100 year anniversary of the San Francisco Quake
Today marks the 100 year anniversary of San Francisco getting hosed by the San Andreas Fault. Over at Yahoo news I found a link to a site that features some interesting tales from the quake.
The 1906 quake is the most famous and the most damaging earthquake to his America since the white man set up shop here. Of course, most of the damage from the earthquake came from the fires that started afterwards and burned for days. And here’s something interesting I learned recently: apparently after the earthquake, there were only a few fires burning, and people’s houses were trashed, and some wiseass somewhere (we’ll never know who) pointed out that homeowner’s insurance didn’t cover earthquake damage, so if you wanted to get money from your insurance company to get your house rebuilt, you had to set it on fire. And so he did. The idea caught on, and more people started torching their own houses for the payout, until…well, until the city burned down.
Probably didn’t seem like such a good idea at that point.
