From the archives: The great San Francisco earthquake, 1906

By Tom Lowe2023-08-11T06:00:00

The Builder warms to the idea of steel-framed buildings after the “peculiar” structures survive a tremor which flattens 80% of the city

It’s a measure of the scale of the disaster which struck San Francisco in 1906 that the following week it was the subject of the leading editorial of a trade magazine on the other side of the world.

More than 80% of the city, America’s largest on the still sparsely populated West Coast, and over 3,000 people were killed by the earthquake and ensuing fire in what remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California’s history.

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