Simon Winchester - A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

PENGUIN BOOKS

A CRACK IN THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

The scientific, geological, human and political stories behind the San Francisco earthquake. Read it and shiver
Herald

Fascinating details, footnotes are treats Winchester has a gift for narrating stories
Independent on Sunday

Fascinating pieced together with care and considerable research. An illuminating analysis of the way western
cities cope (or not) with natural disasters
The Times Educational Supplement

Fascinating reading, lucid, revealing. Stands on its own as an informative and enjoyable book
Literary Review

A superb description of the treacherous geology of the San Andreas fault zone
Sunday Times

Fascinating, enjoyable there is much that makes the mind boggle. Winchesters fine book is a timely reminder
Scotland on Sunday

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, Ireland, India and China, and now lives in New York City and the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and newspapers and is the author of many highly acclaimed works of non-fiction. His most recent books have been the three international bestsellers, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, The Map that Changed the World and Krakatoa.

The Great American Earthquake of 1906

SIMON WINCHESTER

PENGUIN BOOKS

With this book I both welcome into the world
my first grandchild,

Coco

and offer an admiring farewell to

Iris Chang

whose nobility, passion and courage
should serve as a model for all,
writers and newborn alike

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First published by Viking 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
1

Copyright Simon Winchester, 2005
All rights reserved

The acknowledgements on pp. 4012 constitute an extension of this copyright page

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9780141905785

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve.

Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point, 1954

List of Maps

. Map of the North American Tectonic Plate

. Map of North America showing past earthquakes, volcanoes and authors route

. Major tectonic plates and fault lines

. Continents Pangaea to the present day

. Pre-Pangaea continents

6. The San Andreas Fault

The northern section (with San Francisco)

The central section (with Parkfield)

The southern section (with Los Angeles)

. Where the 1906 Earthquake was felt

. San Francisco and affected area, 1906

List of Illustrations

. Mount Diablo

. Print of the Lisbon Earthquake

. Thingvellir, Iceland

. Damage from the Charleston Earthquake, 1886

. New Madrid river turbulence

. Meers General Store

. The Gold Rush

. Meteor Crater, Arizona

. Grove Karl Gilbert

. Survey expedition led by John Wesley Powell

. Eldridge Moores at an ophiolite sequence

. Drilling rig at Parkfield

. Aerial photograph of the San Andreas Fault

. Road displacement in Olema

. Distortion on Route 14 from the San Andreas Fault

. Yerba buena plant

. Line drawing of early San Francisco

. Early Chinatown by Arnold Genthe

. Eadweard Muybridge city panorama

. Caruso in a fur coat

. Carusos pencil sketches

. Early Chinese seismograph

. Seismograph traces from the San Francisco Earthquake

. Louis Agassiz

. Structural damage from earthquake

. Ansel Adams

. Photo by Arnold Genthe, taken from the top of Sacramento Street, of the fire spreading

. Damage from the fire

. Brigadier-General Frederick Funston

. Mayor Eugene Schmitz

. Cuthbert Heath

. Azusa Street Church

. Angel Island: poems inscribed on the wooden walls of the detention blocks

. A morale-boosting message from Sunset magazine

. Alaska pipeline crossing the Denali Fault

. Geyser at Yellowstone

. Seismograph trace

The created World is but a small parenthesis in Eternity.

Sir Thomas Browne, 1716

O wad some Powr the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
Robert Burns, To a Louse, c. 1785

1 The Well-illumined Earth

Some while ago, when I was half-idly browsing my way around the internet, I stumbled across the home page of an obscure small town in western Ohio with the arresting name of Wapakoneta. It rang a distant bell. Once, very much longer ago, I had passed by the town on what I seem to recall was a driving expedition from Detroit down to Nashville. But, so far as I remember, I didnt stop there, not even for a cup of coffee. It only struck me at the time as being a rather attractive name for a town a name that was (I subsequently read) a settler adaptation from a word in the language of the local Shawnee Indians.

The town these days is nothing too exciting which is what one might expect of a place that lies just off that part of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System known as the I-75, not very far from the rather better-known and quintessentially Midwestern Ohio city of Lima. It has some 10,000 inhabitants, and the way that it was built and ordered and settled a century or so ago makes it very similar to uncountable other cities found between the bookends of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.

It is, in other words, a classic example of the modern Middle American community. A place that Sinclair Lewis would have favoured. A place of unexceptional ordinariness, known locally for the making of light machinery, car parts and rubberware, and surrounded by large and generally family-owned farms where soybeans and corn are grown and where the animals Americans call hogs are raised. Reading between the lines, one can perhaps detect the faintest tone of fretfulness: a concern for the towns future, born of such newfangled developments as the spread of manufacturing to Mexico, the outsourcing to Asia of much of the service economy and the drumbeat growth of China. No doubt wishing to encourage new businesses, the Chamber of Commerce makes a claim for Wapakoneta that is shared with many other towns similarly unburdened with excessive splendour: that by virtue of its strategically important location, with all the roads and railway lines that run near by, it is something called a transportation hub.