“Mountains should be seen, not heard.”
—Ursala K. Le Guin,
The Left Hand of Darkness

By Phill Courtney
One hundred and twenty years ago this month, the cosmopolitan, Californian metropolis of San Francisco was devastated first by an earthquake centered near the city that approached an 8 on the Richter scale and then, after that, by a three-day urban inferno that completed the job. Thousands were dead in that beautiful “City by the Bay,” but also elsewhere along a fracture that extended for over two hundred miles.
Other U.S. quakes since then have caused more economic damage, but, In terms of the human toll alone, it remains the worst earthquake in the history of the United States, with the only other natural disaster to exceed it being the Galveston, Texas hurricane, which swept away somewhere between five to ten thousand (many bodies were never found) just over five years before.
I grew up hearing about the quake since a cousin of my mother’s, Zell Henley (who was still with us when I was young), had moved from Indiana, a state which may occasionally—very occasionally—get a 4-pointer from time to time, to San Francisco when he was 23, after landing a job with a photography studio only a few months before April 18th, 1906.
Among the “sacred” family relics I’ve held on to through years is a yellowed newspaper clipping from Zell’s hometown newspaper which consists of a letter he wrote to his parents back in Indiana which the paper headlined as a “vivid” account of what he’d gone through and deemed worthy of publication.
In the letter he compared the quake to “the feeling one has in a rowboat on very rough water,” still my favorite description of a powerful earthquake. Other than the letter, though, I and my two younger brothers heard no first-hand accounts of his experience, reflecting, perhaps, some residual PTSD since he’d undoubtedly experienced many unnerving events during the disaster he’d probably hoped to forget—but couldn’t—stories he undoubtedly didn’t consider suitable for young ears.
After he passed in 1965, we did acquire some photos he had of the quake, and he did tell my parents one amusing story. Having been raised a Christian Scientist, a faith that discourages any imbibing of alcohol, by the time he was 23 he’d never touched a drop. However, after the quake, at a time when city water was considered unsafe, wine was everywhere, so Zell made an exception—for health reasons only, of course.
Sometime in the early Sixties, one of the local TV channels was planning to show the 1936 movie, San Francisco, with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and I begged my parents to make a bedtime exception so I could see it. Okay, they said, but you’ll have to make a choice: the Three Stooges drive-in movie that weekend, or San Francisco.
Well, you can probably imagine my choice. The movie includes an extraordinary and classic cinematic reproduction of the quake, but, like many movies do, they took some “liberties” with reality. Not only did they change the time of the quake, but they also showed people disappearing into a gaping earthquake chasm. Yes, there were some cracks, but none big enough to swallow a human.
Nevertheless, this has led many people to believe that such an event actually happened, but, in fact, the only “crack casualty” happened on a farm north of the city which sat directly on the fault. Apparently, she fell into the crack and either got swallowed or mired so badly they had to bury her. She was a cow.
After that disaster, it seems Zell couldn’t get away from quakes because he later moved down to Los Angeles with his wife, only to experience the March 1933 Long Beach quake, which, in terms of human lives, is our state’s second worst, with a toll that’s often rounded off to 120. (Some quakes deaths are “iffy”—like heart attacks.)
Later in the Sixties, I used Zell’s photos as a centerpiece to create a display about quakes for a junior high science fair that included red lines on a California road map with strings connecting them to labels of each fault, along with some “quake boxes,” in which shifting dirt had displaced some miniature houses I acquired. It won an award.
Then, a few years later, Southern Californians went through the Sylmar/San Fernando quake of February 1971, which killed some 60 people, and would have produced a far more drastic disaster, with the potential for thousands of deaths, if the Van Norman reservoir hadn’t held by a matter of mere feet.
What I remember most about that morning was the sight of my mother dashing up the stairs in our Corona home to see if her children were okay. At the age of seven, she had gone through the 1933 Long Beach quake, riding it out in the Young Apartments built by her grandfather in Los Angeles, and advertised as quake resistant. They were and still stand today beside the Santa Monica freeway.
