- Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004

Dennis Smith is a connoisseur of tragedy. The best-selling author, a retired firefighter, knows how to puncture myths and get to the heart of a matter. He always searches for heroes, but doesn't shy away from controversy.

His latest project aims to be the definitive account of the April 18, 1906, earthquake and subsequent fire in San Francisco, one of the greatest catastrophes in U.S. history.

"I feel that I can bring much more to the story that has not yet been told because of my experience in writing about emergencies and how communities, large and small, respond to them," Smith said. "You don't need to invent this story. It's all there."

The 62-year-old from Manhattan has written 12 books, including "Report from Ground Zero," an unblinking account of terrorism's human cost. In 1972, he wrote the bestseller, "Report From Engine Co. 82," about the South Bronx firehouse where he worked for 18 years before retiring in 1982.

Although he is in the early stages of research, Smith already is convinced that San Francisco elected officials and industrialists tried to downplay the extent of damage and loss of life.

"Early newspaper accounts said at least 1,000 people were killed, but the official count of the city was about 482," said Smith, who is temporarily sharing a home in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco with his researcher, Jim Baker. "A full count of dead and injured didn't surface for 60 or 70 years. I think we can safely say that 3,200 were killed in the San Francisco fire. It's hard to get a full account because of the number of non- English-speaking people, nonresidents and new arrivals in the city ...

"There was an extraordinary effort, mostly by the public relations arm of the Southern Pacific Railroad, to lighten the amount of property damage (now estimated at more than $250 million) and the loss of human life. To me, it was disrespectful to those people who died to diminish their numbers. Was it a wanton disregard for the facts, or a group of leaders who were determined to make the best of an awful situation? They sought to underplay the destructive quality of an earthquake. They didn't want to discourage (people) from coming to rebuild, reinvest and become a part of the city's future vitality."

Smith chalks up Abraham Ruef's corrupt political machine at City Hall as being incidental to the tragedy. But, he adds, "corruption perhaps kept the city from following the recommendations of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan of the previous six years to put in a new high-pressure water system. Why they chose not to do it, I don't know."

Smith's decision to write about the earthquake and fire stems from a sense of urgency. He was working on his fourth novel when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred. He put it aside, rushed to the Twin Towers, and spent the next two months as a volunteer -- searching for survivors and human artifacts among the ruins at ground zero.

"Since 9-11, I feel like fiction is not worthwhile. It's not an effort that makes sense to me," he said. "After writing 'Report from Ground Zero,' I felt that whatever I do in the rest of my life, I want to be in the position to inform people, rather than entertain them."

About 200 books have been written about the 1906 fire and earthquake, a testimony to the immensity of the experience, and several more are expected as the centennial approaches. Film director Barry Levinson plans to turn a new novel titled "1906" into a movie. British author Simon Winchester is writing a nonfiction account. Historian and author Philip Fradkin has also completed a manuscript about the social, political and economic aspects of the 1906 disaster for the University of California Press.

"I have no way of knowing how extensive Dennis Smith's research will be," said Fradkin, who also served as a consultant on the Bancroft Library's project to put its archive of tens of thousands of photographs and words about the 1906 disaster online. "But there's room for more than one interpretation. And I would welcome his participation, particularly from the emergency standpoint ... Maybe some people who live rather blindly and don't think that such a catastrophe will reoccur, will get a sense that history will repeat itself."

How does one tackle a book like this?

"History is nothing but a bunch of people before you who have written things down," Smith said. "You start where other people haven't been, except in the most peripheral way: magazines and journals of the period, church bulletins of the United Methodist Church, the Society of Insurance Adjusters newsletter. You start picking up names and incidents in these publications ... It's like a stairway with very narrow risers. And you have to keep climbing.

"The story I see is people in a terrible situation who are forced to flee their homes and everything that has been valuable to them in their lives -- and to run for their lives. And what the politicians were doing does not interest me very much, except where they made substantive miscalculations and mistakes of strategies."

Although most of the deaths in 1906 were because of the San Francisco fire, structural damage was widespread. The 8.3 quake caused houses, chimneys and ceilings to shake and fall from Eureka to King City.

Fort Bragg was almost leveled. The Point Arena lighthouse was demolished. And the 5:15 a.m. train from Fort Bragg was knocked on its side at Point Reyes Station, several miles from the quake's epicenter off the coast. The quake and fire ruined Santa Rosa, destroyed much of San Jose's business district and caused heavy damage and deaths in Oakland. There was significant damage to the Stanford University campus. More than 100 patients and staff were killed in a collapse of the brand new Agnews State Hospital.

About 200,000 people were left homeless, and many camped in tent cities on the Presidio grounds, Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach and Jefferson Square Park. Others left the city on trains and ferryboats. Refugee centers were established in Oakland and at UC Berkeley.

