S.F.'s rebirth after '06 quake offers hope for New Orleans

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 9/4/5 | Carl Nolte

[SmithL]

99 years apart, disasters that devastated both cities share strange similarities.

The old New Orleans is dead, drowned in the worst natural disaster in an American city since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. There is an eerie sense of parallel between the two catastrophes 99 years apart.

Both cities were destroyed. Both cities had to face an uncertain future. San Francisco recovered and became the city it is today. The story of New Orleans is yet to be written.

New Orleans in 2005 was about the same size as San Francisco in 1906 -- 484,000 people lived in modern New Orleans, about 450,000 in the San Francisco of a century ago.

Both the old San Francisco and modern New Orleans were famous for food and drink -- oysters and champagne were the rage in San Francisco of long ago. Bourbon Street in New Orleans is a somewhat tamer version of Pacific Street in San Francisco's Barbary Coast days.

Both cities loved life, both were destroyed by a force of nature, and the destruction was nearly total. After a huge earthquake and three days of uncontrolled fires in 1906, San Francisco was a wreck -- "a blackened, ruined thing, the pity of the world,'' said Sydney Tyler, a journalist. In New York, they wrote San Francisco's obituary, a newspaper series called "The City That Was.''

The same thing is happening over the ruins of New Orleans; the complicated, beautiful, troubled old city is being mourned, gone forever.

The disasters were very similar. Both cities had looting. In San Francisco, the mayor put out the word that looters would be "shot down without mercy.'' The authorities later denied anyone had been shot, but armed soldiers roamed the streets, and there were no

[SmithL]

After the 1906 earthquake severed water mains needed to fight fires, San Francisco was charred by three days of unchecked blazes.

[cambridge]

Or New Orleans offers a wake up call to SF inre. its overdue earthquake.

Do not expect FEMA to help. You have been warned.

[Dutch Boy]

New Orleans has an extra special obstacle. There is corruption abound. With any luck even that has been disrupted.

[kellynla]

and if one dime is spent rebuilding N'awlins; it will be good money after bad...
all it will take is one more terrorist flying into the levee and we'll have another huge disaster to clean up...
move the city to higher ground for pete sakes!!!

[RayChuang88]

Of course, unlike the blatantly corrupt officials in New Orleans, at least the majority of San Francisco's buildings will stand up after a major earthquake outside of the areas of landfill, thanks to the lessons learned from the 1906 earthquake and numerous building retrofits done since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that San Francisco law now requires. And given most of San Francisco sits on dry land, you won't have the ever-present threat of flooding like New Orleans does....

[Verginius Rufus]

The parallels are indeed eerie...both disasters caused by Harvard-educated Republican cowboy Presidents who never served on a swift boat. Teddy Roosevelt never won another election after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I predict that George W. Bush will never win another election.