Continuing on in my family’s quake tradition, during the summer of 1988 a friend joined me for what could be called A Quake Tour, motoring through areas hit by the impressive Montana quake in August of 1959, followed by the site of another monstruous quake that hit Idaho in October 1983; both resulting in some amazing earth movements.
The Montana quake produced what has been called the most massive earth movement of any quake in the history of the United States, with the possible exception of Alaska’s 1964, five-minute, 9-pointer, that remains in the top five for all quakes in recorded history and moved massive areas of land.
In Montana’s 7.2 quake, millions of tons of earth some half-a-mile across and 400 feet high were sheered away from the side of a mountain and sent thundering into the valley below. Sadly, there was a campsite along the river at the bottom of that valley west of Yellowstone, and the bodies of 19 sleeping campers were buried forever under the slide.
At the same time, the slide was displacing massive amounts of air before it, resulting in hurricane-strength winds on both sides of the slide. Caught in that blast of air was a father and mother, along with their four children, spending what they thought would be a peaceful night in the camp.
When the quake hit shortly before midnight, the mother braced herself, then watched in horror as her husband grabbed ahold of a slender tree with both hands; was pulled horizonal by the wind; flapped there like a flag in a gale for several moments until he was torn away and disappeared into the night.
The only survivors were the mother and her oldest son, who were both stripped of their clothing and then skinned bloody raw as they tumbled down the canyon amid fragments of rocks and trees. It remains the most hair-raising account I’ve ever read about any earthquake.
The 6.9 1983 Idaho quake produced a long fissure at the base of a mountain range, and I took a photo of my friend leaning against it, while the most dramatic story of the quake came from a woman who was out elk hunting with her husband and friend when the quake hit, throwing her to the ground.
Then, on hands and knees, she looked up and witnessed the crack advancing towards and then by her. She later said it looked like God had taken a pair of serrated scissors and was cutting a seam in the earth. The last time I heard, it remains the only eyewitness account of a quake rupture as it traveled. (Last year, and apparently for the first time ever, a moving fissure was caught on a surveillance camera during a 7.7 quake in Myanmar.)
The year after my tour, San Francisco and other Bay Area communities were hit by the 7.0 Loma Prieta quake in October that collapsed a section of the Bay Bridge, with the most shocking effect being the collapse of a double-decker freeway through Oakland. Caught and killed in the half-a-mile crush were 43 unlucky motorists sandwiched between the layers.
There was one lucky aspect to this quake, however. It happened just before the start of a World Series game in Candlestick Park involving the Oakland and S. F. teams, so many were inside watching television at the time. If not for the series, many people would have been homeward bound in rush hour traffic and hundreds might have been killed.
When I’d lived in the Bay area in the mid-eighties on my way to a teaching credential through the Cal State university in Hayward, I had driven that section of freeway a number of times and always looked up at the overhead layer while doing so, wondering if it would hold during a significant quake. Four years later I had my answer.
After that quake, I started my annual “quake day” for students on its date to help them prepare for the hazards; show slides of my photos; and share some dramatic stories. The date fell on a weekend in October of 1999 so I did my quake day the previous Friday. That weekend we were hit by the 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake out in the desert (one day before the date of 1989’s Loma Prieta quake), and wide-eyed students arrived Monday morning announcing breathlessly: Mr. Courtney! How did you know?
My continuing “earthquake obsessions” (I blame it on my mother’s cousin) also inspired me to take a couple of “quake tours” with Kathleen Springer, at that time the San Bernardino County Museum’s “go to gal” on quakes. The second tour took us north of San Bernardino, while the first in 2012 took us down to the deserts near Palm Springs and farther south where we were shown the fascinating way seismologists have been able to pinpoint—almost to the year—the dates of quakes long ago, which hadn’t been possible in the past.
In an area near the Salton Sea, we went into a trench along a dry stream bed where “trenching,” and a science called paleoseismology, pioneered in the 1970s, became the key to dating quakes. Here’s how it works: the trench exposes layers of deposited sand after each year’s seasonal water flow; layers that contain organic material such as bits of bark, which can then be subjected to the carbon dating process.
