EARTHQUAKE AFTERMATH by S.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 30, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 21.

EARTHQUAKE AFTERMATH.

By S.

THOSE who passed through the fearful shaking of April 18 admit having experienced the same feeling that comes to one during a stormy trip at sea. Many were made seasick, and very many indeed have been unable to throw off the swaying, unsteady feeling that follows the completion of an ocean voyage. The floor on which they stand seems to be tilting; the walls seem to sway, and they instinctively reach out to grasp something.

In very many cases persons have been driven insane, either from the rapid, vibratory and gyratory movements to which they were subjected, or to the fear and anxiety caused by the destruction of property and the loss of relatives, and separation from those they loved. In some cases the insane have been brought to their right mind again. Among the latter class is a physician who had been committed to the Agnew Insane Asylum. The fearful work of the earthquake there restored his reason, and he did valiant service in the relief of the hundreds who were injured in that place.

Thousands of persons have been separated from their relatives, and the newspapers have given pages to free advertisements to bring these together again. Wagons drive through the streets carrying signs reading "I am looking for so and so." Men wear similar signs on their hats as they hunt for relatives. Many children have been lost. There are many instances where mothers, in the hurry of escaping from burning buildings, have entrusted their little ones to some servant, and have not since heard of them.

Of the refugees that came pouring into Oakland, one writer says: "Every few minutes there float through the suburbs into the town these processions of miserable, smoked-blackened, haggard, weeping people which made yesterday the beginning of this hell. Now and then you recognize some man, dressed like a tramp, dirty, dragging a miserable woman, as a prosperous business clerk whom you have known in San Francisco. They come to us hungry, mainly penniless, fairly begging something to eat from the public kitchens which the soldiers have set up in the streets."

Of the mental condition into which the people have been brought by the catastrophe, a survivor says: "We are so drunken and dulled by horror that we take such stories [of heroism and fatalities] calmly now. We are saturated."

An Oakland observer says: "People are crying, praying, muttering to themselves on the streets, and no one pays any attention. We have become a city of the mad."

A sporting man says this of liquor's part in the aftermath: "In the section of the city where the distilleries were located most every one was drunk, and even in the face of life and death were quarreling and fighting with one another. Never was the curse of intoxicating liquors so much in evidence. Babies and small children were left by drunken parents to shift for themselves, and most of them made their way to Telegraph Hill, which seemed to be the only place of safety left for them." Some of these abandoned children became food for the flames when the fire veered and swept the hill, and the huddled refugees made their mad rush before the sweep of the hungry blaze.