There is a quiz in a city asking the date of an eartquake happened in san francisco and killed 2500 couldnt find it anywhere anyone can help me? (the answer is not 18 april 1906)

-- batuhan cankul (webmaster@trfree.org), November 04, 2001

Answers

The answer is that there was no such earthquake and that should be pretty obvious since people would most likely be talking about some other earthquake other than the 1906 Earthquake. The 1906 Earthquake killed approximately 500 people. Records are not really that accurate since it was felt that a lot of people were burried or creamated immediately after the quake and no account of their deaths was ever recorded. Some people felt it was actually as high as 2000 but that is very doubtful. As far as other earthquakes go in San Francisco that might have killed 2500. I've got a record of all earthquakes between the years of 1850 and 1906 put out by the Smithsonian Institution. There were 465 earthquakes between those years and not one of them cause the number of deaths your talking about. The biggest earthquake before 1906 in San Francisco was the 1868 quake which caused a lot of damage but not many deaths. In regards to earthquakes before 1850, the population was just not big enough and it surely would have been noted in the early newspapers had it occurred in late 1848 or 1849 where the population had begun to explode. In regards to the years after 1906. The biggest earthquake since then was the one in 1988 and 62 people died in that one. So unless you are talking about a San Francisco in a parallel universe (which some people do believe exists), then there was never an earthquake in the history of San Francisco that killed 2500 people.

-- Harry Murphy (harrymurphy@my-deja.com*), November 04, 2001.

As re the answer given that there were only 500 people killed in the 1906 SF earthquake:

To whom it may concern:

I think you'll get quite an argument from Gladys Hansen, Museum of the City of San Francisco, as concerns your insistence that there were only 500 "known" deaths from the 06 earthquake.

-- Greg LaLonde (greg_lalo@yahoo.com), January 02, 2002.

I do insist on it if you are talking about the people killed inside of San Francisco. If you are speaking about the total deaths of people killed everywhere then it is somewhat higher and could possibly reach 2000. I think it was up in Sonoma where a number of people were reportedly killed like about 60 or 80. If you combined the small amounts of people killed in the Bay Area then yeah, it's very possible the death toll went up to 2000 or 2500. You have to remember too that the Earquake happened at I think it was a little after 6 in the morning when people were not yet at work and so the timing of it probably saved thousands of lives and kept the death toll down. harrymurphy@bigmailbox*.net Remove * to email

-- Harry Murphy (harrymurphy@my-deja.com), January 02, 2002.

Gladys Hansen's description of over 3,000 deaths in the 1906 quake was not from people outside the City. It takes into account those not killed outright on that day, April 18. That includes everyone who died as a result of the quake and fire, such as people who had been injured by falling debris and the like.

And BTW, there was no quake in 1988...it was 1989. Probably just a typo, but I wanted to set the record straight.

-- Rob Summers (summerstime@yahoo.com), April 08, 2002.