The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

April 18 marks the 112th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, one of the most devastating disasters in American history. Although the Richter scale would not be developed until the 1930s, the 1906 earthquake likely approached an 8.0 on the scale. It nearly wiped San Francisco, a city of 400,000 people, off the map, and seismograms felt the quake’s shaking as far away as Germany. The earthquake not only collapsed buildings but also set off massive fires, the combined effects of which killed 3,000 people, leveled almost 500 city blocks, and rendered a quarter million people homeless. The disaster also gave rise to litigation that strikingly paralleled the legal battles over Hurricane Katrina, which inundated Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2005.

The Miles Brothers Films

One of the distinctive features of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is how well-documented it was, giving rise to pictures that continue to capture our imagination. For example, on the 110th anniversary, the Atlantic published 40 photographs taken immediately after the earthquake. In addition, last year the San Francisco Chronicle’s website published a huge collection of post-quake photographs. 

It now turns out there is even film of the disaster. As reported this weekend by the New York Times, the silent film historian David Kiehn has identified and helped restore a 112-year-old film taken by the Miles Brothers film studio shortly after the earthquake. The new footage premiered on Saturday night at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California.

The newly discovered post-earthquake film represents a sequel to the famous pre-earthquake film taken by the Miles Brothers on San Francisco’s Market Street. The pre-earthquake footage, filmed days before the disaster, is available here at the Library of Congress website (the LOC version is 8 minutes long). 

The timing of the pre-earthquake film was extremely fortuitous. On April 14—just four days before the earthquake struck—the Miles Brothers fixed a primitive camera to a Market Street cable car. The Miles Brothers film reveals the sights along Market Street as the cable car made its way to the San Francisco Ferry Building, the iconic landmark that miraculously escaped the 1906 earthquake with minimal damage. The Miles Brothers footage captured an extraordinary moment in time, as the city unwittingly stood on the precipice of disaster. It’s almost as if we had film of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the days before Mount Vesuvius erupted.

Besides memorializing a sliver of pre-earthquake San Francisco, the street footage also provides a fascinating glimpse into what big city life was like in the early 1900s. The film shows pedestrians, bicyclists, trolley cars, horse-drawn carriages, and automobiles traveling across and along Market Street. As they filmed, the Miles brothers did not realize they were documenting a San Francisco that less than a week later would no longer exist. It will thus be quite interesting to see the post-earthquake footage that the Niles Museum has, which completes the story of the pre-earthquake film.

The Earthquake Exclusion

In addition to the visual dimensions of the story, there is an interesting legal dimension to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that has continuing relevance for modern insurance law.

In 1906 insurance policies routinely covered fire losses, but they provided no coverage for earthquake losses. California experienced massive earthquakes in 1857, 1872, and 1892, so insurance companies doing business in the state fully understood the extent of the risk. Accordingly, the carriers included standard policy language that expressly excluded losses “caused directly or indirectly by earthquake” or “occasioned by or through earthquake.” When policyholders filed fire damage claims following the 1906 earthquake, many insurance companies argued that there was no coverage for San Francisco’s post-quake fire losses. The insurers contended that since an excluded event—an earthquake—was the underlying cause of the fire destruction in San Francisco, property owners had no coverage for their earthquake-related fire losses.

Needless to say, the insurers’ legal arguments did not go over well with thousands of policyholders. The ensuing court battles pitted the solvency of insurance companies against the effort to rebuild San Francisco. As the British Consul General explained, “If the insurance is not paid the city is ruined. If it is paid, many of the insurance companies will break.” 

Although some out-of-state insurers won a few victories in the federal courts (sitting in diversity jurisdiction), California state courts overwhelmingly sided with policyholders. Moreover, even some federal courts tended to give the policyholders the benefit of the doubt. For example, in Richmond Coal Co. v. Commercial Union Assurance Co., the 9th Circuit reversed a trial verdict for the insurance company and directed that a heavy burden of proof be placed on insurers to show a sufficient connection between the earthquake and the policyholder’s specific fire loss if the insurers sought to invoke the earthquake exclusion.

When all was said and done, insurers paid out a total of $235 million to San Francisco policyholders, a staggering figure that caused many insurance companies to go bankrupt.

