Earthquakes and wildfires have always been fact of life in Santa Rosa

Earthquakes are a fact of life in this part of the world, as are fires, something we tended to forget until the worst wildfire in California history roared into Santa Rosa last October. A ferocious wind-driven firestorm came without warning in the dark of night and destroyed 3,061 homes in the city. Earthquakes too catch us unaware and seismic predictions remain elusive, despite intense studies and old wives’ tales about overcast, muggy days being “earthquake weather.”

There was nothing remarkable about the weather on that spring morning when, 38 years after being granted that benchmark city charter, a substantial portion of this new city fell down in heaps of brick and mortar. The mighty San Andreas fault had shifted during the Great Earthquake of 1906, causing damage along 270 miles of the California coast.

The courthouse had collapsed, as had City Hall and the Athenaeum theater. Mercifully, those gathering places were empty at the 5 a.m. hour, but more than 100 people (the exact number was never verified) died in the crumbled buildings, which included narrow four-story hotels above shops in the business district.

The Santa Rosa damage - in a population closing on 8,000 - was regarded as the most deadly quake on the continent, with many times more deaths per capita, than the San Francisco toll. Any thoughts of growth or progress were put aside in favor of recovery.

Survivors cleared rubble as trains rolled in on rapidly repaired tracks carrying food, tools and other supplies for people who were living in makeshift tents beside their wood-framed houses that remained standing, but twisted on their foundations.

The population dropped precipitously as families “moved out” or “moved back” to where they had come from, giving up their California dreams.

The attitude of city leaders was that the earthquake was best forgotten, or at least publicly ignored. Businesses reopened in shacks, rebuilding began and by November 1906 a Pacific Coast tourist magazine had written an emotional account of Santa Rosa’s courage in the face of disaster, calling the crumpled town “the pluckiest city in California.”

For 63 years the many fault lines in the region reminded us occasionally of their power - with little consequence. Then, in October 1969, pair of earthquakes, one hour apart, centered their damage in Santa Rosa. The magnitudes were lesser than 1906, but big enough to cause damage.

There were no deaths and only a few structures were deemed uninhabitable immediately. But the long-term effect changed the downtown.

Engineers inspecting hotels and business buildings constructed after 1906 found structural deficiencies that deemed them unsafe for occupancy.

Federal Urban Renewal funds were used to clear several blocks of buildings, some under protest. After several years’ delay because of lawsuits, the vanished buildings were replaced with blocks of new structures including the Santa Rosa Plaza, which in the 1970s was the newest innovation in retail sales.

Wildfires, like earthquakes are touchstones of our history when they become deadly and damaging.

We call out the earth movements by year - the “Quake of “Ought Six,” the “Twin Quakes of ’69.” But only in recent decades have fires been given proper names, capitalized, like the Hanly fire or the Nunn’s Canyon fire of 1964. Fires flared again over the same, but greatly enlarged territory, with deadly consequences in 2017.

Now, at the city’s 150th anniversary, there is a regional uneasiness, a hint of doom, that comes on the downslope winds. And just as the 19th-century leaders planned and executed their earthquake “rebuilds,” today’s leaders lead the citizenry toward another application of that old compliment about “the pluckiest city in California.”