here that San Francisco will one day be swallowed up by the sea."
And on the seventh page, after describing the abandonment of their Baker Street home in San Francisco, he writes: "It was a week from the next day before Maude and I attempted to get across to Oakland. ... Even then, we were in danger of falling walls. We had to walk some distance, and then got into an express wagon ... a number of such wagons were making regular trips from Fillmore Street ... to the ferry for 25 cents a person. Of course, the sidewalks were completely covered with bricks, and the streets were crowded with people on foot. Everyone was sad and many were in tears for the sight was heart-rending in the extreme."
Today, a photocopy of the letter remains in the possession of Brenda and Timothy Town, age 54 and 55, respectively, and who currently live in Tahlequah, Okla. If Hine is in fact the author, he is Timothy Town's great-great-grandfather on his mother's side. The original has gone missing since Town's mother passed away two years ago.
"It's just an amazing letter, a personal letter, he sent out to his family," says Brenda Town. "I hated to see it folded up in a drawer. I want people to appreciate what happened."
Despite Hine's depiction of utter devastation — "San Francisco, as we knew her, has gone. Her heart has been torn from her and the sight is pitiful in the extreme ..." — the glimmer of hope, and of a future, comes in the closing stanzas.
"Here in Oakland, where I have been living since I started back to work at the Herald, everything is crowded, but it is a paradise in comparison with San Francisco," writes Hine. "You can't have any idea how such a great catastrophe wipes out time. There simply isn't any such thing as time then. Life means something different to all of us now. We have been given another chance."
— Candace Murphy
THE VALLEY
Cut off from news, fearing for loved one
The news of the earthquake was not reported by the Livermore Herald until three days later — April 21, 1906.
The main account came from Carl Holm, who was spending some time in the city with his wife, Ida. Holm talked to a reporter about stepping over bodies as the couple tried to make their way out of the Winchester Hotel to safety.
His granddaughter, Livermore native and local historian Tilli Calhoun, doesn't know why her grandparents were in San Francisco. Perhaps the Holms were on a shopping trip, since many people in the Valley often went to San Francisco to get the latest fashions. Maybe they were meeting with others as part of the Danish society. But surely they were not there, as was the case with others that day, to hear the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso sing.
"My parents were more of the 'Beer Barrel Polka' type," Calhoun says with a laugh. People went to the city a lot in those days. "It was an easy trip to take the train over to the ferry."
The worst part for people in the Livermore Valley was not knowing what was going on after the earthquake hit.
"The telephone and telegraph systems were cut off because the lines were all toppled, so you couldn't contact people," Calhoun says. "Although many people were killed in the earthquake, most died during the three days of fires and the family here didn't know if (my grandparents) were safe. It took them three days to get back home. And I think the newspaper reporter had to be at the docks in Oakland to get that story from my grandfather."
Not in her grandfather's newspaper account was the story her grandmother told her of knocking on doors to make sure everyone had gotten out of their hotel rooms.
Her grandparents had been booked into one room, but for some reason were given another. When they knocked on the door of the room they thought they were going to be staying in, they discovered a man dead in his bed. The fireplace had collapsed onto the bed, killing him.
Valley residents could see the flames engulfing San Francisco, according to several personal letters and newspaper accounts.
Some, like Ned Anspacher of Livermore, reported to loved ones in a letter that "I was in Livermore and the house here which is a one-story house rocked like a cradle." He was uneasy about relatives in San Francisco and set out to check on them.
There, he discovered that his relatives had survived.
"We only have what clothes that we have on our backs, that is of course our houses are not destroyed by fire but I guess what is left in there will be stolen or given away by the relief society," Anspacher wrote. "I.W. Hellman, the richest man in the West, stood in line yesterday for bread to eat, so you see what it really is and on top of it all it poured down rain for 12 hours after the fires were out."
The Livermore Herald's account of the quake recorded that damage to Livermore was confined to railroad water tanks and toppling of a few tall chimneys. And although Pleasanton suffered more damage to buildings, "the whole loss is so trifling as to be not worth mentioning in comparison (to San Francisco)."
