Nightmare in San Francisco.

Most people were still sleeping when the ground began to shudder. It was 5:12 in the morning, and in one great, spasmodic jerk, the continental plate beneath California slipped. A magnitude-7.8 earthquake--still the largest ever recorded in a U.S. metropolitan area--split the ground for 300 miles, leaving a visible scar down the state. For 60 seconds, from Humboldt County to Monterey Bay, the earth convulsed.

In San Francisco, just a few miles from the epicenter, chimneys crashed to the ground. The roof of the Grand Opera House crumbled. The pillars of City Hall snapped, and part of its dome collapsed. Even the hills trembled. "Did you ever see a dog shake a rat?" wrote Warren Olney, a local politician. "We were like rats in a dog's mouth." Apartments flattened like accordions; fourth-floor residents climbed right out onto the street. The fires that would rage for the next three days were just starting to burn. In a few hours, they would swell into an unstoppable inferno.

Three days later, the largest metropolis west of the Mississippi--the heart of western shipping, manufacturing, and finance--was a charred skeleton. Of San Francisco's 400,000 residents, 225,000 lost their homes. Five hundred city blocks were burned. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people died. "Not in history," Jack London would write, "has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed."

But did it have to be that way? As the city of San Francisco marks the 100th anniversary of the calamity--and as officials consider the city's continued vulnerability to quakes--some residents are beginning to think not. In popular memory, the handling of the disaster was one of San Francisco's finest hours: Together, soldiers and civilians battled the fires. Rich and poor struggled to survive side by side. The city's courageous efforts to rebuild, in particular, have taken on an epic tone: By 1915, San Francisco was back on its feet, playing host to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world fair that marked its return to glory.

Rich--and poor. But this gilded tale, historians say, is not the whole story. And an increasingly vocal group of scholars has begun to argue that the devastation of San Francisco was caused not so much by the earthquake and fire as it was by bad planning, lack of imagination, and human error. "San Francisco," writes historian Philip Fradkin in his book The Great Earthquake and Fire-storms of 1906, "was the city that nearly destroyed itself."

Then, as now, lack of preparedness was a big part of the problem. San Francisco was known for ignoring its past. Thrown up almost overnight during the gold rush of 1849, the city burned down again and again--six times--over the next 50 years. It was rattled by major earthquakes in 1865 and 1868. And while seismology was not the science it is today--the role of plate tectonics in earthquakes wasn't understood until the 1960s--city dwellers certainly knew they weren't living on solid ground. At least once every decade, for as long as the city had existed, there had been a quake of magnitude 6 or above.

Some wealthy San Franciscans had prepared for the worst, of course. The most expensive hotels hired top engineers to build steel-reinforced structures that could--and did--withstand major quakes. The same was true of several federal buildings, including the U.S. Mint. "But it was a two-track system," says Charles Wollenberg, a history professor at Vista College in Berkeley, Calif. Well-heeled businessmen lived and worked in sturdy buildings; the poor made do with flimsy wooden structures, many of them built on the same landfills that had liquefied in earlier quakes.

As a result, much of the city was a disaster waiting to happen. Six months before the quake, the National Board of Fire Underwriters published a report rating the probability of fire in San Francisco as "alarmingly severe." Ninety percent of the city's structures were made of wood. "In fact," the board concluded, "San Francisco has violated all underwriting traditions and precedent by not burning up." And yet, when the city's fire chief pushed for a system that would allow firefighters to use San Francisco Bay in an emergency, he received no funding. "Willful ignorance," says Richard Walker, a professor of geography at the University of California-Berkeley, "is a pretty constant story in all of this."

The quake grabbed San Francisco by this Achilles heel. As the first few blazes sprang up, firefighters furiously cranked on hydrants all over town, only to discover, to their horror, that there was no water--the quake had broken many of the pipes and couplings that connected the city to its distant reservoirs.

In that first minute of shaking, the city's firefighting capacity went from bad to worse. Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, the one man who might have organized a coherent response to the fires, was fatally injured when a hotel fell on his house. "This was the single biggest tragedy of the quake," says Dennis Smith, author of San Francisco Is Burning: the Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires.

Sullivan's absence was not only a blow to morale; it was the beginning of what many scholars now consider a period of appallingly poor civic leadership. Because the general commanding the city's 1,500 federal troops was out of town when the disaster hit, his second in command, Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston, took charge. Funston was a complicated man: He had been awarded a Medal of Honor in the Spanish-American War, but he had also been accused of war crimes in the Philippines. "He was a great military hero," says Smith, "but he was just the wrong guy at the wrong time." Historians today cringe at Funston's aggressive response. Two hours after the city stopped shaking, Funston, without orders, assembled his men and sent them, armed, into the streets.

