‘Every brick is down’: Survivors’ accounts detail devastation of 1906 earthquake in Santa Rosa

This spring marks the 115th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco and Santa Rosa.

It struck early on the morning of April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m., and many survivor accounts of the earthquake begin with people waking from it.

Famed botanist Luther Burbank had a sleepless night before the earthquake struck, according to his 1911 account printed in the Sonoma Historian, the journal of the Sonoma County Historical Society.

“I arose and undertook to dress myself, but was thrown back on the bed and found it impossible to stand even by holding onto objects usually stable, receiving such a shaking as I never before experienced,” he wrote. “During the earthquake there was such a general noise of falling buildings that little else could be heard, even loud shouting was almost lost in this general babel of noises.”

After the quake, Burbank headed to the devastated business section of downtown Santa Rosa, which he called a “hopeless mass of ruins” where there were piles of bricks and rubbish, gas leaks and fires.

A firsthand account from America C. Chinn, of Glen Ellen, also printed in the Sonoma Historian, said all chimneys around her collapsed.

“Santa Rosa is a perfect wreck fourth street from one end to the other is all down all the hotels and the churches every brick is down,” Chinn wrote.

A train of Petaluma firefighters and volunteers got to Santa Rosa in 14 minutes after the quake. “All say it was the speediest trip of their lives,” the Petaluma Argus-Courier reported.

In the weeks following the 7.9 magnitude earthquake, there were numerous local news reports of bodies being pulled out of the rubble. At least 85 people were killed in Santa Rosa, where about 7,000 people lived at the time, according to the United States Geological Survey.