Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (9780062277459) by Winchester Simon

Author:Winchester, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

THREE OTHER ISLANDS, well known locally, reported the events. On Angel Island—which stands foursquare in San Francisco Bay, and which in the aftermath of the quake was to be the main receiving station for Chinese immigrants and the consequent center of much amusing mischief, as we shall see—there was a Mrs. Nichols, who reported:

The shock resembled the jolting of a railway train which running at full speed had left the tracks and was bumping over the ties. It was accompanied from the beginning by a loud noise which gradually decreased as the jolting motion ceased. Water standing in a pail was thrown out six feet from northeast to southwest. The clock was stopt. The bay was calm. Acement pavement was cracked. The station was on solid rock.

At the Naval Training Station on Yerba Buena Island—now best known as the midway point on the Bay Bridge—sailors felt a “heavy vibratory shock”; and on Alcatraz—which by then had its Citadel, its lighthouse (the first on the West Coast), and its military prison—the commandant distinctly felt three shocks, the second of the three being the strongest.

Then, from fifty miles south of the epicenter, at Santa Cruz, came an oceanside report from an early riser, an observation that serves as a reminder that the shock was also traveling southeastward along the fault track, and causing damage and destruction at places other than on the northwesterly track toward Shelter Cove and Point Diablo confirmed by most of the ships. This report came not from a ship but from the wharfinger on a wooden quay that extended into Monterey Bay from the Santa Cruz docks.

This man was standing on the quay, which extended out to sea in a southeasterly direction, when he heard a loud rumble coming from directly ahead. (The fault is fairly close to where he was standing, about twelve miles due east, close to the garlic-growing town of Gilroy.) He next saw, with perfect clarity, the shock wave coming fast toward him across the water: He felt two distinct sets of vibrations as the waves traveled through, the second being much the greater. The wharf seemed to pitch lengthwise—doing the same bronco-bucking dance that the Washington Street pavement was performing up in San Francisco.

And then the shock waves hit land: The stunned wharfinger could only report that they caused “great rattling and crashing” as they tore through town. The sea, meanwhile, looked strangely unruffled: There was no surf where the shocks passed, and the water’s surface appeared only “like that in a tub, when jarred.”

The earthquake was indeed felt in Santa Cruz, and in thousands of other communities besides, as it roared its unstoppable way northward, southward, and eastward. In Santa Cruz giant fissures opened up beside the San Lorenzo River, which itself first churned into foam, then sank many inches below its normal level, and finally slowed down to a crawl. A man nearby reported being first thrown to the east, then to the west; and the grove of eucalyptus trees he was idly contemplating in the dawn light started to sway violently in the same direction.

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