A fateful order by San Francisco's mayor, Eugene Schmitz, made matters worse. Fearing widespread looting--which never materialized--Schmitz posted a proclamation declaring that local police and Funston's troops would "KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime." Though martial law was never declared, the military and some quickly deputized neighborhood militias were authorized to shoot civilians on sight. It was, Fradkin writes, "one of the most infamous and illegal orders ever issued by a civil authority in this country's history."

Dynamite. For three days, in this power vacuum, chaos reigned. Soldiers and militiamen confronted suspected looters with rifles raised, often with deadly results. One national guardsman, Elmer Enewold, believing martial law had been declared, shot at a man he saw picking something up off the ground. He missed, but another soldier brought the man down. "An officer came along and ordered us to throw the body into the still burning ruins," Enewold wrote, "so in it went."

Funston would later argue that his troops hadn't killed a single person. Historians disagree: Current estimates put the number of people who died at the hands of law enforcement as high as 50. Residents chafed under the military's heavy hand. "The citizens did not know whom they were to obey, and certainly the military subordinates and guards were not made to understand the limits of their authority," wrote Marion Osgood Hooker, a local doctor. "'Preserve us from our preservers' was the cry of many of us."

The fires, meanwhile, continued to rage unchecked, so hot they melted steel and ignited structures more than 125 feet away. With little water at their disposal, firefighters turned to the next best weapon: dynamite. They began blowing up buildings in the path of the blaze to try to create firebreaks.

Many of the dynamiters didn't realize what kinds of explosives they were using, however. In their haste, they often placed black powder and gunpowder in wooden buildings, which tended to start more fires than it put out. "It developed that when black powder was exploded, it threw off a combustion that ignited all woodwork with which it came in contact, thus starting additional fires," the new fire chief admitted later. Walls that might have served as firebreaks were brought down; houses became kindling, further fueling the flames.

In the confusion, the citizens of San Francisco didn't always acquit themselves as well as many like to remember. Wild rumors swept the city: A tidal wave was coming, immigrants were looting houses on Nob Hill, black and Chinese men were cutting off women's fingers to steal jewelry. These stories were never substantiated, but after the fires were put out, local politicians went so far as to try to move Chinatown, in its entirety, to an island in the bay. "Disasters tear away the curtain that hides a lot of ugly social reality," says Walker. "That is just as true in San Francisco as it was in New Orleans."

Two days after the first fires started, the flames leapt past the last of the improvised firebreaks and put the unburned half of the city in danger. But then, for the first time since the quake, San Francisco had some luck: A westerly wind blew the flames back across the street. Fifty more blocks would burn, but the conflagration eventually ran out of fuel. The next day, it rained.

What would the city learn from its destruction? At first, it seemed, not enough. After a quick count, officials set the death toll astonishingly low, at 478. Historians consider the number absurd--the first step in a concerted political effort to portray San Francisco as a safe place to live. Indeed, the San Francisco Real Estate Board, meeting just six days after the quake, focused exclusively on damage from the fire--completely dismissing the earthquake that had caused it. Other businesses followed suit. Their reasoning was simple: To rebuild, they needed eastern money. Fires were preventable; earthquakes were not.

"Virgin ground." To be sure, the city did make some efforts to learn from its mistakes. The governor appointed a commission of scientists and geologists to study the disaster, and its final report is generally considered to be the basis of modern earthquake science. In 1908, the city also passed a bond issue that funded a seismologically resistant water system: Cisterns were buried under every major street corner, and more flexible pipes were sunk below ground. "It was one of the great engineering masterpieces in the United States," says Stephen Tobriner, a professor of architectural history at UC Berkeley.

By and large, though, most of San Francisco's energy was devoted to quickly rebuilding--at any cost. As one civil engineer, John Debo Galloway, put it soon after the disaster: "The distant observer will ask why, with virgin ground before it, the city did not cut avenues, widen streets, and build nothing but incombustible buildings." For the business elite that ran the city after the disaster, such safety measures were not an option. "The city had suffered from the greatest fire in history," Galloway wrote. "What San Francisco needs is the cheapest building possible in which business can be done, to insure the community enough to eat. The other subjects can wait." It was the same mentality that had allowed the city to bounce back from earlier fires and quakes. And, of course, it was the same philosophy that had doomed the city in 1906. What it means for the city's future, only the next big one will tell.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Smoke engulfs San Francisco as fires erupt after the earthquake.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): SPLIT. Streets cracked down the middle, and a scar ran up the coast. After the quake, San Franciscans watched their city burn.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): MAKING DO. Families dined alfresco after the quake. Other survivors set up temporary housing in Jefferson Square Park.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

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By Justin Ewers