She took time to dress herself while the ground and her home were still shaking, in that era when getting dressed was no simple matter of throwing on clothes.
Anna Amelia Holshouser, whom a local newspaper described as a "woman of middle age, buxom and comely," woke up on the floor of her bedroom on Sacramento Street, where the earthquake had thrown her. The response of the citizens is less familiar. Nearly every municipal building was destroyed, and so were many of the downtown businesses, along with mansions, slums, middle-class neighborhoods, the dense residential-commercial district of Chinatown, newspaper offices, and warehouses. The way the authorities handled the fires was a major reason why so much of the city - nearly five square miles, more than twenty-eight thousand structures - was incinerated in one of history's biggest urban infernos before aerial warfare. Afterward came the fires, both those caused by broken gas mains and chimneys and those caused and augmented by the misguided policy of trying to blast firebreaks ahead of the flames and preventing citizens from firefighting in their own homes and neighborhoods. It was a major earthquake, centered right off the coast of the peninsular city, and the damage it did was considerable. At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, about a minute of seismic shaking tore up San Francisco, toppling buildings, particularly those on landfill and swampy ground, cracking and shifting others, collapsing chimneys, breaking water mains and gas lines, twisting streetcar tracks, even tipping headstones in the cemeteries. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.The outlines of this particular disaster are familiar.
She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster
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