Tales of the City
Dec. 29th, 2021 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: A Crack in the Edge of the World - the Great American Earthquake of 1906, by Simon Winchester
I think we acquired this from a book-swap shelf, in the Before Times of course. I usually find Simon Winchester's books interesting even if they may not be quite what I was expecting. This is a good case in point, as he ranges very broadly, with only a limited amount of writing about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the subsequent fire. This is, perhaps, a slight liberty, as it's clear from the original publication date that this was intended to mark the centenary of that event, but Winchester gets away with diverging to include twentieth century geological developments in the areas of plate tectonics and continental drift, a historical overview of several other earthquakes across the North American plate, the danger presented by the Yellowstone super-volcano area, a series of episodes along the San Andreas fault, and a road trip from east coast to west coast, up to Alaska, and back.
On a more human scale, Winchester describes the history of the San Francisco area, from colonisation through the nineteenth century California gold rush. The new metropolis was not always robustly built, though there had been damaging seismic events within living memory. He considers the insurance industry, which exhibited a wide variation in behaviour between companies who paid up irrespective of the cause of damage, and those who held out, maintaining that policies covered fire damage but not earthquake damage. The earthquake ruptured water main pipes, meaning that the initial damage was quickly compounded by fires, generally started by falling electrical cables, with the fire service unable to respond effectively; in this context, Winchester discusses the option of filing the event under "great city fires of history" such as Rome, London, Hamburg and Dresden, though with a unique cause.
I think we acquired this from a book-swap shelf, in the Before Times of course. I usually find Simon Winchester's books interesting even if they may not be quite what I was expecting. This is a good case in point, as he ranges very broadly, with only a limited amount of writing about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the subsequent fire. This is, perhaps, a slight liberty, as it's clear from the original publication date that this was intended to mark the centenary of that event, but Winchester gets away with diverging to include twentieth century geological developments in the areas of plate tectonics and continental drift, a historical overview of several other earthquakes across the North American plate, the danger presented by the Yellowstone super-volcano area, a series of episodes along the San Andreas fault, and a road trip from east coast to west coast, up to Alaska, and back.
On a more human scale, Winchester describes the history of the San Francisco area, from colonisation through the nineteenth century California gold rush. The new metropolis was not always robustly built, though there had been damaging seismic events within living memory. He considers the insurance industry, which exhibited a wide variation in behaviour between companies who paid up irrespective of the cause of damage, and those who held out, maintaining that policies covered fire damage but not earthquake damage. The earthquake ruptured water main pipes, meaning that the initial damage was quickly compounded by fires, generally started by falling electrical cables, with the fire service unable to respond effectively; in this context, Winchester discusses the option of filing the event under "great city fires of history" such as Rome, London, Hamburg and Dresden, though with a unique cause.