To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Cody CassidyHow to Survive a Hellish EarthquakeNow ReadingHow to Survive a Deadly TornadoHow to Survive a Killer AsteroidHow to Survive the Donner PartyHow to Escape the TitanicHow to Escape PompeiiHow to Outrun a DinosaurSubscribe to WIREDLet’s say you want to go on a walking tour of San Francisco at its warmest and most energetic. You want to see the port town after the rush for gold swelled the foggy backwater into the largest city west of the Mississippi—back when it was home to the West Coast’s tallest buildings and beautiful brick architecture. You want to see San Francisco as it was before the Golden Gate Bridge sutured California’s great gap, back when escaping the peninsula meant waiting for the ferry.So you travel back to April 18, 1906, and with a big day ahead, you arrive in the early morning hours, while most of the city still sleeps and gas-powered lamps provide the only light.Because you’ve done your research, you begin your tour at the location of the city’s founding: Mission San Francisco de Asís, also known as the Mission Dolores, established when the Spanish missionary Francisco Palóu arrived on the sandy, hilly, isolated peninsula in 1776.When Francisco named the church, he did so after nearby Dolores Creek. This may surprise you, because you don’t see a creek. But the old creek bed is there, under the foundations of the churches and stockyards and houses, buried beneath a mixture of sod and trash infill thrown into the marshy area by pioneers so they could build on top of it. As you’re absorbing the scene, at exactly 5:12 in the morning, you feel a sharp, sudden jolt beneath your feet.It’s startling.It’s harmless.It’s a warning.You need to run. Buy This Book At:If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.The jolt is a foreshock. It’s the first wave of energy passing through the earth’s crust that presages the main event, which in this case is the biggest earthquake to ever hit a major US city. Survivor testimony suggests the foreshock arrived approximately 30 seconds before the real shaking began, which means you have roughly 30 seconds to find shelter before a 7.9-magnitude earthquake slams into a city woefully unprepared for it. Many buildings collapse. Nearly every structure sustains serious damage. Bricks, church steeples, balconies, and towers shower down on the streets below. Water mains burst. Gas lines explode, and nearly everything not shaken to the ground burns in a four‑day firestorm. In terms of lives lost in American natural disasters, the 1906 quake compares only to the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas. In terms of economic damage, there is no comparison. Over the next four days, three-quarters of the city crumbles into rubble and ash. At least 200,000 people are left homeless. More than 3,000 die.But all that comes later.When you feel the foreshock you need to get off the street, because you’re surrounded by buildings of dubious construction with foundations wobbling atop an old pioneer trash pit. But oddly, the safest course of action is to get inside one. The only place more dangerous than inside a wobbly building is beside one, because in 30 seconds nearly every chimney, church spire, and cupola in the city will collapse onto the streets below.Of course, you shouldn’t just run into any building. Use your 30 seconds and survey your options: Barns, factories, stockyards, and other structures with large open spaces and few interior walls are more likely to collapse than buildings designed for living. (In 1906, nearly every warehouse in San Francisco collapsed.) Instead, look for houses, offices, or apartments—anything with lots of interior walls.Avoid brick buildings and the structures next to them. Unlike wood-framed constructions, brick buildings shatter rather than sway, and they often shed walls instead of collapsing, saving those inside them but posing huge risks to those beneath. Many of the fatalities, including San Francisco fire chief Dennis Sullivan, occurred when a building collapsed onto the roof next door.Dhruv MehrotraMatt LasloDell CameronJennifer M. WoodWhen choosing a building, note its orientation. The direction it faces matters. If you can, run into one with a foundation oriented north-south rather than east-west. It will be far more stable in the impending tectonic shift.Once you’ve found the perfectly oriented, single-story, multiroom, wood-frame house with similarly constructed neighbors, get in a doorway or at the very least beneath a table. Crouch low and cover your head with your arms. A tiny piece of the San Andreas Fault has just broken free.The San Andreas Fault marks the meeting point between the massive tectonic plates supporting the Pacific Ocean and North America. These plates move in the same northwest direction, but the Pacific Plate moves faster, and thus their relationship is far from harmonious. Friction can hold the plates together for decades or even centuries. But as the years pass, the strain builds until, like an avalanche on a snow-laden mountain, one small disturbance sets off a chain reaction.At 12 minutes past 5 in the morning on April 18, 1906, a small section of the San Andreas fault broke just west of the future Golden Gate Bridge. William Ellsworth, professor of geophysics at