Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires
    San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires
    San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires
    Audiobook12 hours

    San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires

    Written by Dennis Smith

    Narrated by Alan Sklar

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    At 5:12 a.m. on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in history, instantly killing hundreds. The ensuing fires that ravaged the city for days were responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,000 more. In all, 522 blocks and 28,188 buildings were leveled, and some 200,000 people dislocated.

    This watershed event in American history has never before been told with the richness of historical detail and insight that our foremost historian of fire, Dennis Smith, brings to it in San Francisco Is Burning. Smith cinematically recounts this terrible tragedy through the stories of the people who lived through those terrible days-from a valiant naval officer who helped save the city's piers and wharves to Eugene Schmitz, the crooked mayor, to the "debonair scoundrel" Abe Ruef, the most erudite city boss in American history. Throughout, Smith reveals many unknown details about the event, from the city's great vulnerability to fire-due to its corrupt and hasty building practices-to the widespread racism the quake unleashed and the atrocities committed by national guardsmen. Told with verve and a seasoned firefighter's knowledge, San Francisco Is Burning is the gripping and definitive account of one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 22, 2005
    ISBN9781400171798
    San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires

    More audiobooks from Dennis Smith

    Related to San Francisco Is Burning

    Related audiobooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Grave legacy

      Oct 26, 2021

      A Grave legacy
      10 min read

    • Article

      How Scott Peterson's Murder Convictions Were Suddenly Thrown Into Doubt

      Oct 16, 2020

      SAN FRANCISCO - Laci Peterson's 2002 disappearance from her Modesto, Calif., home on Christmas Eve made instant headlines. Her family initially said that Scott, her husband, was beyond suspicion. Then a woman surfaced who said she was having an affai

      4 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Aug 5, 2021

      One of the pleasures of the summer, as lockdown was lifted, has been the return of history festivals. These live events have become part of our cultural landscape over the past few years, and what we have been missing really hit me at the Chalke Vall

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Night Before the Fourth

      Jul 1, 2011

      The Night Before the Fourth
      5 min read

    • Article

      Raw And Immersive Tale Of The Civil War

      May 26, 2022

      LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1641, with Charles I deep in dispute with his Parliament, alarming reports reached Westminster of Catholics amassing arms at Basing House in Hampshire. At this point in time, few expected civil war, but plenty feared an imminent

      5 min read

    • Article

      Books In Brief

      Sep 10, 2018

      Books In Brief
      4 min read

    • Article

      Stranded Content

      Jun 9, 2022

      It is one of life’s exquisite ironies that the story behind a work deemed the first novel in English, a work of the strictest Puritan spiritualism, begins with indecent behaviour on consecrated grounds. We don’t know exactly what Alexander Selkirk —

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hurrah For The Wavy Navy

      Mar 9, 2022

      Hurrah For The Wavy Navy
      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Boundless Sea’ Explores Centuries Of Ocean Voyaging

      Nov 12, 2019

      David Abulafia’s sweeping history “The Boundless Sea” touches on great explorers as well as war, trade, and migration.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Annversares

      Mar 17, 2022

      Annversares
      5 min read

    • Article

      When In Rome!

      Nov 17, 2022

      When In Rome!
      7 min read

    • Article

      In the Name of Notre Dame

      Apr 17, 2019

      In the Name of Notre Dame
      11 min read

    • Article

      Bending the Arc

      Dec 4, 2017

      With all the hoopla this year over Canada 150, and amid the energies and dollars directed at celebrating our national story, I have been thinking about local history and why it matters. Our readers are deeply engaged in research about their families.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Jolly Roger Of A Good Read

      Feb 11, 2021

      Readers are in for a rollicking time with these tales of mutiny and plunder on the high seas. This is a new, abridged edition of a book first published in 1734, with an introduction and potted history of piracy by historian and presenter Dr Sam Willi

      2 min read

    • Article

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER

      Mar 16, 2023

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for San Francisco Is Burning

