SUNDAY INTERVIEW -- GLADYS HANSEN / 90 Years Later, Quake Victims Get Names / Gladys Hansen, the city's archivist emeritus, has dedicated her career to identifying those who died in 1906

Although she was born almost 20 years after the disaster, Gladys Hansen has become San Francisco's expert on the 1906 earthquake and fire. The city's archivist emeritus and curator of the Museum of the City of San Francisco has spent much of her life researching, cataloging, writing and answering questions about the temblor that jolted San Francisco awake 90 years ago this week.

At the time (5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18), the '06 quake was considered one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. In terms of seismic damage and casualties, it still ranks at the top. It's estimated the quake measured about 8.3 on the Richter scale.

Yet the full dimensions of the destruction remained buried for almost 60 years. It wasn't until Hansen started working in the San Francisco Archives Room of the Main Branch library in 1963 that the identities and an accurate number of those who were killed began to emerge. By her estimates, casualties were six times greater than originally reported -- not 478 dead, but closer to 3,000.

Hansen says a deliberate effort was made to gloss over the impact of the disaster. Everyone with an investment in the city -- from Army brass and insurance executives to Southern Pacific Railroad tycoons and civic boosters -- minimized the damage and the continued threat of danger, she believes.

In a book she co-authored in 1989, titled "Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906," she documents the misconceptions and disinformation.

After 47 years as a librarian, including 20 years as the city's archivist, she retired in 1992. Mayors Art Agnos, Joseph Alioto and George Christopher attended her retirement party, where she was presented the key to the city for her dedication in putting together the disaster's missing pieces.

Shortly thereafter, Hansen was appointed curator of the Museum of the City of San Francisco, where she continues her quest to identify all who died nearly a century ago, the day the Earth shook and the sky burned.

Q:

A:

I searched everywhere. There was no list. I learned that the Board of Supervisors estimated that 478 died. The State Board of Health said 503 died. And General (Adolphus) Greely, from the U.S. Army, said 498 died. But they gave totals only; no names. So I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a big project."

Q: How did you go about your research?

A: I started by going through the newspapers. You believe everything that's in the papers, don't you? I was looking for 478 names. That was my goal. I copied the names on 3-by-5 cards. I went through every newspaper that San Francisco had from April 18 to May 18 (1906) -- a whole month. I thought, "Hey, the city was well on its way to recovery by then." So I finished our papers, did the Oakland papers and reached out for any paper, anything I could get -- books, church records, etc.

When Frank Quinn, the retired city registrar of voters, came in, things changed because he was interested in graves and wakes and death. So he and I were a great team. He started out by going to the departments of vital records, the health department and coroner's office. He checked all the city records. So now this little list started to grow and grow. The first year brought it up to about 700. The second year it went to 1,500.

When we finished all the city records, we sent a letter to all the historical and genealogical societies throughout the United States and asked them to publish in their bulletins the type of work that we were doing and requested that their members write to us if they had any family that they lost in 1906.

God, we got what seemed like thousands of letters. The mail would come in -- another letter, another death, another death. . . . In fact, one time a letter came in that was just addressed to "the Death Lady of San Francisco." Nobody else wanted it, so they gave it to me. It was more information.

A lot of women would write and say, you know, "Aunt Jenny came to San Francisco and she and her family wrote to us all the time and then they didn't write any more." We'd write back and say, "Send us what information you have, and if you have any letters up to that time, let us know." So they'd send back what information they had. We'd check the city directories. But since women were not listed unless they were widows or married, we had to double-check everything. Basically, what we began doing was putting these people into houses. They needed addresses, and that's why we turned to the city directory, the voting registers and so forth.

Q: What was the number of casualities that you finally came up with?

A: Over 3,000. When I retired I said that (identifying them) was going to be my project. I really feel that this is something that should have been done a long time ago. And I owe it to them because if there's a great earthquake in San Francisco again, I don't want to just disappear. I want people to know I lived in this city.