Stanford University, tells me the initial break was the size of a dinner plate. These types of snaps occur all the time, but after decades of built-up tension, this one cascaded into a quake almost as powerful as the San Andreas Fault is capable of producing. In a moment, the Pacific Plate shifted north by an average of 15 feet relative to its North American partner.The rupture raced down the fault at nearly 2 miles per second, sending pressure waves rippling outward through the earth like the wake of a speedboat. Successive 3-foot undulations moved through the earth’s crust at nine times the speed of sound. They rocked, compressed, and shattered the soil as they radiated away from ground zero.The crew of the Argo, a steamer headed for San Francisco Bay, were the first to feel the jolt. Bolts blasted out of their sockets and the solid metal hull dented inward, as if a depth charge had gone off nearby. The crew scrambled out of their bunks, expecting to see a rock or rogue wave. Instead, they saw nothing but flat water, with no tsunami or even a wave in sight. Fortunately for the Argo, strike-slip fault lines like the San Andreas do not typically produce large tsunamis. Their side-to-side movement rattles the earth but doesn’t displace huge quantities of water. Though you face many dangers in 1906, you need not worry about tsunamis.Within seconds, earthen swells pass through San Francisco. If you look westward, you may even see them coming. You may first see the tops of buildings begin to dance against the sky. The St. Francis Hotel shakes so violently it looks like “a tree in a tempest,” according to one journalist’s account. Soon you may see the waves themselves pass like supersonic sea swells. Jesse Cook, a police sergeant working downtown, said the undulations looked “as if the waves of the ocean were coming towards me, billowing as they came.”Dhruv MehrotraMatt LasloDell CameronJennifer M. WoodAs the waves arrive, so does the sound—a deep, horrible rumble and screech as rock grinds into rock, cement cracks, foundations crumble, and bricks cascade from above. As the rupture passes through the hilly neighborhoods of San Francisco to your north and west, the sturdy bedrock mutes the earth’s motion. According to a damage assessment conducted by seismologist Harry O. Wood shortly after the earthquake, the shaking above San Francisco’s bedrock never exceeds VII out of X on the Rossi-Forel intensity scale. But down where you are, atop the porous pioneer landfill of the Mission, you may as well be sitting on a bowl of Jell-O. The soft soil behaves like a liquid, sloshing back and forth between the troughs and peaks of the waves. On the Rossi-Forel scale, the shaking reaches IX. If you’re standing, you’ll be knocked to the ground and pinned there “as if glued,” recalled Sergeant Cook. On the other side of the city, a 4-year-old Ansel Adams falls and breaks his nose. “My beauty was marred forever,” he later said.If you want to avoid a similar fate—or worse—tuck into a ball, cover your head and neck with your arms, and wait as successive 3-foot waves rip the soft soil apart, compacting and settling the loose dirt with each passing swell. In less than a minute, the Mission District snaps south 7 feet and drops down 5. Some buildings withstand the shift; many do not.The earthquake exposes San Francisco’s history of corrupt politics and reckless construction like a scrupulous inspector. Even City Hall collapses, a result of mixing “bad politics and bad cement,” the Chamber of Commerce later says. The Valencia Street Hotel telescopes into the ground so completely that the residents of the top story walk out onto street level, while those in the lower stories die in the crush. The brick church beside Mission Dolores falls in on itself. The walls of the Columbia Theatre and many of the apartment buildings built on the infilled Lake McCoppin site a block to your south collapse into their smaller neighbors, crushing them.After 60 seconds of relentless shaking, the earthquake and its deafening cacophony finally end, revealing a quieter, even more horrifying sound: the soft hiss of escaping gas.Let’s say you pick the right building, you survive, and you aren’t trapped. That’s good. But the danger has only just begun, and now you need to leave your lifesaving shelter as quickly as you ran in. The shifting earth has compacted the gas mains running north-south beneath the streets. You may see them poking out of the ground like the bones of a fractured arm. These severed mains now spew their gas into arcing electrical lines. Underground explosions go off like cord charges down the street, excavating deep trenches. The explosions ignite the city’s densely packed clapboard housing south of Market Street. Within minutes, no fewer than 50 fires burn throughout San Francisco’s southern districts.Fire was a familiar foe to the citizens of San Francisco. At least seven major fires ravaged the city during its booming Gold Rush era, including a three‑day firestorm in 1851 that destroyed three-quarters of its structures. Fire ripped through the city so frequently that some residents of the South of Market district had rebuilt their homes and businesses as many as five times.A postmortem report of the 1906 firestorms conducted by the National Board of Fire Underwriters concluded that