The whole story is told in a fascinating article by Robert James, an attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. His article, Six Bits or Bust: Insurance Litigation Over the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, was published in 2011 by Western Legal History. In the article James examines the massive damage caused by both the earthquake and the citywide fires that burned for 3 days afterward, the legal arguments of policyholders and insurance companies, and the outcomes of the various cases in state and federal courts (as well as one case heard in Hamburg, Germany). James concludes that “[b]y showing that policyholders could recover even under strict policy language, these cases helped to spur settlements by reluctant insurers and determined the pace at which the city’s rebirth was completed in the years immediately following the disaster.”

He also explains how the concurrent causation problem shaped the development of insurance policy language in the years after the earthquake. Today it is common for insurance policies to cover a policyholder’s “ensuing loss” through provisions that make clear “if an excluded cause of loss”—such as a flood or an earthquake—“results in a Covered Cause of Loss”—such as a fire—“we will pay for the loss or damage caused by that Covered Cause of Loss.”

James’s article is available here and it’s a fun and interesting read.

Hurricane Katrina

Almost exactly one century after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a natural disaster once again raised the issue of whether an excluded peril barred insurance coverage even though a covered cause of loss was also potentially involved.

In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, costing more than 1,000 lives and causing $150 billion in property damage. Despite the widespread prevalence of “ensuing loss” provisions, many insurers initially denied coverage to Katrina-affected homeowners on grounds that storm surges caused much of the damage in Louisiana and Mississippi, and thus the standard exclusion for flood damage barred coverage. However, as policyholders and their attorneys pointed out, the policies covered wind damage, and hurricane force winds had accompanied Katrina’s storm surge.

The result was years of litigation in Mississippi and Louisiana courts, this time with more mixed results for policyholders than the San Francisco earthquake litigation a century before. In the end, however, the insurance companies still ended up paying billions in damage claims. But one should not feel too bad for the insurance companies. PBS Frontline did an excellent program, The Business of Disaster, on the huge profits that insurance companies have generated through administering FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. If you are interested, the Frontline documentary is available here.

U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazards Map

I happened to be in San Francisco on April 18, 2006, and will always remember the city’s emergency warning system sounding at 5:12 a.m., the exact moment the earthquake struck 100 years before. It was an eerie, moving, and memorable experience.

The risk posed by earthquakes is not limited to the West Coast. If you are curious about the earthquake risk where you live, you can find the U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazards Map here. As one would expect, the entire West Coast is located in a high risk area. What is surprising is the large portion of the United States that is exposed to at least some level of long-term seismic hazards, including in particular the Memphis, Tennessee and Charleston, South Carolina areas. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake is thus a good reminder to all of us that we should take nothing for granted, not even the ground beneath our feet. 

Comments

[Steve L.]

April 18 is also the 243rd anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.

[Anthony Gaughan]

That's a great point, Steve. I certainly hope and expect that Boston and the towns on Revere's path, such as Cambridge, Somerville, and Arlington, make a big deal of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride in 2025.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

This should remind us (apart from the Buddhist doctrine of ‘impermanence’ or classical Chinese conceptions of the nature of change) that these events are not adequately characterized as “natural disasters” (like famines, which were once seen as purely ‘natural’ occurrences owing, say, to a drought, floods, what have you; natural phenomena may be precipitating or causal factors, but in today’s world a famine is a decidedly socio-political and economic event, the responsibility for which is all-too-human), as earthquakes and hurricanes are often social disasters as well, particularly in the sense that we can anticipate, plan, and construct our built environments in ways that greatly the diminish the destruction, harm, and deaths that often result from such catastrophic events. Hurricane Katrina is a notorious example (see, for example, Disaster Law and Policy by Daniel Farber, Jim Chen, et al. (2nd ed., 2009), and the lessons learned in my lifetime from the 1971 Sylmar/San Fernando earthquake and the 1994 Northridge earthquake (I experienced the first, but had moved out of our family home by the time of the second) are another (sometimes even slight changes can make an enormous difference, as in housing construction).