These layers show the age of quakes similar to the rings of growth in a tree which can indicate years of draught and flooding based on the width of the rings. In the trench these layers lain on top of each other like a layer cake show the times quakes happened when a distinct jog or vertical jump is noted in the layer. These are the years quakes happened.
When they came to the first break many layers down, dating determined that it had happened sometime between 1680 and ‘85, when the last “big one” occurred on the southern section of the legendary 400-hundred-mile-long San Andreas fault (the longest in the world), and the one responsible for the 1906 quake.
This was an extremely startling find showing that the southern section has been “locked” for some 350 years, and especially since past breaks have determined that the intervals between “big ones” range between 300 to 600 years. In other words: any time now, or perhaps…after we’re all gone.
As always with predicting quakes: while they now have some fairly precise years from long past, they haven’t, as of yet, been able to “nail down” the year (let alone months and days) of quakes still to come. Although it’s always risky to speak in absolutes, this may never be possible, although this hasn’t stopped them from trying.
So, what we can do, and what we have yet to do with any degree of wide-ranging rational commitment, is to prepare for quakes—which doesn’t refer to your “quake kit” stashed under your bed, although that’s not to say it isn’t a helpful idea.
No, what hasn’t happened are regulations with “teeth”—regulations that prevent builders from putting homes and other structures directly over earthquake faults (yes, a challenge in California)—regulations that mandate the demolition of structures known to be earthquake hazards—and fire regulations to prevent massive conflagrations like the one that hit San Francisco.
Although they weren’t earthquake triggered, the massive fires last year that destroyed Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena could have been if a quake had hit, especially during a period of strong Santa Ana winds, and one documentary about the 1906 disaster reveals that insurance underwriters had determined long before that San Francisco was a city “waiting to burn.”
Finally, we Californians have been extremely fortunate in recent years when it comes to major quakes. So far San Francisco in 1906 has been the only major city to be hit directly by a major quake. In the 1830s a major quake hit Northern California at a time when it was sparsely populated, and in 1857, a huge quake hit the central section of the San Andreas at a time and place with few humans, killing only two.
In 1872, a fault in the Owens Valley erupted massively, with an upthrust of over twenty feet (which can still be seen, and I have), but again: few people. Small, remote communities in Kern County were hit by a 7.7 quake in 1952 (the largest and still the strongest since San Francisco), but again only 12 fatalities. Since then, both of the memorable Los Angeles area quakes in 1971 and 1994, which took similar tolls of around 60, did a lot of damage but again are considered only moderate quakes.
And all the recent 7-pointers in Southern California have hit far out in the desert: Landers in 1992 (the day of the twin quakes); Hector Mine (1999); and Ridgecrest (2019). Los Angeles and its environs, plus the densely populated Inland Empire have been spared—but it can’ t last, and we should never think it can.
As I used to say to my students during my yearly quake days: don’t be scared—be prepared. But leave it to John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, to put a positive spin on it all. He was a constant celebrant of the natural world, and that included earthquakes.
During that Owen’s Valley quake in 1872, John was sleeping in Yosemite Valley (his home away from home) when the quake hit at around 2 am in the morning, and—he loved it. “A noble earthquake!” he wrote in one of his essays, adding that the roar of the quake was “as if the whole Earth, like a living creature, had at last found a voice and were calling to her sister planets.”
I doubt many people will feel the same way when a major quake finally hits a major metropolitan area in California, but, as always, it does put the small concerns of humans in perspective when it comes to the 4-billion-year history of the Earth, during which, for only the blink of an eye, we egotistical humans have declared our magnificence.
As I wrote in the concluding paragraph of another column about the big ones I did in 1992 for a coffeehouse magazine: “Quakes serve to remind us that we are visitors on this terrestrial sphere; guests of Mother Nature, who can, at any moment, shrug her shoulders; take us self-important humans down a peg or two; and remind us that the Earth commands our respect.”
So, with all due respect, just remember: fasten your seat belts.
Phill Courtney has been a high school English teacher and twice a candidate for Congress with the Green party. His first 7-point quake was the one centered near Hector Mine in 1999, and has yet to experience an 8-pointer, although a friend did several years ago while visiting Ecuador. Phill’s email is: pjcourtney1311@gmail.com