File:A history of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco; an account of the disaster of April 18, 1906 and its immediate results (1906) (14580151437).jpg

Identifier: historyofearthqu00aitk (find matches)
Title: A history of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco; an account of the disaster of April 18, 1906 and its immediate results
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Aitken, Frank W Hilton, Edward
Subjects: Earthquakes -- California San Francisco
Publisher: San Francisco, The E. Hilton Co.
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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be de-stroyed by such a fire was made evident. Any of San Franciscos great of^ce buildingswould have withstood an ordinary fire starting inany one room: but in the intense heat of the con-flagration when the fire once took hold of such abuilding it soon spread and converted the wholeinterior into a roaring furnace. Soon the mortarof the tile partitions lost its life and crumbledaway; soon the tile themselves began to fall to the floor. In time the tile surrounding the columnswould give way similarly and expose the latter to the fires action. The steel heats to white incan-descence; its strength leaves it; the weight restingupon it slowly settles. The column bends, flaresout; buckles; the framework above settles andstrains itself at every joint. In some cases this would happen only in one ortwo places in the building; in others, everywhere.Such a buckling, repeated on several floors, couldresult only in twisting and straining the frame sothat rivets are sheared and beams pulled apart, to
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IR ^.^ Rear of Kamm Building Photo by Waters 1 A STUDY OF THE FIRE drop through to the floor below and perhaps carrythat, too, to the basement. Such complete destruction occurred, indeed, insome of the second-class buildings—those with cast-iron columns, steel floor beams and concrete floors.Through the breaking of columns the floors of suchbuildings were made to sag so much that thefloor beams pulled away from the shoulders onwhich they rested, and, with the floor itself, droppedthrough. The two buildings on Mission betweenFirst and Fremont show this result in part. Theadjoining portions of each building for a width ofabout twenty-five feet, and for almost the full depthof the building, have no columns or floors at all,the whole interior—columns, beams, girders, andconcrete arches—having gone down together intothe basement. The small picture showing the flar-ing and breaking apart of a cast-iron column in thebuilding at First and Mission streets, and the com-panion view showing

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