— Susan Young
NILES
Evidence of quake still visible today
Phil Holmes, the unofficial historian of the Niles district of Fremont, recalls talking to a woman who lived out in what he calls devil's elbow — where Alameda Creek makes a big bend near what was then the town of Alvarado, now part of Union City where Union City Boulevard and Smith Street intersect — during the 1906 earthquake.
"She was asleep early in the morning and she thinks her bed rolled from side to side and bounced back over," Holmes says. "A tree by the house bent all the way over one way, then the other, nearly to the ground."
The woman, now deceased, took Holmes to a nearby bridge she used to fish from and showed him how the creek beneath had moved approximately a quarter of a mile away during the quake.
Overall, the damage in Niles was not nearly as bad as it was during the quake of 1868 on the Hayward fault. Water gushed through cracks in the ground in'06, especially in areas closer to the Bay. Chimneys and shelves came down and many window panes were broken.
Brick houses suffered, but most of the area's earlier adobe buildings had been replaced with wood, and wood buildings hold up much better.
The roof caved in and walls were partly demolished in a brick bank building in the Centerville section of Fremont. "But the most dramatic destruction was in the Palmdale Winery in Irvington," Holmes says. "Big chunks of the wall came down." The winery stood, but was torn down later.
The westernmost pier of the Dresser Bridge, the first rail bridge you come to in the canyon when you're driving east from Niles, crumbled when the hillside above the bridge collapsed, causing a landslide.
The landslide knocked down the pier and dropped the bridge into the river, says Alan Frank, curator of the Pacific Locomotive Association, the organization that runs the Niles Canyon Railway.
"There's still a big 'V' where the hillside came down," Frank says.
The pier was replaced within a few months, and it's stood ever since. The two easternmost piers are original; the westernmost are rebuilt.
Down the road, the Sunol train depot shifted but stayed intact. Instead of a foundation, the station rested on redwood beams on the ground. Franks says it wasn't damaged, but it probably moved like a sled.
If you want to investigate further, many Niles stores are well-stocked with books on the Fremont area that include photos and stories from'06 and other periods.
— Barry Caine
HAYWARD
A safe haven — on a fault of its own
Before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the October 1868 temblor along the Hayward fault was known as "The Great Quake." Estimated at 7 on the Richter scale (which is no longer in use), that quake killed 30 people around Hayward and caused extensive damage both in the East Bay and in San Francisco.
Damage in the Hayward-Castro Valley-San Lorenzo area was less significant in 1906, but as with most East Bay communities, the region saw an influx of refugees. According to documents in the Hayward Area Historical Society, about 1,000 displaced San Franciscans relocated here.
There's some irony in that, because their "safe haven" was and continues to be quite a seismically active area.
While we're all thinking about the devastation of the'06 quake and the way that cataclysmic event changed the Bay Area, we need look no further than downtown Hayward to see the shape of things to come.
On Saturday, Mitchell Craig, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at California State University, East Bay, and Joyce Blueford of Fremont's Math Science Nucleus led a walk along the Hayward fault that demonstrated how slippery life can be on an active fault, even when the ground isn't visibly shaking.
Some of the major stops on the walk included old Hayward City Hall, which sits forlorn and abandoned, the victim of "fault creep," the slow, steady motion of fault segments.
"It's literally being pulled apart," Craig says. "If you look through the windows you can see cracks in the walls about an inch wide."
Creep also causes sidewalks, curbs and even some brick or stone walls to crack or become offset. San Lorenzo Creek, which crosses the Hayward fault in downtown Hayward, has been offset by as much as a mile due to slip and creep along the fault.
The Colorado-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences keeps a close eye on the Hayward fault creep — measured by five "creepmeters" from Pinole to Fremont. The group notes that the Hayward fault has slipped about five millimeters a year for the last several hundred thousand years, and in the last few decades, that has been enough movement to sever buried pipes and crack roads.
Craig says creep and slip can alleviate pressure and keep faults from going into full-on earthquake mode. But the Hayward fault, even with all the apparent movement, isn't creeping fast enough.
"The big event on this fault was in 1886," Craig says, "and the feeling is that we could be about due for another 1886-type event. So it's best to be ready with the earthquake preparedness kit and to not have heavy objects hanging over your bed."
— Chad Jones
