The Day San Francisco Burned: The 1906 Earthquake and Fire

At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground under San Francisco began to move. Within an hour fires were burning in dozens of places, and over three days they destroyed about five hundred city blocks. This film follows the San Andreas Fault, the broken water mains, the army and its dynamite, Chinatown and the paper sons, the tent cities, the bank on a plank, and the scientist who explained how earthquakes work. CHAPTERS 0:05 Prologue 0:44 Chapter 1: The city 1:49 Chapter 2: The fault 2:39 Chapter 3: The morning 3:47 Chapter 4: Fire 5:05 Chapter 5: Soldiers and dynamite 6:36 Chapter 6: Chinatown 7:34 Chapter 7: The homeless city 8:31 Chapter 8: Money 9:27 Chapter 9: What the ground taught 10:05 Chapter 10: Rebuilding 10:48 Chapter 11: What it left behind A NOTE ON NUMBERS Death tolls and damage figures vary between sources, and modern estimates are higher than the 1906 official counts. The Giannini plank-and-barrels story, the Telegraph Hill wine story and the Lloyd's of London pay-in-full story are popular accounts that may be polished by time. KEY SOURCES U.S. Geological Survey: The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Wikipedia: 1906 San Francisco earthquake Britannica: San Francisco earthquake of 1906 Online Archive of California PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS All images are in the public domain: Library of Congress; The New York Public Library; California State Library; contemporary newspapers and publications; via Wikimedia Commons. No image is used more than once. MUSIC "Dark Times" and "Long Note Two" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/