All of this called to mind a few intriguing remarks on the integral interdependence of the “social” and the “natural”—as “my environment,” from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943):

“I wish to arrive on my bicycle as quickly as possible at the next town. This project involves my personal ends, the appreciation of my place and of the distance from my place to the town, and the free adaptation of means (efforts) to the end pursued. But I have a flat tire, the sun is too hot, the wind is blowing against me, etc., all phenomena which I had not foreseen: these are the environment. Of course they manifest themselves in and through my principal project; it is through the project that the wind can appear as a head wind or as a ‘good’ wind, through the project that the sun is revealed as a propitious or an inconvenient warmth.”

Elsewhere, and more to the point, Sartre writes that “It is necessary … to recognize that destruction is an essentially human thing and that IT IS man who destroys his cities through the agency of earthquakes or directly, who destroys his ships through the agency of cyclones or directly.” Again, it is through man that “fragility comes into being,” “it is man who renders cities destructible,” and so forth and so on (depending on how much thought one gives to these remarks, they are either insipid or profound).

[Being a notorious procrastinator, this post called to mind the fact that I’ve yet to anchor my bookcases properly to the walls (and in one case, the ceiling).]

[Anthony Gaughan]

You are absolutely right, Patrick. The term "natural disaster" is a misnomer and your Jean-Paul Sartre quotations are great. As for the bookcase, I just watched over the weekend on Netflix a Midsomer Murders episode in which an unsecured bookcase plays a key role in one of DCI Barnaby's cases!

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Speaking of natural disasters, does anybody know the brand of paper towels that President Donald John Trump tossed at the crowd gathered in the Country of Puerto Rico? Was it Brawny or Bounty, the quicker picker upper? Maybe Kirkland Signature to show bi-Parisian cooperation.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Can one imagine if that Earthquake were to happen today and our Great Leader were in charge? Illinois and Wisconsin suffered from identical flooding of the Fox river from past summer storms. In November 2017, FEMA aka TRUMP denied disaster assistance for Illinois yet granted it to Wisconsin.

[Anon]

The New York Times suggests building codes have not caught up with technology in the area of seismic risk:

https://nyti.ms/2J0VtYX

[Anthony Gaughan]

Thank you for pointing out today's important NYT article on San Francisco's building codes, Anon. The panoramic photo of the 1906 destruction is striking. It surprises me that the city's building codes don't adequately account for the increased risk posed by skyscrapers. A year or two ago 60 Minutes did a piece on the sinking and leaning Millennium Tower, which is an incredible story. San Francisco is one of the truly great cities in the world, but it's deeply troubling to ponder the continuing risk posed to it by earthquakes.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

The Japanese government appears to have set an enviable standard for building earthquake-resistant structures of all kinds. I found this succinct summary online (and it appears engineers and architects are coming up with yet more imaginative design features in this regard):

[B]uildings are designated as either 耐震 (taishin), 制震 (seishin) or 免震(menshin):
(1) 耐震 (taishin, basic earthquake resistance): The walls and/or load-bearing pillars are reinforced with specific stiffening materials to make them stronger against shaking. (I think this method is dominant in the U.S., but if anyone knows differently, please let us know.)
(2) 制震 (seishin, vibration control): The building is equipped with dampening devices (like shock-absorbers) designed to dissipate kinetic energy.
(3) 免震 (menshin, base isolation): There is a device separating the building from the ground which prevents shock waves from being transmitted to the structure. (I think something like this would work well in residential construction.)

If I’m not mistaken, one of the biggest variables when it comes to earthquake risk in the San Francisco Bay area is the degree of susceptibility to soil liquefaction, for which there is no “solution” short of moving people off the most vulnerable sites (which of course will not happen).

[Anthony Gaughan]

I think that's exactly right Patrick about the ground liquefying. There is a map of San Francisco in the New York Times story today that shows the exact locations where the ground is most likely to liquefy. The Market Street, Financial District, and North Beach areas are among the areas at highest risk.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thanks: I have to wait until next month to view that article as I've used up my page views for the month (and I did that some time ago!).

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Now "my" paper, the Los Angeles Times, is weighing in, with today's headline article: "East Bay fault is 'tectonic time bomb,' more dangerous than San Andreas, new study finds."