even under ideal conditions the conflagrations would have overwhelmed the fire department. But what little chance they did have vanished when the firefighters attached their hoses to the hydrants and discovered the gas mains weren’t the only underground pipes to snap in the quake. Later examinations revealed that the matrix of plumbing pipes connecting the city to its nine district reservoirs broke in at least 20,000 places. Water from the cracked piping spewed into the streets and houses, drowning those trapped in collapsed buildings and draining the reservoirs just when firefighters needed water most.Dhruv MehrotraMatt LasloDell CameronJennifer M. WoodFortunately for you, the first fires ignite to your south and east, which means you have some time. Once you run back onto the streets of the Mission, you’ll find absolute chaos. Hard experience has taught the people of San Francisco the danger even distant fires pose, and as soon as black smoke begins rising across the eastern horizon, the evacuation will commence. You’ll see half-dressed businessmen with faces covered in shaving cream, families carrying all they can hold, and business owners saving their most valuable wares. James Hopper, writing for the San Francisco Call, reports seeing a barefoot man in pink pajamas and bathrobe, wrapped in a pink comforter, stylishly making his escape.In 1906, no bridge connects the San Francisco Peninsula to the rest of the Bay Area. Fortunately every boat in the bay—from tugboats to cargo ships to private sailboats—mounts a Dunkirk-like evacuation from the city’s wharves. By the end of the fire four days later, this armada will evacuate more than 30,000 people across the bay. You need to be one of them.Many of the boats depart from the Ferry Building, where Market Street tees into the bay. Market is just a few blocks to your north, so get out to Mission Street and turn left. As you move north, check behind you. There’s a rather surprising and very lethal threat stampeding from the south.In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, some 60 longhorn cattle escaped from a nearby stockyard. For a brief moment, Pamplona comes to San Francisco. The herd stampedes down Mission Street, trampling panicked residents and goring saloon owner John Moller before he can squeeze back into his establishment. As you run, keep checking for steer—and move faster than poor Mr. Moller when you see them coming.After a few blocks you’ll arrive on Market Street, San Francisco’s answer to New York’s Broadway. The wide main boulevard cuts diagonally through the city, stretching from the peninsula’s geographic center to the bay. Look to your right down the street and you’ll see a tall tower at the end, two and a half miles away. That’s your goal. Fire will eventually close this escape route, but not until early afternoon. If you move, you should make it before then.However, you shouldn’t sprint or even run. Move deliberately, pay attention to passing police or soldiers, and if they give you any instructions, follow them.Fire and cattle are not the only dangers here.In the minutes after the earthquake, from high up on the sturdy bedrock of the Russian Hill neighborhood, Brigadier General Frederick Funston surveys the chaos unfolding below. Funston serves as the commanding officer of the Presidio military fort in the north of the city. He is a veteran of both the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, and is, as they say of good Army men at this time, a man of action. He isn’t about to let an ignorance of firefighting techniques, an utter lack of experience in city government, a military tradition dating back to the Magna Carta, or the US Constitution prevent him from taking control.Dhruv MehrotraMatt LasloDell CameronJennifer M. WoodStanding atop that hill while you’re dodging a steer’s horns, Funston concludes that the situation, the city, and its citizens require the full weight of his experience. At 5:30 am, he illegally enacts martial law of his own accord and orders his garrisoned troops into the city with bayonets fixed. By 7 am, the largest peacetime military occupation of a US city in history marches into the streets of San Francisco under direct orders to shoot anyone suspected of looting.Many soldiers follow their orders all too closely. Suspicion is enough for a death sentence. They fire on anyone running out of a building with their arms full—even when the building is seconds from incineration—without asking any questions, including seemingly important ones, like whether the person owns the business and is trying to save their own stuff.No one knows the exact number of citizens shot by Funston’s soldiers over the four‑day firestorm. Contemporary newspaper accounts concluded the soldiers and police shot or stabbed at least a hundred suspected “looters.” With the destruction of City Hall, most of the victims remain anonymous. But the name and circumstances of death of at least one person is known: prominent businessman Heber C. Tilden. He was working for the Red Cross when soldiers shot him after he accidentally drove past a checkpoint.As you walk down Market, keep your arms completely empty and your eyes off the bankers as they evacuate wheelbarrows of cash and carts of gold. You’re walking close to the soldiers. The first reported shooting occurs on