Read Online A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online Page B

one minute of earthquake at dawn, and while there is no struggle against a quake once it has begun, the fire was fought fiercely—if ineptly on many counts. Flames destroyed much of the evidence of earthquake damage too. San Francisco’s fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, was fatally injured in the earthquake, and so the city lost at the inception of the disaster the person who might have directed subsequent efforts wisely. The earthquake broke many water mains, so fighting the fires became far harder than it could have been. Sullivan had long worried about a major fire and thought about how to fight it. In his absence, the firefighters were joined by the army, and the latter tried reckless experiments in using explosives to make firebreaks. Their mistakes were many.
    One was the use of black powder, or gunpowder, in place of dynamite. The latter simply blows things up; the former tends to also ignite them. Thus many buildings were turning into burning, flying brands that spread the fire farther or started new conflagrations entirely. Another was setting the firebreaks too close to the existing flames, thereby simply breaking buildings up into more flammable debris. A third was setting explosives to buildings that contained chemicals, alcohol, and other highly flammable substances. A fourth was setting explosions that restarted or started fires in areas that were previously secure. And a fifth was keeping away from the flames the public who might have supplied the power to fight the fire by hand.
    Many of the most successful firefighting efforts were by groups of citizens armed with buckets of water, with shovels, with wet gunnysacks, with whatever came to hand—and often by smothering sparks on roofs, fires could be prevented from becoming overwhelming conflagrations, when people were allowed onto those roofs. Another important firefighting tactic was summoning the political clout to turn back the dynamiters and break through the military lines. It was a struggle between the reckless technological tactics of the occupying forces, convinced that their strategy of destruction could save structures and neighborhoods elsewhere, and the citizens committed to saving as much as possible through hands-on methods. Former fireman Dennis Smith reports in his San Francisco Is Burning that by the second day the National Guard allowed citizens to fight fires, but the army persisted in evacuating, or evicting, them. Historian Frank Hittell writes of fighting fire himself with professional firemen who asked where the rest of the volunteers were. They were being kept back by soldiers, so the two uniformed groups were in open conflict. Hittell was struck by soldiers when he volunteered again.
    Jerome Barker Landfield lived at the north end of the city, and he wrote afterward, “Water was lacking, but the proprietress of a little grocery at Larkin and Greenwich Streets gave me two barrels of vinegar. This proved to be a godsend. A score of volunteers armed with blankets soaked in vinegar, extinguished flaming cinders on neighboring roofs, and we held Greenwich Street safe from Larkin to Van Ness. Two agile schoolboys with pails and cups climbed to the roof of the Robert Louis Stevenson house at Chestnut and Hyde and saved the mansion by putting out sparks as they fell. By eleven o’clock Friday morning we believed that the rest of our district was out of danger.” Then the military blew up a nearby patent-medicine company, whose thousands of gallons of alcohol went up in flames, threatening to destroy what they had just saved. Landfield saw the mayor but was unable to convince him to stop the dynamiting. Fortunately Abe Ruef, the political boss who had put Schmitz in power and organized the network of bribes that enriched both men, came by in his automobile, listened to Landfield, and put an end to it.
    The big post office still standing today at Seventh and Mission streets was saved because ten employees refused direct orders to evacuate and