San Francisco Is Burning by Dennis Smith

An 'especially cruel irony' was the fact that saloons were ordered closed on the day of the fire, yet there, in bottles, jugs and kegs, 'was undoubtedly enough wine to extinguish the early fires.' Smith too often pauses to backfill the careers and family histories of various personalities or discuss the tectonics of earthquakes. The author takes aim at the procedures of the official response and the chain of command, considers whether the army did more than the navy and presents 'what-if' scenarios that will appeal most to students of how to manage a natural disaster. With 92 chapters, the narrative effect is one of a nervous cameraman trying to take in everything (the chapter on Enrico Caruso jumping from his bed at the Palace Hotel is one paragraph long) and managing to make a distant event seem even more remote. Many shattered lives were bravely pieced back together. But soon, closer examinations revealed an act so violent, so vicious - yet so unthinkable - it plunged the city into a state of denial from which it has never fully recovered. ) performs an exhausting autopsy on the temblor and subsequent fire that devastated San Francisco 100 years ago. The tragic fire was at first ruled an accident in headlines welcomed by the public and embraced by city officials.

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.Firefighter turned author Smith ( Report from Ground Zero 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. 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. 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. In all, 522 blocks and 28,188 buildings were leveled, and some 200,000 people dislocated. The ensuing fires that ravaged the city for days were responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,000 more. on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in history, instantly killing hundreds.

San Francisco Is Burning by Dennis Smith