Fradkin, who has studied the quake's aftermath, said: "60,000 people left San Francisco and wound up in Oakland. Most of the Chinese from Chinatown left San Francisco and ended up in Oakland, thereby establishing the Chinese community there. And San Franciscans in power didn't want them back. They wanted the prime real estate.

"San Mateo supervisors were so worried that they asked their citizens to be armed because they feared an invasion of the poorest refugees. There was the same fear in San Jose. Businesses moved out of San Francisco -- many to Oakland. Perhaps the downfall of San Francisco as the industrial heartland of the West dated from that event because more businesses chose not to relocate back in San Francisco and remained spread out throughout the Bay Area."

Smith has checked in with the Phoenix Society of local fire buffs, former San Francisco Fire Chief Andy Casper, new Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and firefighters whose grandparents survived the fire. He has met with two Oakland fire chiefs, whose department sent two fire engines and dozens of firefighters to help in San Francisco.

He has spoken at length with Gladys Hansen, San Francisco's former chief research librarian. "Her knowledge on this subject is legendary."

Smith has met with Chinatown leaders in hopes of gathering stories from people whose relatives were affected by the four-day inferno.

"There's a coterie of people who know as much about the 1906 fire as I ever will, and if you ask them the right questions, they'll find the answer for you," Smith said. "You couldn't do this work without them."

He has studied the lives of the Big Four -- Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington -- and others who built much of San Francisco. Smith has also reviewed rare film footage of the fire and thousands of historic photographs.

"What strikes you in the photography is that there are just a few pictures in which you see panic in the eyes of the people," he said. "There were a couple of hundred thousand people on the roads fleeing the city. The photography doesn't show desperation. The people were orderly for the most part. There was much talk of looting, and some of that. And some people were shot for looting."

He criticizes the decision to send 1,700 troops into the city.

"The shocking thing to me is that we would send so many troops into an American city with fixed bayonets," he said. "Gen. (Frederick) Funston was a great American hero. He won the Medal of Honor (for chasing down a rebel leader in the Philippines). I just really think he made a mistake."

It is unclear how many people were shot and killed by soldiers and police officers.

"The shoot-to-kill order by the mayor (Eugene E. Schmitz) I think was a mistake," Smith said. "What were we killing people for? For looting things out of stores that were going to burn anyway?

"They shouldn't have ordered people to evacuate their homes, either. That was a big mistake. They should have let people save their homes."

A raging fire south of Market Street converged with another fire that had spread from Gough and Hayes streets, creating a fire line 2 miles wide.

Twenty soldiers and a group of civil servants saved the U.S. Mint Building at Fifth and Mission streets, which contained a treasure trove of gold and silver coins.

"That, to me, was one of the greatest firefights in history, because that building was in the middle of a firestorm," he said. "Everything around it burned."

Photographs show the fire's devastation, a huge expanse that was leveled from Van Ness and 18th streets, across Russian Hill and North Beach, to the bay -- with few buildings that were saved.

"There were over 28,000 buildings burned; 490 full blocks burned to the ground, and 32 blocks partially burned to ground," the author said.

About 580 firefighters actively fought the San Francisco fire; two were killed in the conflagration.

Several hours after the quake, San Francisco firefighters were ordered to take a stand at Van Ness. They saved the Western Addition and the rest of San Francisco.

"Every single building that survived east of Van Ness was due to some great heroic effort. And the force of my story is going from building to building to building," Smith said. "I found that the firemen all stayed with their jobs." San Francisco did not own any fireboats, so the U.S. Naval Station at Mare Island deployed two to the city front.

Firefighters ran a water hose from the bay to Sacramento Street, a distance of about a mile. And they dynamited at least several dozen buildings to make a firebreak.

"The idea of dynamiting buildings is to take away the fuel," Smith said. "The dynamiting here caused as many fires as it saved, because of a lack of expertise."

He has pored over letters written by victims who gave accounts of the quake and fire to their families.

"I have held in my hands a letter written on a brown paper bag from a woman who was trying to find her husband. In terms of living history, you can't get much better than that," Smith said. "Another letter was written on a shirt collar by a man to reassure his family that he was alive."

Why dwell on a tragedy that occurred nearly 100 years ago?

"I think it also tells something about the American personality -- not just the California personality," Smith said. "San Franciscans possessed that spirit of manifest destiny: a tremendous sense of independence, purpose, determination and direction. And there was also a great transition going on at that time.

"It was the beginning of an age of political reform, true labor growth and influence, the beginning of women's suffrage. America was changing very rapidly and growing very rapidly ... It was a time when telephones and telegraphs were commonplace."

As news of the disaster spread, humanitarian aid flowed from the U.S. government, charities, and people around the world. Bankers provided loans. Mayor Schmitz urged San Franciscans to face the disaster in the way that other major cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, Chicago, Lisbon, New York and Rome had responded to conflagrations.

"San Franciscans were able to come out of this incredible turmoil and tragedy," Smith said, "and rebuild their city ..."

E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com