Features

If this Sunday is a typical one in Berkeley, most residents will still be asleep around dawn. It will be quiet enough to hear the bells of the Campanile ringing across town. Berkeleyans will begin to rise and start their weekend routines—breakfast or brunch, church perhaps, or yoga, a morning walk or jog, a ruffle through the daily newspaper, an early start to garden work or studying or an excursion out of town, or perhaps just a morning spent relaxing in bed. 

Ninety-eight years ago, Berkeley was anything but tranquil. All over town the ground suddenly heaved and shook. Crockery crashed. Plaster walls cracked. Bricks fell, beds bounced, heavy furniture rattled around, books and bric-a-brac toppled.  

People hurried outdoors. The shaking stopped and the town seemed spared. Only here and there—in a few buildings downtown, at Berkeley High School—did there seem to be major visible damage. Then, across the bay, Berkeley residents began to see rising clouds of smoke. San Francisco was ablaze. It was April 18, 1906. The worst earthquake in modern American history had struck the Bay Area, and one of the worst urban fires ever was commencing.  

The big symbolic anniversary—the centennial of the “Big One”—arrives just two years from now, in 2006. Throughout the region, scientists, historians, policy planners and emergency workers are preparing to commemorate the event (see sidebar). 

In 1906, the East Bay was not as badly damaged as San Francisco (or San Jose or Santa Rosa, where less publicized but still horrendous damage and loss of life occurred). Ferry-borne refugees poured across the bay. Many were housed and fed here in Berkeley—and also racially segregated, in those more overtly discriminatory times.  

Tent encampments appeared on the UC campus, public buildings were pressed into service, and locals volunteered aid. The UC Cadet Corps—male students enrolled in military training—donned their uniforms and marched off to assist with guard duty in stricken San Francisco.  

UC administrators dismissed classes for the semester, arranged for free rail transportation out of town for many students, and began to total up the damage: physical, in the case of UC properties such as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art which were destroyed in San Francisco; financial, in terms of the loss of property tax revenue and rental income for the University. 

UC was also at the epicenter—pardon the pun—of a serious research response to the earthquake at a time when many locals simply wanted to rebuild and forget, hoping or believing that the earthquake was a one-time event.  

Since the 1880s, Observatory Hill on campus had hosted one of the first seismographs in the Western Hemisphere (another was at UC’s Lick Observatory near San Jose). The 1906 event added strong impetus to earthquake research at UC. 

Geology Professor Andrew Lawson (who had mapped the San Andreas Fault and later had Bernard Maybeck design him an earthquake resistant concrete house in the Berkeley Hills) was appointed to head a scientific commission, financed by the Carnegie Institution. The commission would eventually issue an exhaustive and landmark report that would help provide the foundation for the modern science of seismology.  

History Professor Henry Morse Stephens marshaled students to gather first-hand and press accounts of the disaster. And a young Cal professor of engineering, Charles Derleth, Jr., was among the few experts to research and speak out against unsafe construction techniques even as San Francisco business interests busily sought to rebuild while minimizing the effect of the earthquake by emphasizing the fire, instead. 

Off-campus, Berkeley boomed following the earthquake and fire. Businesses and some burned-out San Franciscans relocated to what many perceived as the safer East Bay. Ironically, some resettled in the Berkeley Hills, above the Hayward Fault. Berkeley’s “streetcar suburbs” grew rapidly, and within a few years it was no longer a town but a city. 

Today, nearly a century later, the University of California remains home to some of the world’s top experts in seismology, seismic engineering and design, and the public policy aspects of planning for, and reacting to, natural disasters. The Berkeley campus has become a laboratory for seismically resistant design through the SAFER Program that has been retrofitting UC buildings at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  

The City of Berkeley has also worked notably in recent years to become a “Disaster Resistant Community.” Public buildings and schools have undergone their own elaborate seismic retrofits, along with many commercial buildings and private homes. 

Still, up in the Berkeley hills broods the Hayward Fault, and its cousins, minor and mighty, snake beneath the Bay Area within serious shaking distance of the East Bay. Eventually, 1906 will come again, not just in anniversary form.  

Steven Finacom works at the University of California. In 2006 he will be curating a Berkeley Historical Society exhibit examining the local impact of the events of 1906.ˇ