. A history of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco; an account of the disaster of April 18, 1906 and its immediate results. Photo by Aitkcn Landslide Along Ocean Shore Railroad THE FAULT LINE 43 At these far-away observatories the instru-ments showed a gentle swaying back and forth,renewed with each new quake, three in all. But therecord at Oakland shows a complex motion whichis a veritable wilderness of crisscrossings. The see-saw, it has been said, was followed by a complexity of the movements involved in thetwister can be realized by attempting to make amarble in a plate tr
. A history of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco; an account of the disaster of April 18, 1906 and its immediate results. Photo by Aitkcn Landslide Along Ocean Shore Railroad THE FAULT LINE 43 At these far-away observatories the instru-ments showed a gentle swaying back and forth,renewed with each new quake, three in all. But therecord at Oakland shows a complex motion whichis a veritable wilderness of crisscrossings. The see-saw, it has been said, was followed by a complexity of the movements involved in thetwister can be realized by attempting to make amarble in a plate traverse such a course as is shownby the earthquake signature written by the seis-mograph at the Chabot Observatory. It was this twister, with its sudden jerkings andreversings and spasmodic joltings, that did the dam-age in the cities near the great fault. Along thefault itself there was a pulling apart and jammingtogether and destruction of fences, bridges, pipe-. PJiotfl hy Aitkcn Landslide Along Ocean Shore Railroad 44 THE FAULT LINE lines, trees, or whatever else happened to be in theway; in the nearby cities whatever stood high andinsecure was unbalanced by the swaying, or throwndown by the twister. In passing across the ocean bed from MusselRock (eight miles south of San Francisco) toBolinas ( a point on the mainland across the Gol-den Gate) the quake gave to San Francisco theseverest shaking-up it had ever had. Many thingsseemed to show the tremendous power of the tem-blor. Yet while there were striking instances ofdamage to streets and buildings, such cases werenotable rather than many. Apart from the damageto plaster and bric-a-brac and plate-glass show win-dows, and the throwing down of chimneys, thedamage in every case was due to filled ground orpoor construction — the houses and streets that hadgone down had done so because the ground slid outfrom under them; and the imposing structureswhich had collapsed had failed simply because
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