Lessons for L.A. from San Francisco's 1906 Quake and Inferno, and from Outliers

Via my old friend and fellow longtime journalist Donald G McNeil, Jr., I came to ponder what lessons from San Francisco’s 1906 double-barreled catastrophe can apply as the incinerated neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles are re-envisioned and rebuilt - as they inevitably will be. Read on.

Why am I not using a conditional phrase there? Long ago, in reporting on Hurricane Katrina and the inundation of much of New Orleans, I came to know the research and writing of the historian Peirce Lewis. He called New Orleans “an inevitable city on an impossible site.” I’d wager that Los Angeles deserves that label even more given its vulnerability to fire, flood, earthquake and the rest.

So, given that reality, what will be coming? If politicians, investors, builders and residents have any sense at all, they’ll avoid the rush to weaken standards as a way to speed reconstruction. They’ll finally get real about the hazards inherent in the geography, geology, climate and ecology of the region - and those that are growing worse (invasive grasses make fires worse and bigger; climate change is shifting precipitation patterns and wet/dry cycles).

They’ll look carefully at outlier homes that didn’t burn. Read Kriston Capps’s piece for Bloomberg’s CityLab centered on her interview with the architect Greg Chasen after he tweeted photos of a new Pacific Palisades house he had designed that stood largely undamaged while others all around burned to ash. As Chasen stresses, luck played a role, but design absolutely did, as well.

Such outliers exist after every fire, as I’ve reported after the Lahaina catastrophe and Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado. Here’s a relevant video clip from back then.

The lessons from San Francisco after the earthquake and fires in 1906 are highly relevant, as McNeil explained in a short post on Medium. An excerpt is below. To set the scene, here’s a photograph showing the absolute destruction from the fires that spread after the shaking, taken from an anchored airship a month after the earthquake. Look familiar?

A detail from a panoramic photograph of the destruction of San Francisco taken from a moored airship on May 29, 1906 (Library of Congress; lots more images and background at Rare Historical Photos.)

Here’s an excerpt from McNeil’s piece, “The L.A. Fires - Disasters are an Opportunity”:

The Los Angeles fires are nothing compared to what happened to my hometown, San Francisco, in 1906. The earthquake is more famous, but the fires did far more damage. Over four days, 60 separate ones broke out, and 80 percent of the city — 28,000 buildings, more than twice as many as have burned in L.A. — were incinerated. The whole downtown area, including City Hall, the courts, cathedrals, theaters, banks, hotels, department stores and newspaper buildings went up in flames, as did most of the manufacturing district south of Market.

Here’s a map.

Source

Here’s more from McNeil (with my bold-face emphasis on firebreas):

Despite the devastation, the rebuilding of the city had many good effects. Earthquake and fire codes were strengthened, as were insurance laws. (Outside the fire zone, many “painted lady” Victorians survived because their wood frames swayed with the tremors instead of cracking as brick buildings did.)

The city got more parks. Some blocks in the burned area were set aside as public plazas, and much larger “residence parks” became mandatory in newly built areas to the west, both for their intrinsic beauty and as firebreaks. To help the city expand, a streetcar tunnel was bored through Twin Peaks.

A beautiful City Hall, modeled on the Invalides in Paris, went up, along with a municipal library, courts, and an opera house, all centered on a large plaza….

Similar improvements, on a smaller scale, could come to Los Angeles.

For example, the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to Malibu where so many houses burned could become a public beach. (Rebuilding would be a traffic nightmare, the narrow highway could be made safer and rising seas are eventually going to take the remaining houses anyway.)

In neighborhoods that vanished, block-wide parks could be created as firebreaks. Zoning could restrict how many houses climb the vulnerable hills. Housing codes could mandate anti-ember screens under eaves and rooftop sprinklers. Tanks and reservoirs for better fire-control could be erected.

There are many opportunities to learn from this and fix the errors that led to it.

Needless to say it’s easier to write what McNeil says here, and what I’ve been writing about fire-resistant building codes and landscaping for way more than a decade, than to have such a transformation take place.

But the tools and knowledge are there. All that’s needed (as Al Gore famously said about addressing global warming) is political will. I don’t see that as encouraging.