The stony pales of exclusive society have been broken down by a common suffering and a common sympathy.
Continuing San Francisco Earthquake of 1906,
our selection by Herman Scheffauer.
Previously in San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
Time: 1906
Place: San Francisco
Iron works and foundries roar and ring incessantly; the railways pour in their tons of freight from all parts of the world and the vast harbor is white with sails and alive with steamers. The quickening air of the West that has always been charged with a boundless energy is now more than electrified with a thrilling sense of rush and restlessness. Down the confused and encumbered streets the erring and bewildered winds from the Pacific sweep clouds of dust and ashes into the faces of the citizens. But the citizens themselves are in a whirl of work and tireless activity. Everybody seems to be supremely happy under the dominance of one great idea, the fulfilment of one grand purpose — the rebuilding of the city. The race and the chase for wealth is plainly apparent, as well as the feverish efforts toward the quick rehabilitation of shattered fortunes. For all that, cheerfulness, good will, generosity and kindliness prevail in this gladdest and maddest of American cities. The catastrophe has converted the people to a sort of altruism, both practicable and practiced.
The stony pales of exclusive society have been broken down by a common suffering and a common sympathy. As a matter of course, one helps others or is helped oneself. Money has rained upon the city from the insurance companies and from private sources and the banks are flooded with funds far exceeding their former figures. Impatient millions of gold are waiting until the ground is cleared for building. The days of El Dorado and the great bonanzas have come once more but in another guise.
In conjunction with the gigantic task of rebuilding the city must be considered the appalling labor involved in first clearing the ground whereon the thousands of new edifices are to be planted. Shaken into tremendous heaps of conglomerate rubbish by the earthquake, melted and disintegrated by the fire, flung broadcast by the blasts of dynamite or shattered into ragged masses by the great siege guns used during the conflagration, the ruins and wreckage of the dead city confronted the citizens with a problem to which the digging of the Panama Canal was simplicity itself. The immense tangle of iron pipes, wires, drain-pipes, steel girders and columns, roof-trusses and tie-rods held the square miles of debris together with a disheartening tenacity. This mighty network of iron, buried and embedded in the demolished structures, melted and fused into inextricable tangles, still forms a formidable obstacle to the clearing of the ground. It fetters building to building and anchors them to the granite footings or wide foundations or the basalt-paved streets. When one considers that the destroyed area of San Fran cisco was six times as great as that of the monumental fire of Chicago, the gravity of this problem may in some measure be appreciated.
Thousands of cars of debris are hauled away by great locomotives running on tracks that have been laid into the various centers of the burned district. The millions of tons of wreckage are cast into the bay and serve a useful purpose in extending the land in certain sections of the peninsula. Were the debris heaped in one pile that pile would make a mountain overtopping Ben Nevis. What work, what riches, what hopes and achievements that sad and forlorn mountain would represent! The San Franciscans display a fantastic pride in the stupendousness of the disaster which overtook their city and seem to find a certain strange, heroic satisfaction in the idea that their ruins are the biggest, finest and blackest ruins that ever were.
Out of the clouds of flying lime-dust and ashes that shroud the black, jagged crests of the broken walls emerge the long arms of monster derricks that tear apart with toothed iron scoops the tangle of the wreckage, lifting tons of brick and mortar and dropping them thunderously into the waiting trains. The whistling and snorting of hoisting engines are heard everywhere and it is thrilling to observe the destruction of many of the lofty, crag-like walls and isolated piers and towers left standing after the cataclysm and the fire. The crash and thud of the dead walls as they are torn down or blown asunder by dynamite are as stirring to the pulse and the imagination as the bombardment or the mining of a city besieged. The razing of many of the ruins is accomplished by means of steel cables attached to or wound about them. The cable is drawn taut by a derrick engine and thus, whole or piecemeal, the walls are torn down. A tower nine stories high, forming the corner of what had been a great office- building, was sawn through with steel cables and successive jerks from a powerful engine — a difficult and dangerous undertaking which after many failures resulted in the tower col lapsing within itself much after the manner of the campanile of St. Mark’s at Venice. In the onslaught on the ruins numberless feats of heroism are performed every day. Chinese and Japanese toil side by side with the whites of all nations; Sikhs from India with colored turbans are seen sturdily wielding pickax and shovel. Brown Kanakas and Porto Ricans move swiftly about the base of the swaying, crazy walls, regardless of all danger. The silhouettes of men meet the eye clear-cut against the heavens as they walk along the crumbling tops of high and unsupported walls a foot in width and seamed with widening cracks. Others, covered with dust and rust from head to foot, crawl through molds and jungles of tangled, twisted iron and make fast the steel ropes. Many are working deep down in the basement of some eight-storied nun, digging away in the darkness like moles, the while the treacherous walls tremble above them. Often they collapse and then Death adds to the harvest the earthquake brought him. If, as the ancients thought, no temple and no city for which blood sacrifice had not been made could stand, then must the San Francisco of the future be insured the long- enduring favor of the two elements that wrought their terrible wrath upon her a year ago.
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