    4/5

    32 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This appealing narrative history offers a blow by blow account of the collective efforts of the San Francisco Fire Department, city officials, and Army and Navy officers to battle the fires triggered by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The book lacks citation to sources - there's a bibliography and a bald statement that "all information contained in this book may be relied upon as historically accurate", but that's all. Smith offers strong judgments of which historical figures deserve respect and which scorn. On the other hand, the short, staccato chapters keep the story moving, the particular figures whose stories Smith traces are well chosen, and he provides just the right amount of context of their lives before and after the fire. Beyond being a good read, the book should serve as a helpful case study for emergency managers and accident theorists. Two major take away lessons are the value of spontaneous, self-organized response by neighbors during an emergency; and the damage that a single, powerful emergency manager can unleash if he gets in over his head.
    • 5/5
      Comprehensive recapping of the horrible tragedy and brave heroes. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Disappointing. Dennis Smith is an ex-firefighter and highly regarded author; his books Report From Engine Co. 82 and Report From Ground Zero were best-sellers and received critical praise However, San Francisco Is Burning doesn’t do much for me. At almost the very beginning, Smith gets way out of his depth with his description of the physics of earthquake ground shaking:
      “Consider a weight on a string, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. If the weight is hit by a force at the lowest point in its path to the earth, that action will create another pendulum going in the direction opposite the force, due to the simple Newtonian explanation that for every action there is an equal reaction. If the force, however, hits the weight at anywhere other than at the lowest point in its path it will not create another pendulum but a circular motion. This circular action combined with both the pendulum motion and an up-and-down motion are the three most fundamental movements in nature. If oscillation and waving are added to these three motions, the net affect will approximate the movement of the ground that might be felt by a person during an earthquake. It can be beyond Newtonian in relation to the original point of the quake, and if one is inside a house, one will move the way the house moves, and the house will move according to its construction and the soil it sits on.”
      Well, alright then. If anybody understands that, I invite you to explain it to me. Smith is on firmer ground when recounting the post-quake fires, but even here he seems awfully derivative. He recounts many of the same anecdotes related by Fradkin – the tavern owner trampled to death by an escaped herd of longhorn cattle panicked by the quake, for example. His most interesting contribution is his discussion of the efforts of the US Navy and the US Army in fighting the fires.
      Smith makes General Frederick Funston the villain. Funston took control of the city after the quake and brought in troops from nearby military bases to enforce his authority. The problem, according to Smith, is that Funston’s actions were almost all incorrect. Funston had his soldiers patrol for looters and evacuate threatened areas rather than actually fight fires – with the exception of blowing up buildings to create firebreaks.
      Smith claims that the anti-looting patrols were overenthusiastic, sometimes resulting in the summary execution of innocent citizens. His evidence is all anecdotal: well after the disaster, various people reported seeing soldiers shoot looters – or just ordinary people. The issue is complicated as there were several armed official or quasi-official groups operating in San Francisco simultaneously; the Regular Army, the California National Guard, the San Francisco Police Department, the Special Police civilian auxiliaries, miscellaneous police forces and security guards belonging to railroads and other private entities, and ordinary citizens who picked up guns and stood guard over their homes or businesses. Fradkin and Smith agree that some looters or suspected looters were shot, but neither provides any sort of documentary evidence. (To be fair, the huge historical collection made just after the disaster – including hundreds of eyewitness stories, was apparently lost sometime in the 1920s. Both Fradkin and Smith hint that the loss might have been deliberate, to encourage investment – but there’s no evidence for that either).
      Smith’s second contention is that the military evacuated people unnecessarily; he cites a couple of examples where workers and homeowners were prepared to defend their houses or industries, but were forced away at bayonet point. Smith is able to cite a couple of cases where defense measures were successful – people patrolled their roofs and extinguished burning embers; office workers threw all flammable building contents out the windows and saved the building shell – and another case where a building probably could have been save if the army had left people alone (a mostly sheet-iron and steel-frame flour mill where the only burnable material was grain in the bins). I tend to agree with Smith but it’s not fully clear. Although the fires were not moving very fast, there was still the possibility that a large number of civilians could have been trapped if evacuation had been delayed or not attempted.
      Could the troops have served better if they directly assisted the firefighters? Perhaps. Smith doesn’t give a coherent analysis of what the Army should have done, other than dropping hints here and there in the text. My general impression is that Smith thinks the Army should have acted the same way as civilians who successfully defended their property: patrolled roofs for embers, moved furniture and flammables out of exposed buildings, and perhaps recruited civilians to help rather than simply forcing them out. The problem is that the Incident Commander system was decades in the future. For the Army to have acted this way, it would have been necessary to have somebody on the scene that Brigadier General Funston recognized as more expert than himself; this is almost impossible to imagine.
      Fradkin and Smith both agree that the large-scale dynamiting was worse than useless. Once again, this was on Funston’s initiative; he was apparently aware that dynamite had been used successfully in fighting other large urban fires. There were two problems; although everybody talked about “dynamiting”, both during and after the fire, what was actually used most often was black powder. Further, there were no explosive expert available, so the buildings tended to by blasted to bits rather than collapsed, which either just left a heap of flammable rubble, or worse, dropped little bits of flaming debris all over. What Smith said should have been done is pick a defense line well ahead of the fire, clear all the burnable contents – furniture, merchandise, etc. – out of the building, then used just enough explosive to drop it in place. There were enough troops to get this done, but no one with sufficient authority or understanding to get them to do.
      Although hard on the Army, Smith has nothing but praise for the Navy, specifically the destroyer Preble under the command of Lieutenant Frederick Freeman. The Navy, of course, had a salient advantage over the Army; they had the Pacific Ocean to draw water from. Freeman hooked up SFFD hoses to Navy pumps – took a while, the connections weren’t compatible – and successfully defended the waterfront (he reportedly didn’t sleep for 36 hours). Smith notes that Freeman’s contribution was ignored when Funston made his report. (Freeman’s subsequent career was rather sad; he was dismissed from the Navy during WWI for being drunk on duty and eked out a small living renting his house. A loyal subordinate eventually got his dismissal changed to an honorable discharge, which made him eligible for a pension – just in time for Freeman to die of cancer).
      The writing’s well done, although Smith breaks up the book into numerous small chapters – some only a paragraph long, but each with a large heading. There are good maps showing the fire’s progress, and a photograph section. The references are a little strange; some of the works don’t seem to have much relevance (The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake; The Path Between the Seas; the Origin of Continents and Oceans, for example). I think if I had to choose I’d probably recommend Fradkins book, although both have flaws.
    • 4/5
      This book would be a great gift if you have a fire fighter in the family. It is very heavy on the firefighting details. It was also an indictment on when political corruption meets a disaster.
    • 5/5
      Looks at the San Francisco Earthquake by focusing on the political coverup designed to downplay the earthquake and blame the greater damage on the fire. Does an excellent job of covering the disaster as well.