Q: What are some of the myths and misconceptions about the 1906 earthquake and fire?

A: I would say probably that there was no water in San Francisco to put out the fire. There was plenty of water. In fact, there was a salt-water line from the beach right down Market and alongside the Palace Hotel. They never tapped that line. And there was plenty of water in the hydrants throughout the city. But the problem was this fire got away. Reading some of the accounts from the firemen of the time -- they'd come in, get their equipment up close, put wet bags or sacks over themselves and try to get close to the fire, but it was too hot. It was 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's one of the reasons so many people just disappeared; they were reduced to ashes. By the time the firemen blocked off the hydrant, their engine was so hot they couldn't move it. They had to abandon it and move on. So the misconception was there was no water; there was plenty of water. It's just that there was not enough manpower.

Another misconception is that our fire department single-handedly put out the fire. Not true. One of the things I'd like to see -- say, on this 90th anniversary -- is some credit given to our military, the Army under General (Frederick) Funston. The citizens may not have liked the power that he represented, but those soldiers kept order. The Navy came in and ran water lines -- they basically put out the fire. They also provided water to our fire department for their steam engines.

Q: How long did it take them to get the fire under control?

A: Three days and three nights. That's why I think we are celebrating the wrong day. Instead of celebrating the earthquake and fire, we should be celebrating when the fire went out on the 21st.

Q: You've written that there was an effort to suppress information about the extent of casualties and loss of property related to the fire and quake. Who was responsible for suppressing it, what information did they suppress, and why?

A: In 1865 and 1868, we had some very good earthquakes. So you have to remember that a lot of these people -- the movers and shakers -- who were involved in those earthquakes were alive in 1906. They had already played the game. And one of the games was to protect the economy. I mean, you had to keep the money here. And so you can't go around saying, "Hey, this city is a disaster; we've had a big earthquake and a fire." By 1906 these players in the early years were now saying, "Let's not talk earthquake. Let's talk fire." Because cities could recover from fire, and many of them did. Fire was acceptable.

Q: Who were some of those responsible?

A: Well, certainly, Southern Pacific, this is where they made their money.

Actually, it was my son, Richard, and retired San Francisco Fire Chief Emmet Condon who found a photograph taken from the roof of the Mark Hopkins Hotel looking down onto Kearny Street, below where the Hall of Justice stood. The dome or the steeple on the building fell at 8 o'clock in the morning, when there was another heavy aftershock. However, the photograph that we have on display at the museum was taken at 10 o'clock in the morning and you look down and there is the Hall of Justice, beautiful building, no problem with it at all, until you start looking closer and you see the top has been put back into the photograph -- built up again. It's a fresh new building. And then you look along the tops of the buildings, and they've all been cleaned up.

Q: You mean touched up?

A: That's right. They've been touched up. And this photograph was seen all over the world. There was a lot of that going on.

Q: Are you saying there was a deliberate effort to spread disinformation?

A: Yes, very definitely. There had to be. In fact, the insurance companies were trying to find people who had been on the streets with small cameras taking photographs right after the earthquake. They were willing to pay up to $15,000 for a photograph of a building that had suffered heavy earthquake damage but had burned. At that time, if you had an insurance policy, if anything happened to your building due to an earthquake, you had no insurance. So that accounted for a lot of arson in this city.

Q: In terms of property loss, what was the actual cost?

A: Gosh, 28,000 buildings actually were destroyed, 498 blocks leveled. One quarter of our city burned -- almost everything east of Van Ness to the Bay -- gone. The figures that are usually posted are around $300 million, but that was for the insured value of the building, not for the contents. Typically, most insurance covered only maybe 20 percent.

So that's a very conservative estimate. Our project figured out it cost billions of 1906 dollars, not millions -- 1906 still ranks, compared to even the recent earthquakes, as a darn expensive one.

