San Francisco revises death toll for 1906 earthquake

SAN FRANCISCO -- In 1906, a great earthquake rumbled through this city, toppling buildings and spawning fires that devoured entire neighborhoods. A year later, city leaders declared something remarkable: Despite the widespread destruction, only 478 people had perished.

For decades, the number stood as fact. But as the centennial of the legendary quake approaches, San Francisco is beginning to accept a more devastating truth about its history -- that the official death toll of the quake was a fable, a distortion intended to downplay a catastrophe that risked permanently tarnishing the luster of the West Coast's most vibrant city.

Historians now say at least 3,400 died, and perhaps thousands more, mostly immigrants and those on the lowest rungs of society.

''Everything you knew about the 1906 earthquake was a lie or an inaccuracy," said James Dalessandro, a San Francisco writer who is helping to revise the city's history. ''If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth."

The 1906 earthquake, the deadliest ever in the United States, runs deep in San Francisco's folklore and psyche. The Great Quake, as the 7.8-magnitude temblor is called here, lasted less than a minute but shook with a ferocity that destroyed or damaged about 29,000 homes -- nearly 90 percent of the city, Dalessandro said.

Gas lines ruptured and burst into flames, turning collapsed buildings into pyres for the thousands trapped under rubble. Much of the city's 450,000 residents were left homeless.

Last month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution that will take the city a step closer to recognizing the true extent of casualties. The board set aside the old tally and said it would consider a new count to help commemorate the quake's centennial on April 18, 2006.

''This is about righting an old wrong. We had a lot of heroes, but we also lost a lot of people. This is a way to give them dignity," said Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, whose great-grandparents met on a fishing boat used to ferry survivors to safer shores.

The city's action has validated the work of Gladys Hansen, a 79-year-old former librarian and city archivist, who over the past four decades has immersed herself in the painstaking work of counting the dead. She used dusty public records, old newspaper clippings, and other documents to piece together the quake's gruesome toll.

''The fires came in, and all of a sudden, all of these people disappeared. And nobody went looking for them," Hansen said. ''No one should just disappear."

She began her work in the 1960s when she was the genealogist at the main branch of the city's public library. ''The one consistent question I got was about how many people died in the earthquake of 1906, and what were their names," Hansen said.

Armed with a librarian's penchant for accuracy, she dug in. ''I thought the old number was always right," she said. But what she found was disconcerting. ''My list just kept growing and growing. I kept adding more names. And once you're intrigued, you have to keep going."

Over the years, her tally would grow to more than 3,000. Her list, which includes those who died from quake-related injuries within a month of the temblor, is featured in the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, an online repository of the city's history.

As legend puts it, the official tally of 478 was made up by the city coroner, who added 100 to the 378 bodies that showed up at the morgue.

But many of the dead did not make it to the morgue, Hansen and other historians contend. Many of the dead burned up in the fires. Rescuers were unable to dig out scores of corpses from under the rubble, and left the bodies to wither unaccounted for. What's more, many remained unaccounted for because of the deep anti-Chinese sentiments of the times.

''The Chinese were never really counted," said Dalessandro, author of ''1906," a fictional depiction of earthquake-era San Francisco that was published last year.

The reasons behind the undercount might have risen out of the city's instinct to survive. At the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco was the most important outpost on the West Coast. The California gold rush had established San Francisco as an important economic center. It also became a popular destination for tourists. But when the quake hit, the city also took an economic jolt. Bad publicity threatened to keep investors away.

''The city had to survive. You couldn't survive on bragging about the number of dead," said Hansen, who in 1989 published ''Denial of Disaster," a book about her project.

To reassure the rest of the country, the city's civic and business leaders tried to portray a city that was open for business as usual, said Andrea Davies-Henderson, who received a degree in religion from Harvard University and is a former San Francisco firefighter now working on a doctorate in history at Stanford University.

A low death toll helped minimize the severity of the quake, said Davies-Henderson, who is working on a dissertation exploring the social impact of the quake on families and neighborhoods.

Mary Lou Zoback, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, said it is time ''to recognize all the people who died."

Several years ago, the Geological Survey abandoned the old death tally and began using Hansen's numbers. Now, its website says the death toll from the 1906 earthquake was more than 3,000.

While historically interesting, ''all this attention on the death count is a bit misplaced," Zoback said. The more important discussion, she said, is about the next big earthquake. ''Are we prepared for the next one? I don't think we are."