By Philip L. Fradkin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA; 432 PAGES; $27.50

---

Are you prepared for the big one? No, not the next big earthquake, but the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. There's no better place to start than "The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906" by Philip Fradkin, a veteran Bay Area environmental journalist who has written two previous books on earthquakes.

Fradkin is an impassioned writer who knows his subject. He has lived beside the San Andreas Fault for 30 years and has lost a home to fire. He writes that he sees his book not just as a history but also as "a disaster manual for the future." I respectfully beg to differ. Rather than a manual for the future -- of which there is no shortage -- Fradkin has given us something much more valuable: a clear-eyed view of our past.

Fradkin worries that "history is not a commodity that is valued greatly in this state." What we don't know we can't learn from. But there's nothing like a centennial for commodifying history, and Fradkin is doing his best to make sure that the history on sale is good history. This book will be followed next year by a photography book that Fradkin is working on with Mark Klett and Rebecca Solnit, an exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and a digital archive of historical documents with 10,000 images and 35,000 pages of text at the Bancroft Library (bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections).

At the behest of former state librarian Kevin Starr, Fradkin has spent years pulling together all of the documents for the Web site, and his immersion in these primary sources is the great strength of his book. As his story makes clear, it was impossible for anyone to see the city whole in the midst of the earthquake, the three days of raging fires that followed and the madness that seemed to grip San Francisco after the disaster. So Fradkin's history is told from many points of view. The perspective shifts every few pages. If this seems fragmented at times, so be it. "It is a writer's job to make sense out of a confusion of events," Fradkin says. "But to bring absolute order to the chaotic three days and the aftermath would be a disservice to reality."

The result is an often raw immersion in the experience of the earthquake and its aftermath, in which San Francisco as we know it was reborn. Odd juxtapositions give us a glimpse of a city caught in a transition in 1906. Cowboys were trailing longhorn cattle up Mission Street to the stockyards when the earthquake struck. In the confusion, the cattle bolted, gored a saloonkeeper and became tangled in fallen electrical, trolley and telephone wires.

First-person accounts mix the harrowing and the humane. Guion H. Dewey wrote to his mother: "I saw innocent men shot down by irresponsible militia. I walked four miles to have my jaw set. A stranger tried to make me accept a $10 gold piece. I was threatened with death for trying to help a small girl drag a trunk from a burning house, where her mother and father had been killed. A strange man gave me raw eggs and milk, and offered me his own bed in his house, which had not been wrecked (this is the first food I had had for twenty-two hours)." The destruction was overwhelming. Flames flared from broken gas lines and grew into firestorms that charred an area of 4.7 square miles, blackening 508 city blocks and burning 28,188 structures, including City Hall, the Hall of Justice, the county jail, five police stations, 27 firehouses, three emergency hospitals, the main library and two branches, and 31 schools. Between 4,000 and 5,000 people lost their lives in the disaster.

But this is not just a compendium of facts. Fradkin has a message to deliver, too. It is telegraphed in his subtitle: "How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself." The city is responsible for its own demise because it did not heed the warnings of previous earthquakes and fires. Buildings were not built to resist the shaking and flames. When water lines broke in 1906, firefighters used dynamite to try to blast firebreaks. This often spread fire rather than stopping it.

Fradkin is also talking about the aftermath of the earthquake, when Progressives embarked on a vicious struggle for power that further tore the city apart. This is environmental history with a vengeance. "The physical destruction caused by the natural forces of earthquake and fire was followed by an unparalleled period of racial, political, and social strife," Fradkin writes. "The forces of nature shaped the subsequent culture and its history. Violence in the landscape begat violence in the human history that followed."

But the real villain here is not nature. It's the Progressives, and especially James Phelan. One would be hard pressed to find a better example in one man of the best and worst of the Progressives than Phelan, the wealthy banker-capitalist, former mayor, future senator and anti-immigration ideologue who led the city's recovery. Fradkin portrays the Phelan-orchestrated prosecution of pro-labor Mayor Eugene Schmitz and his right-hand man, Abraham "Boss" Ruef, on corruption charges as an allegory for the ruthless Progressive campaign to remake the city in its own self-image.

Fradkin invokes Chinese philosophers who see earthquakes as the cause of the rise and fall of dynasties. The problem with this analysis is that the Progressives had already begun plotting their campaign before the earthquake. The disorder gave them the opportunity to take control, and they seized it. One long-lasting and still controversial result was the successful campaign to build a system to create a reliable water supply for the city by damming Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Fradkin's hostility toward the Progressives is understandable. But he also seems somewhat ill at ease with the city itself, especially when he personifies it. He almost seems to side with the priest who argued that the city deserved what it got and might again. But it is not the city that destroys and rebuilds itself. It is people who make and remake San Francisco.

Jon Christensen is a research fellow at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at Stanford University.

This article appeared on page B - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle