Doomed to Fail - Ep 89 - Fire In the Rubble: The Great San Francisco Fire

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Ok! It's 5:13 am on April 18, 1906. The earthquake is over, a lot of people are dead or trapped in the rubble. Almost right away, dozens of fires start across the city - many are small in homes and can be put out immediately. But some, especially in places where the gas lines have ruptured, are out of control in minutes. In a city where many are trapped or injured, they now need to run for their lives to escape the flames. After four days of fire and a heroic stand by the SF Fire Department and the US Military - 80% of San Francisco will be gone.Join us for part two of San Francisco's worst day - the Fire.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortlandthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we're back. For another episode of Doom to Fill, which that means I did the introductions properly. I'm bars joined here by Taylor and Taylor. you're you're you're did you just change between recordings no I don't wait I took my

sweatshirt off because I'm getting hot oh then we're trying to do wardrobe change in between recordings um sweet and we're back to a new topic where this is going to be a tailor joint and she's going to play the regular game of me guessing what she's going to cover and I'm going to be wrong I mean you know what I'm going to cover because I cover the first half last week San Francisco fire yes um so okay i feel like i got like 70% of the way there and then the book i was reading was just like so long that i was like i want to die i was listening to it at 2.5 speed last night and i was like this i have this has to end so um i feel like my ending of this and i'm not going to land

this as much as i want to but we'll we'll talk about it so before we go and kind of recap last week and talk about the fire i'm going to send you a picture can i send it in the chat in this um i don't know but if not you can send through slack it's a link i linked it twice i'm like i'm a hundred years old there's a link can you click on that link please and describe what you're seeing in that picture um complete and utter devastation and a giant fire that is black and white. There is clearly a trolley system running down the center of the city. One building for some reason is missing its entire facade, which seems bad.

Because of the earthquake. That'll do it. But the rest of the buildings are standing. I mean, there's a lot of rubble in the street, but. Yeah. So this is, okay, so this is like the day after the earthquake. And I'll share this on social media, but I think it's wild. So there's like a building missing a facade, so like a dollhouse.

You can see inside and see the rooms. And then there are people sitting on the street, sitting in the rubble, kind of sitting in chairs looking down a big hill. And the fire is just two blocks away. It's coming for them, you know? So I'm sure all of this area was destroyed as well. Yeah, but you don't know that. I mean, you don't know that it's coming for you when you're looking at it because fire's changed. all the time.

No, I think you know it's coming for you. I'll tell you why a little bit, because it came for everyone. Geez, right, Jill. Remember that the earthquake happened at 512 a.m. on April 18th, 1906. It was a 7.9 earthquake, and it was like 42 seconds long, which is just so unbelievably long. I can't even imagine. So a lot of people died immediately.

Chimneys fell, buildings collapsed. And then, do you remember what happened to the fire chief? he walked home he was sleeping in the living room but he walked in the check on his wife and he walked into an open hole yes so he goes straight to the hospital that is chief sullivan he never wakes up he is like he's there they don't tell him what's happening he dies a couple days later so the fire chief he is um he he doesn't make it but um so There's an acting fire chief that I'll tell you about in a second, but the fire chief dies. I also posted and sent you a text that I got a crowbar.

I said I would have one. Yeah, you did. Brow to you. Thank you. And I was going to bring it in here to show you, but then I was like, I should keep under my bed, duh. It's like where it needs to be. So I left up under my bed, so it's there. I've also seen crowbar before.

I know, I know. So I have a crowbar. But also, I'll add shoes under there. And then the third rule is to make sure you have water because water is going to be a big problem in San Francisco. like literally right now. So almost immediately after the earthquake, communication is cut off between San Francisco and the rest of the world. The telegraph system, the telephone system, everything is down.

And the earthquake is pretty much over. It has a couple little aftershocks in the next couple days. But the earthquake damage is done. Like that is already done. And now it's time for the fire. So, and we talked about this. before because of societies like in in London in 1666 like there was just fire that was the only option you know like you had candles you had a fire in your house and then in Chicago you know there was like

you have a gas stove you have gas lights and then now in San Francisco some things have electricity like the businesses usually do but homes usually still have like gas lighting and in gas for everything so immediately there are a bunch of fires because gas mains are broke chimneys fall down there's little fires kind of all over the city but a lot of them are put out by people because they're like in their house so if you're like in your kitchen and you see a fire like we've talked about this before like you saw a big fire in like a window or like a mirror and you like had to go put it out yeah terrifying yeah but so that probably happened hundreds of times but someone was there so you're at your house you do it so there's no like it doesn't spread

it's just you at your house but then a lot of places where the commercial buildings where there's maybe like a night one night watchman but not a lot of people so those fires got out of hand like really quickly um most businesses did have electric lights but it was mostly the gas um the gas lines exploding that started all the fires by 730 a.m so about two hours after the earthquake all of the gas have been cut off and it would be cut off for 23 days so for 23 days they would not have access to gas and what people will do later is they will build stoves out of bricks on the street. So people were outside cooking for about a month.

They weren't allowed back in their homes to have open flames and do things like that. I also wrote, I have no idea how to do that. What month was this? It was April. Okay. So it wasn't like freezing cold or anything. It's not freezing. I mean, it's in San Francisco.

So it's like, it gets pretty cold. And damp. It's like damp, but like not in the world. So with, Within fires about three to four days long, there are 30 different fires about that kind of like converge like into one big fire. It destroyed approximately 25,000 buildings, 490 blocks were destroyed. And in today's money, the damage would be $8.5 billion. So it just like destroyed the city.

In the beginning, the death toll that they were saying was about 300. But like that cannot be true. You know, like we talked about with like the other fires. like, that's ridiculous. So you don't, you, there's so many people whose bodies you're never going to find and people who you don't know were in a certain place or whatever. And especially, like, they were discounting the people in Chinatown for a long time. So now that they started to count them, then we think the number's a little bit higher.

So obviously, like, the death toll is probably closer to like 3,000, if not more. A lot of bodies were just, like, unable to be found because they were burned so badly. They're just like part of this rubble. The chief dies. But I do want to emphasize that Chief Sullivan, a lot of the good that happened during the fire and how prepared they were were because of him. He made sure that his department, they were fully trained. They did a ton of drills. They were like ready to help.

The problems that they had were like, you know, water. And like the fire was huge and all the things. But like the firemen were as ready as it could have been. And that was because of him. So now that he is, you know, now that he is essentially dead, he dies a couple of days later, but they never talked to him again, there's going to be a new chief that is going to have to step up. And then the military is going to get involved as well. There are a lot of stories of things like, and I hate this. This is like the worst thing of like parents dying and like the kids being left alone, you know, and like trying to figure out what to do. So like finding like a baby by itself. I hate that. so upset but like you know so like a lot of like that is happening so right when it happens when the fire starts the last message that the navy gets out of san francisco to the rest of the world like over the wires they say earthquake town on fire send marines and tugs and that's it

so the rest of the country kind of starts to know that it's happening and they start to kind of start to send relief but they really don't know like the extent of what's going on there oakland is not on fire. San Francisco is. So people are able to escape to Oakland. Don't talk about that in a second. So some stories, there's like some like anecdotal stories like from people who are like doing really brave things, really crazy things are happening to them as this fire is just like building and building. The author Jack London, do you know who that is? He wrote like the call of the wild about the dog. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he lived 40 miles away and Collier's magazine called him that morning. And they said, can you go to San Francisco go and tell us what happened?

So him and his wife went to San Francisco and they kind of just like walked through the city as it was burning and like talked to people and like met people and he wrote an article for Colliers and I listened to it today. It's available on Wikipedia. Someone did like an audio version of it. And some of the things that, you know, he says is, you know, San Francisco is gone. The earthquake is going to make this so much harder. So this isn't like a fire in a place where like. things aren't already destroyed you know what i mean like there's like the rippling of the street and you know all the water remains are broken and all the gas mains are broken so the town is already destroyed and then it's on fire which makes it like that much worse you know yeah um and people were like he said people were very calm um he saw someone offering a thousand dollars which is like shit on my 1906 to help bring like a wagon of of trunks um somewhere and then no one would help him and he eventually saw those trunks on fire like everything caught up fire people were like i was this like yesterday i was worth 600 000 and today i have nothing and he went to a man's house and the man was like

this is my house like it'll be gone in 15 minutes you know and he was like this is my wife's china he's like look at my piano isn't it beautiful and like he knows it's going to be destroyed because of the fire is coming which is like horrifying okay taylor you have 15 minutes Myles said save the piano. Okay, so that was what I was going to ask you. You have 15 minutes to save the three most valuable things. In my home? Yes.

I feel like I have like papers, like our passports and like our birth certificate's and stuff. So I feel like I'd want to save those. I also feel like I thought about it like, I don't know. I feel like I would just like take a bunch of clothes and like underwear and like pajamas. Because like a lot of people are going to be like dirty. for a really fucking long time after this because there's no burning water. And water is so important, thank you, Miles. And so rare that, like, you can only use it for drinking and cooking.

You can't use this to, like, take a shower. Yeah. You know? You know, what I thought was I would take my laptop, cell phone, chargers, and papers. Chargers is a good one to remember. Yeah. Because that's, like, the only... connection, you can really have the outside world, but you're, if we came together, then we'd be set.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. We have planned. But yeah, so people are thinking, so there's some rumors, and this happens in every disaster, but there's rumors that, like, this is the end of the world. People are like, Chicago's on fire, too. You know, like, every major city is on fire. Like, the world is ending, which, like, obviously is not what happened, but people were kind of

panicking a little bit. There are a couple hotels, obviously. apartment houses that collapsed and they're just full of bodies and we'll just never know what happened to those people. I think we talked about that last week, but they're just once they're trapped in the rubble and then the fire comes and we'll never know. One of the fires, so several fires that kind of conversion to one. So one fire's called the Hammondags fire. They tried to say that a woman was making breakfast, but I don't, that's true. I think that could have happened anywhere, you know, but that ends up being one of the worst ones. I don't really know, say, everyone's

good geography, but this one is like south of Market Street. And that one, ended up being the worst. Other fires were starting simultaneously. People were doing the same thing that they did in Chicago where they were like burying their stuff. So they would like bury all their china, bury their pianos, like try to like bury stuff so it would be safe from the fire. But a lot of that stuff was like so hot. And another thing that I think is it's science, but it's wild is like the oxygen is one of the things that makes things catch on fire. So people had stuff in like a safe at their house and they couldn't open the safes for at least a month because one like one organization tried to open theirs on May 2nd. So April 18th to May 2nd and as soon as they opened it, everything caught on fire inside of it because it's still so hot inside.

And then once the oxygen hits it, that's when it ignites. So they had to wait like at least a month to open things that were like super sealed, but I think it's crazy. It's the same story that we had heard over and over. We heard it in London. We heard in Chicago where people were like. charging a lot for like their carriages and their cars and to get people out of out of the town so you know the prices were like obviously increasing like of course they would um one person in the book i read one person said like if he thinks that because you know in the bible when in sonama gomorra

lots wife turns around and turns into salt why would i know that i don't know it's like a famous story but someone was like i think that she didn't die from that i think she died from carrying her trunk out of this town because like everyone was carrying all their shit like one guy had like was carrying his dead wife people were carrying you know the all they could just trying to like get away like save their couple you know their couple little things but then that got me thinking like why would you have a trunk ever as your luggage it's going to be super heavy and it's like a brick so it's like when did we invent luggage with wheels and do you want to guess what year we invented that and when do we invent wheels do we have wheels back then did they invent did they know that

round things roll back then? First, it was 1906. We've had wheels for like thousands of years. Oh, okay. Oh, my God. Anyway, it was 1970, which I think is way late to figure out that you should put wheels on your luggage. A man named Bered D. Saddow invented rolling

luggage in 1970 and patented it in 1972. Can you copy and paste his name and find out what is net worth is? I bet it was like $3 billion. I mean, like, I can't believe we to think of it earlier. That's real dumb, everyone to have a really heavy drunk. So people are trying to just like get out with whatever they have.

One fun story is the California Academy of Sciences on Market Street had a goddamn hero named Alice Eastwood. She was a self-taught botanist, and she had preserved a ton of plant specimens and had all of the science material and things there. And so she went in the middle of the fire, climbed. over the all of the broken stuff from the from the earthquake and saved a shit ton of scientific research she would she climbed up six stories through all the rubble got as much as she could and she lowered it down to her friends with a rope and they were able to save it she had to move it several times but she saved a lot of scientific work then so great job alice um people were rushing to the water so Oakland was out on fire so they needed to like get their fairies would just

just like moving people, moving people across the bay to places that, like, obviously were not engulfed in flames. At the pier, it was women and children first. And that reminded me that Lindsay also wrote, my cousin Lindsay wrote to us, because she said that, like, you kind of backed into being on the right side of that women and children first argument, because, like, essentially it is based on, like, the patriarchal idea that women are nurturers, but also for it because I want to. to be first on the boat.

If you want to be a true feminist, Taylor, you will sacrifice your life to save mine. I will not. I will be first in the boat with my kids. So I have to grapple with that on my own. Fair. Over in Oakland, the three major English language papers

printed a paper together the next day. So they did like a joint newspaper to tell people what was going on. A lot of people went to their workplaces to save them because they were like, my house is okay or my house is gone so what do I do next I'm going to go to my office and try to save it because this is my place of employment and like I don't want to be a dick but like I would literally never do that I mean could you imagine like going to our old office and being like I'm

super worried about this I'd be like I'd be like the last thing I would think of no I guess not I guess like my relationship to my place of employment is different now than it was back then so maybe I would now but also everything's on online. Everything's in the cloud. Everything is digital. Right. Like, now I would never do that. But, like, again, people do that then. But I just was like, oh, my God, I would literally never risk my life to save my office. We have to save the Staples chairs. Yeah. No. Like, this is a $1,500 chair. But still, it has wheels. You could, like, push it out on it. No, they clearly did not have wheels on chairs. If it took that long to have wheels on luggage, they definitely didn't have wheels on chairs until, like, 2013, probably. No, I think, I'm going to have fact checked by myself. Who invented chairs with wheels? Because I think it's Charles Darwin. Wait, it's Darwin? Yeah.

Okay, I thought it was Thomas Jefferson, but the internet was telling me now it was Charles Darwin. I'm going to Cora for no reason. But it was a long time ago. Like, longer ago than wheels on luggage. Now people are saying, no, I thought maybe it was Thomas Jefferson. Either way, the history of the office chair. Anyway, maybe we'll get there.

Taylor, why don't we like, why don't we, like, you know, why don't we just, like, put our heads together and just list off everyday items and figure out if they're better with chairs on it? With wheels. Wheels. I love everything about that idea. I'm 100% in. Well, we'll, guys, the next, we'll do a bonus episode where we just list off every item we can think of.

5,000 percent. So people were doing that. Like one photographer got a lot of really good shots of the city because he went to a photography store. And the guy was like, take anything you want. It's going to, you know, it's going to get burned anyway. So just like take it. I know you have not seen Peewee's creative adventure, right?

I mentioned it during the Alamo episode. Yeah, I think I have. So, jump around. Well, I haven't seen all of them, but I've definitely seen. I mean, I have, no, you didn't say, was it Peewee? Yeah. Okay, maybe not. I'm just not the other guy who,

um, the other weird guy, he also got caught jerking off in a, in a theater. Not peevee? He goes to death row. Ernest? Ernest!

I'm confusing Ernest with peewee. Okay, disregard. Blair and I watch Ernest to save's Halloween, or one of them recently, and it's still still pretty fun. um so okay so peewee's great adventure he is somewhere and there's a pet store on fire and he is like i got to see the animals so he goes in and he's like opening the cages and there's like monkeys and there's dogs and cats and like bunnies and he's holding the fish tanks every time it goes in

he sees he sees a cage full of snakes and he's like ooh-huh every single time and he brings out all the animals out and finally he the last animals are the snakes so he comes out of the burning building and he's holding two handfuls of snakes and he's like he hates it and it's so funny but during this great fire two young men did save all the pets of a pet store which is very nice they broke the windows yeah that would be me while you're saving the orphans from the orphanage I'm saving the animals for sure perfect um

I don't know if you remember last week we talked about the palace hotel which was like the nicest hotel in town and it had survived it was earthquake roof oh really is that where that was I thought it was, yeah. Cool. But it burned down. They rebuilt it in 1909 and it's still there, but the original one did burn down,

even though it did survive the earthquake. Another kind of fun thing that happened is there was a bank called a a lot of the banks, I mean, they burned down. But the bank of Italy was run by a man named Amadeo Pietro Gianni, and he was the owner, and he took all of the money to his house, which was like $2 million, like, a shit ton of money.

He took it to his house. he had some men guard it and he was able to give loans and take deposit so he was really important in like rebuilding because he knew he knew all of his customers he knew what they needed he was able to like you know loan money to get more money and in two years the bank of italy was in a new building and kind of ready to go and he pioneered branching um so he was like one of the first people to have like branches of his bank like around around the city And then in the 1920s, he merged with a smaller bank in Los Angeles and became the Bank of America, which is pretty cool. Yep.

So my, well, not my first job, but the longest job I had before we worked together was at Bank of America. And so I looked at the history of it and was like, wild. Pretty cool. The, I don't know if you remember also there was an opera the night before the earthquake. And the singer Enrico Caruso, he's the one who saved his signed picture of Taylor Roosevelt. That's the thing that he saved. But he said, I will never return to San Francisco. And he didn't.

He died, you know, like 20 years later. But he also looked awesome. So if you ever want to look up Enrico Caruso, he looks amazing. Some buildings were saved by locals. So there was a cathedral that was saved by people. And what they did is one guy climbed to the roof. And he tied a rake to a... to a rope lowered the rake down and they attached a hose to the rake and he pulled it up and soaked

the roof so that it wouldn't catch on fire. As fire was kind of coming through the air and like ashes and embers were flying through the air, people would, they'd land out of the roof and they would just chop off those shingles, you know, just to like stop it as much as they could. So a lot of people were able to do that. People would soak sheets and wine and put them on their roofs just to like try to get the fire to stop. And another building that was saved was the mint that had all the gold and like the money in it was saved by a few people who were very invested in saving it. It was one of the only buildings to survive in like downtown San Francisco. The people were inside fighting the fire as it kind of came closer and closer.

And when it ended, they, you know, opened the doors to nothing, you know, which was just like crazy. they were like in this building protecting it and then not really paying attention and then like everything was gone when they when they opened the doors um so a little bit more about how they actually stopped the fire because it wasn't rain and the winds didn't change like it was stopped but not before it spread so the hydrants and sewers started to dry up not all of them but a lot of them did and active active fire chief dottery dot tree he was in in charge and he was in charge and he was was trying to create fire breaks, but they were doing it like an absolute wrong way. They were using gunpowder and dynamite, and they were only knocking down buildings that were already on fire. But what you have to do is be like ahead of it by a lot. Yeah. Knock over the next building.

So they're knocking down buildings that were already on fire. So when they essentially bombed the buildings, all of the embers and the air would just up the next house on fire. So we just like keep going. You know, so that really helped it like get bigger and bigger. Um, there was a general, it kind of works though. Well, it didn't work. No, no, no. If you played out to this end conclusion, it would work. Because if you just did that all night long, eventually you would have destroyed every house, thereby extinguishing the fire when it hit the ocean. Sure, sure. If everything's gone, then there's no fire. Well, there you go. So it would have worked.

Congratulations. That order came from that order came from General Frederick Funston, nicknamed Fearless Freddie. He was in the military and he got the military involved right away. His superior general Major Greeley,

Major General Greeley, he was out of town but was slowly coming back. But in the meantime, this kind of crazy dude, Frederick Funston, he did a whole bunch of stuff like he had a he was the one who was who said to use a dynamite to only do houses that were already on fire he had like finally gotten a message out because a lot of messages were not getting out

people were like you know obviously like send one as a message to their family like i remember when there was a earthquake and san Francisco in the 90s my aunt vn who lives there called and said we're okay right before the phones went out you know yeah and we were like so grateful that she was able to get through to us because i remember I remember calling and she was like, there's an earthquake, we're okay. And then the phones went out and we at least knew what she was okay, but these people don't, some people will never know what happened to their family. And some people are just like waiting for anything. So telegraphs and mail was free, but it took a long time for it to like, or it took a while for it to get going.

But they did eventually get, you know, news over to D.C. Terry Roosevelt was the president. He asked people to donate to the Red Cross because this was 76 years before FEMA was, um, spun up. So he asked people to do it to the Red Cross to be able to contribute. Taft was the secretary of war. And he was, you know, in contact with Funston and Greeley as well. So one thing that Funston did is he did kind of a pseudo, a pseudo martial law. Like it wasn't martial law. They would like to say that later, but like it kind of was. So the order was anyone who was looting or, you know, lighting a stove or a fire in a place they shouldn't should be shot to kill.

It was a shoot to kill order. So a lot of military people came over and they had, they were fully armed and being like pretty aggressive. They would like yell at people if they had like a candlelit. They would force people to help with certain things. And it's like they would have probably helped anyway. They didn't need to do it like at gunpoint, you know, but. I am in favor of like when everything's fucked beyond all belief dealing with like basic human greed. or criminality or whatever it's like dude yeah just fucking shoot them like we have way too any normal bodies to vary we don't fucking eat you hold that shit anymore like yeah i'm sure and i'm sure officially there were very few deaths by gunshot but there were probably more like you said like i'm sure that happened more often so i'm like one of them um they killed a red cross worker by accident you know like people were riled up and scared and so the wrong time to have a gun um but people you know they were kind of forced to help which also again i think it's kind of

of okay. They would have helped anyway. What else you're going to do? Like help rebuild. So there was a fireboat called the fireboat Leslie, and they tried to get water from the sea, but it was like the piers are wood. It was like hard to get to them. They did some pretty incredible things by like coupling hoses together. And some of the hoses would go for over a mile from the ocean to the houses. And that saved like a part of the city as well. They used sewer water, which is gross, but like, you know, whatever. you can get it's 1900 it's like everything probably smell like shit anyways exactly i mean it was like i think one of the first things in the book that i read the longest minute was like everybody was wearing hats because you had to wear hats because it like there's constantly like shit in there you know like there's everyone's burning coal everyone's all these things so like yeah like no one's salt um but another thing they did is they stopped liquor sales almost immediately and they broke all the bottles of booze that they could.

There was a distillery that had, because they don't want people to like get drunk and freak out, but also I'm like If anything, preserve the liquor and like ration it and like literally just give it out to people. Like, why would you I know. It's the opposite. I know. There was a distillery that made

whiskey and they had like 100 barrels of whiskey and they were like, excuse me, we basically have bombs. Like, we have this whiskey. Like, it is going to catch on fire. It's going to explode. Is that possible, though, because I was thinking about when you said the wine thing and was like, unless it's like ever clear, like it's not flammable because the liquid content, the O2H2O content has to be so significantly higher the flammability of the liquor in there, right? That's a good question. And I don't know. So please email us dip to feld pod at gmail.com if you know, because I was thinking that too, but I was like wine must have less of an alcohol content. And then, like, whiskey and, like, vodka and, like, hard liquor feels like that could be flammable more.

Like, isn't that what a Molotov cocktail is? I don't know. All the things. But anyway, they moved all of the barrels of whiskey to a place that had already been burned so that it was, like, out of the way. I literally reached over while you were, like, talking. And I was, I typed what into Google? And I was going to follow with what is in a Molotop cocktail. And then I was like, that is for sure going to flag me for the FBI.

something to go ahead and change if anybody just happens to have that information handy or the willingness to sacrifice our search history to the DTS No I think it's just I think that's just booze in a rag Well it's got to be more specific than that

I can't like what is it like it can't just be like A Mai Tai right No but it's like but like A margarita No yes yes I have a salt room I'm a Molotov cocktail A little wedge of lime It'd be so cute.

That's a bottle. Oh, I guess it mostly has, like, gas in it, probably. Are a lot of cocktails legal? It's this question. Of course, I'm not legal. You're stupid. You were stupid if you're asking that question. I mean, the components are legal if we figure out what's in it.

Yeah, but you can bomb someone's house. Yeah, but you can own a Molotov. It's like owning a gun. I mean, I own a Molotel cocktail. I have bottles. I have rags. I have gas in my car. You know.

We got to stop recording our crimes. Anyway. Okay. Anyway. So another thing I talked about last week was like the relationship that the Chinese Americans had to the rest of the city. People in Chinatown didn't want to leave because they were afraid that they weren't, you know, they were going to get deported and they were right to be afraid. They had just if they didn't have their papers, like they were definitely like in trouble. And a lot of people during the rebuilding wanted to just like not have a Chinatown and ban them from coming back to San Francisco proper. But that's actually. was ended up being overrules and they were able to come back and build the Chinatown that is there today people were definitely like scared and then also of course like the soldiers who are just there in the under martial law are like raiding people's homes so they raided chinatown which was like bummer yeah um people started to make their own fire breaks they had their own like committees they were like people trying to figure out what to do because the communication is kind of all over the place everyone is like sleeping in parks it is really

really foggy people are getting sick sleeping on the ground they have like one blanket that's something that happened a lot in the other ones we talked about too like outbreaks of cholera and the refugee camps things like that um everyone though is helping like if people are working they're working so people are like you know they're helping in bakeries they did not or not a food they ended up they were able to like you know feed um a lot of people everyone was pitching in um at one point someone had like a like a two thousand chickens and like a i don't know chicken farm but they like let loose and everybody was like grabbing chickens which I think is hilarious because also I would not know what to do

with the chicken with the chicken I mean you you you cut its head off right feathers yeah and then yeah you cut its head off um you plug its feathers I guess they didn't have fried chicken back then so like you probably have just like they've always had fried chicken um

either way people are pitching in kind of helping each other. Another person who is a hero from this time is Lieutenant Frederick Freeman. He was on a boat and him and his men stopped the fire from spreading on day three. They went to like a big portion of the city and were able to, able to save it. He worked kind of on his own with no direction. And so he really, you know, really saved a lot of people, saved a lot of property. And later in his life during World War I, he was the captain of a ship that was

torpedoed and then he started he was so upset about it he started drinking and going into addiction ended up being dishonorably discharged and kind of living like a vagrant lifestyle but in 1941 before he died FDR pardoned him and gave him an honorable discharge because of all the work that he did during the earthquake and other things he'd done before that but he had like felt so guilty about being torpedoed um but so people are working together and they are working really hard like 80% of the city is destroyed but the mail was working by Friday, which is a big deal, because it was like Tuesday and Friday, the mail was working. People were able to, you know, talk to their, to tell their family around the

country around the world, they were safe. And the fire ended up stopping because, you know, the people stopped it. They did the correct fire breaks. They didn't rain. It wasn't anything like that. It just like, they ended up stopping. And also, obviously, like it ran out of shit to burn because it was like, it burned most of the city. In the aftermath, there was no water. So we just talked about this like for bathings of people were getting sick. People had to dig poop holes in their backyards. You know, like it was like a pretty bad like sanitation issue for a while. People were giving donations, but some of the donations had strings attached. Like there was a part of the city that did not have cable cars and the cable car company was like, we'll donate,

you know, $100,000 if we can build a car in this place where we couldn't have one before, things like that. A little bit of corruption happened. The judge, who was the judge of the Wong Kim Ark case that we talked about last time. he was actually the president of the American Red Cross at this time. So he was able to like, he like invested a lot and like helped in San Francisco. The, like the empress of China tried to donate money and the people

were like, no, which is so racist and dumb. Yeah, stupid. Like I hate in a movie when someone's like, I'm too moral to take this check. I'm like, I'll take that check. Thank you. Yeah, I'm kidding. You know, like you're dumb. I have no principles.

Yeah. People were given tents. some people had insurance so some insurance companies paid out a lot of the ones that were based overseas around the east coast never really paid out what they were supposed to pay out because a lot of it and i'm sure you remember this from owning a home in california but like you have to have separate earthquake insurance from your regular home insurance and so people had to prove that their house was destroyed by the fire and not by the earthquake yeah i can believe it you know it was like when i was living in florida and i knew people who were homeowners in florida and they had had had to get separate hurricane or blood insurance from everything else and yeah it was yeah expensive yeah yeah yeah so a lot of people ended up living in little housing camps so they would build these like little like 200 square foot houses and then you could move them later so you would like put down a down payment and then end up being able to move the house to maybe where your original land was or moving it um all the little houses were blue because the army had extra blue paint which is kind of fun

there was another story where the army had all these boots that were the wrong color and the people didn't want to wear them so they were in a storage room so they just gave them to everybody which is also cute. That's awesome. Yeah. So yes, so

this is kind of where I stopped my research about the rebuilding and such but you know they rebuilt better than before but I think that the thing that is so scary about this is just like one disaster after the other and like a fire could happen anywhere but like that

earthquake was crazy and it's going to happen again you know like California is not safe going to have other earthquakes so I also this reminded me my friend Morgan sent me a article about that tower that you had talked about in San Francisco that's falling or tilting the Millennium Tower so I've read an article about it it was called the Millennium Tower and it's on Mission Street which is one of the streets that was, like, totally destroyed in the mission district. And it's, like, six inches off. And, like, one, the lady that in the article, she sent me, like, figured it out because, like, she was, like, doing a putt put in her apartment in her three fucking million dollar apartment.

And all of the golf balls would, like, go into one corner. I mean, okay, yeah, you know what? Never mind. That was good. What? I was good. Well, because my house is also, like, not level, but, like, it's a- But you're the first floor.

You're on a ranch. I know, exactly. It's different when you're like 40 stories in the air. I get it. Yep, it's different. Yeah. Like, if my house was tilted a little bit, meh. I'm on bedrock.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm not worried about it. But, like, this, this, like, gigantic tower is, oh, my God, it's crazy. Also, it's funny to think that $3 million in San Francisco, that's probably like a starter condo for anyone who lives there. I cannot imagine. Like, so it's, it's, um, it's 58 floors, the whole building, um, but they have 60, they say they have 60 floors because they skipped 13, which happens, and 44, because people think the fours are bad luck.

Have you heard that four? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But, um, Jesus Christ, I'd be so fucking mad if, I bought a $3 million car go. fix it? No. It's like they're trying to figure out how to fix it. What's it called Millennium? Uh-huh. It makes you kind of want to throw up a little bit. Like, even, it makes me so upset and, like, so nervous.

I mean, I don't know. Maybe, maybe in, like, 3,000 years, your home will be, like, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and there'll be a landmark for people to visit. But also, like, there's no way that if there's, or earthquake that isn't toppling over literally immediately i know if i was a neighbor i'd be like i want a refund yeah and you can't you can't you know like oh god i hate it so much i could really like honestly my hands hurt you know like you get nervous in your hands are talking about anything like i just hate it so much i don't know what to do um so yeah i mean i i i i know that you know this it was a good good time to to like industrial revolution time

is a good time to start over on a city so they could build better because like they had done things like we should have stronger construction we should not build everything out of wood but they hadn't retroactively put those laws in place so if you have to start over at least you can start over better in some cases they did

because they didn't see people just wanted some place to live like really quickly you know those camps were open for years people trying to figure out where to go like in all these disasters rich people could figure it out but poor people they have fucking nothing you know what are they supposed to do but now it just seems to be a lot of tall buildings

in San Francisco which makes me nervous man this millennial thing I hate it so much I was in New York so the week that this was 13 years ago but the week that we had our wedding reception in New York City we had to move it because there was a hurricane

so there was like hurricane time so we had to cancel our reception due a couple months later it was fine but that week there was also an earthquake and I was on the 38th floor of a building and I felt my desk go loop loop and I was like yeah yeah it's interesting too because California has like probably some of the strictest

regulatory guidelines for building things and you think that like how was this able to happen I mean in 1906 or this Millennium Tower? No the Millennium Tower also it is it's got to be like a developer's worst nightmare to have like a bunch of millionaires living in your building

when you're building like fucks up really badly because like they're going to see you into oblivion and it sounds like that's what they're doing right now but they're not gonna like what are they like the woman in the article I read I'll share the article but like a like tech bro bought the apartment above her for like $15 million and he was like I don't care that it's tilting I like the view and I'm like you're the worst I mean that would be the dream to be that rich we would Taylor you might say he's the worst but we would both love to be in that position I would not, I wouldn't, I would not want to live there. Yeah, I definitely want to live there.

I'm not a know from that. Guys, just live on level land. I have no idea how we got to this conclusion in the San Francisco fire episode, but that is my takeaway. I'm, I think we both, we both live in one story houses and I'm happy that we do. Amen. Please don't move. Sweet.

So that is the, we got San Francisco, we got Chicago wrapped up. I'm sure there's plenty, plenty more. fires away. I know. Well, I'm going to start doing Women's History Month next week, and I'm very excited to have some fun stories, but if you know women's history, you know there is a very important fire that I will talk about. But I was going to do it next week, but I'm just so tired of talking about fires that I'm going to maybe do it the week after. Good. I don't know what that is. I'm sure. If you know, you know,

you know, but I'll tell you later. I will probably know after you tell me, because you know that I don't you know me I don't connect dots real quick it takes a little bit for the marinade and so I'm sure I'll know when you tell me so okay cool um but yeah that was awesome thanks for sharing Taylor we got our episodes in for the week start for the late start per usual it was my fault um but we got them taken care of every release mutiny on the body today so there's something out there enjoy smutony um cool uh again write to us at doom default pot at gm.com us on the social. The Doom DeFal Pond. We're trying to become rich and famous. And I don't think that's a bad thing. No. Tell your friends. I think y'all should want us to be rich and

famous because some of you all know us. You like doing this. Yeah. Come on. And like as our friends, you know, we'll give you VIP passes for our live shows at Madison's Garden. Email us today with your name and you will be on the list forever. Forever. It does a lot. sweet anything else so before we shut off that's it just that those fun things from Morgan were fun and she gave me some other good ideas

of things to cover and I hope people have sent us Instagram messages with like some true crimey things so I'll make sure you see them love it awesome well go ahead and cut things off and