A couple of years ago, we all started to laugh because we saw something in the paper that said the city had just finished paying off its bonds for work that was done to recover from the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Q: You mentioned the role the military played in putting out the fire. Now that the Army has left the Presidio, and the naval shipyards are gone and military bases throughout California are closing, what impact is this going to have on recovery efforts after the next great quake that hits San Francisco?

A: I think we're going to be really sorry that we've lost our military, because we're going to be standing alone. This actually forces everyone to take care of themselves. Who's going to maintain order as the Army did, or fight your fires, as the Navy did? Even the Marines came in and helped. We're not going to have that.

Q: How prepared are our police and fire departments?

A: I think the fire department will be overwhelmed if we have another earthquake like we had in 1906. That's why a lot of us wanted the battleship Missouri to homeport here along with the rest of the fleet: because they provide the sailors who know first aid. They provide the generators that you can hook into to keep the electricity going. They provide sailors to fight fires.

Q: In terms of the city's history, what was the significance of the event that occurred on April 18, 1906?

A: Well, in my estimation, two great things happened to San Francisco in our history. The first was the Gold Rush that created this city. The second was the earthquake, which leveled the city. And then came the reconstruction of the city. The Gold Rush created it, and the earthquake and fire cleaned it out.

Q: This year marks the 90th anniversary of the quake and fire. Is that cause for celebration?

A: I'm against celebrating a catastrophe. We observe it. And we make stars of those who went through this event. However, I don't think it's something that you get up and dance in the streets and have a big party over. Because this was a time of death. You had 3,000 people dying. I think we should look more toward those who were here, whose names we lost. We don't know anything about them. They died and disappeared.

Q: What are some of the more interesting or significant things that you've unearthed that had not been known about the earthquake or fire?

A: Each phase of this study has opened up new doors. First was the collecting of the names of those who died. Working with the professors from UC Berkeley, trying to get them to understand that the earthquake that they had read about was not the earthquake that we were producing from our dead. They then suggested that we put those people in houses. They wanted to know how many wood-frame buildings went down, how many brick buildings went down.

What's interesting is we found more people died in wood-frame buildings than in the brick buildings. After we got them in the buildings, they wanted to know what type of soil those buildings were on.

The thing I started with was an old Royal typewriter, very happy with my 3-by-5 cards. But one day (Bay Area broadcaster) David Fowler said to me, "Gladys, let me have your list of dead, because I want to put it in my computer."

When he put the names in his computer something happened right away. We were then able to bring all the people who died at a certain spot together. So you were reuniting families, you were finding out where the greatest amount of people died.

Out of our study, we found out how they died (by checking the death records and coroner's reports) -- whether it was burns, asphyxiation, shock, suicides. And through this work, there is now a definition of an earthquake dead, which is defined as anyone who dies at the time of the disaster or dies within a year of the disaster as the result of injuries received.

Sometimes I think all those who died are right there behind us saying, "Keep going. Keep going. Keep going."

Q: How do you feel about the city- and state-mandated seismic retrofit requirements, which have caused closures of historical churches and buildings throughout the city, many of which survived the 1906 disaster?

A: I'm always kind of astounded at some of the things that have been red-tagged, because many of these buildings survived 1906. Brick buildings. And here they say, "Well, tear them down." But we found that more people died in the wood-frame buildings than in the brick buildings.

I understand that we have to try to protect ourselves. And all of us have to do that. But how far do we go to protect ourselves? What price do we have to pay? Who is to say that these upgraded buildings will survive a big quake? They are untested.

Q: What are your concerns about the city in terms of earthquake preparedness?

A: I think perhaps rather than have the city handle earthquake preparedness, we should reach the peo ple. We know darn well that the fire department is going to be overwhelmed; the police department is going to be overwhelmed, and the military is gone. Initially we should not expect help, except from our neighbors and our own family -- and nothing else. Learn how to take care of yourself.