Market Street just after 7 am, when soldiers shoot a man in the back as he flees a building with his arms full. Fire quickly incinerates his body along with any evidence of who he was or what he was doing.By the time you make it halfway down Market, separate streams of smoke rising from the dense neighborhoods to your south coalesce into a single, towering black cloud. Fire has consumed the crowded clapboard housing of the working-class district and built itself into an inferno so hot and close it has developed its own wind system.The heat in the fire’s center will by now exceed 2,000 degrees, warming so much air so quickly that it ascends at speeds in excess of 80 miles per hour. Like a thunderstorm of fire, the hot air rises some 6 miles high, cools, and rockets downward, creating vortices from the wind shear and small tornadoes of flame.These urban firestorms flood their surroundings with spark showers that fire experts call an “ember attack.” Even buildings made of brick and other seemingly flameproof materials succumb to the onslaught. Sparks probe every crevice, hunting for a way into the flammable interior. Inevitably, the embers find purchase. They snake through ventilation systems, pass through open windows, or find cracks in the construction. Once inside, the flames leave nothing behind but burned-out husks.Firefighters build a fire line along Market Street, hoping to contain the blaze to the city’s southern districts. To widen the firebreak, the fire department, with the assistance of the military, turns to explosives.Dhruv MehrotraMatt LasloDell CameronJennifer M. WoodIt does not go well.They detonate the first of many buildings at 9 am. You might even see it off the corner of Sixth and Market. Don’t stop to watch. The soldiers who set the fuse misjudge the timing, and one of them, Lieutenant Charles Pulis, dies in the blast. It’s the first tragic failure of what would be a disastrous strategy that only serves to ignite buildings and start fires behind fire lines.As you move down Market, you’ll hear increasingly frequent explosions above the roar of the flames. In some cases, you may even see bombs going off in buildings already on fire or, in one spectacularly disastrous case, when soldiers detonate a fireworks factory near the water.Any hope the fire department had of holding the fire line at Market Street ends by 9:30 am, when a new fire begins in a kitchen on the corner of Hayes and Gough Streets, deep behind the firebreak. “Had there been the slightest quantity of water attainable when this fire was discovered it would have been easily extinguished,” a responding firefighter later says. “But we were compelled to watch it burn and spread.”The flames force firefighters to retreat to their secondary fire line. Just before noon the fire crosses the northern end of Market Street and burns the banks on California Street, the Italian district of North Beach, and Chinatown. If you keep moving, you should arrive at the Ferry Building before fire seals the path behind you.Once you reach the Ferry Building, you have a choice. You can depart on one of the many boats leaving for Oakland or Alcatraz Island (don’t worry—it’s not a federal prison yet). Or you can stay and help the only successful firefighting effort the city ever mounts.At about the same time you arrive, so does a Navy lieutenant by the name of Frederick Freeman, along with 66 sailors, a destroyer, and two firefighting tugs. The tugs’ powerful pumps soon provide some of the only water in the entire city.Over the next 70 hours, Freeman and his sailors will fight the fires along the waterfront. As the rest of the city burns, and as Funston ineffectively detonates hundreds of buildings in a failed attempt to establish a fire line along Van Ness Avenue, Freeman keeps the piers open, allowing boats to ferry evacuees to safety. You can join him and over the next four days help save hundreds of San Franciscans.After four days, the fires will finally burn out once they reach the sandy dunes along San Francisco’s western edge. You can then, if you’d like, safely finish your tour—though, according to the novelist Jack London, there may not be much to see. London walked the city shortly after the disaster as a journalist for Collier’s magazine and wrote: “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone.”So it may be a good time to end your visit. Of course, the San Andreas Fault still runs beneath San Francisco, it’s still active, and after all these years no technology exists to predict earthquakes. The best geologists can do is use the frequency of a fault’s great ruptures to gauge when it might happen again. According to the United States Geological Survey, the San Andreas Fault averages a 1906‑sized earthquake every 200 years. So you may not need to visit this disaster. Instead, it might visit you.From How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes by Cody Cassidy, published in June by Penguin Books.Read nextRead next📩 Don’t miss our biggest stories, delivered to your inbox every day🎧 Our new podcast wants you to Have a Nice Future“Building a platform like Twitter is not difficult”This surveillance system tracks inmates down to their heart rateFrances Haugen says we need a “Free Mark” movementBees get all the love. 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