A Crack in the Edge
by Ed Buch, CSI, CCS, AIA

Prior to starting A Crack in the Edge of the World, America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, by Simon Winchester, (Harper Collins, 2005, 462 pgs), I had pleasantly finished two of his earlier books. Both of these, The Meaning of Everything The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, & The Map that Changed the World, were really good reading although the subjects were a little obscure. His newest book is ostensibly about the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, although it goes well beyond that.
Since this is the earthquake’s centennial year, and since I had good luck with his previous books, I bought this book instead of one of the several others published this year on the subject. As architects and engineers, we deal with earthquake design issues in our work everyday. I was curious about the history of The Earthquake, the fire that followed, and to learn something of life in San Francisco in the aftermath. Given what we’ve read and heard about life in New Orleans following the hurricanes last summer, I wo ndered if there were any parallels with life in San Francisco in the months after the earthquake.
Winchester did not disappoint. But based on his earlier books, I should have realized it would not be a straight forward tell. This one really takes the long way around, weaving into the story threads from far and wide. Winchester has a clever ability to create stories within the main story. He can’t resist the interesting digression and writes great footnotes. You know the phrase, “In the beginning…”, it applies here.

The book begins in the hometown of Neil Armstrong, Wapakoneta, Ohio, takes a detour to Iceland and Greenland all before getting to the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. Along the way, he treats us to detailed accounts of the earlier earthquakes in Charleston, SC and New Madrid, Mo. He offers brief histories of California, San Francisco, and the San Andreas Fault. He also has fascinating sections on the history of seismographs, going back to the Han Dynasty in China. A useful explanation of the different ways that earthquakes are measured is also included. We all know the Richter Scale but do you understand the diffe rence between the intensity of an earthquake and its magnitude? Then fin ally, in Chapter 10, we make it to San Francisco and the great earthquake of April 18, 1906. Details on this and the chapters that follow w ill have to wait until next month, after I finish reading the book.
Winchester writes like another of my favorite authors, John McPhee. McPhee is also a nonfiction author who can make seemingly mundane topics come to life on the page, painting pictures with words. In addition to McPhee’s lengthy articles in the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on trains delivering coal from Wyoming to electrical generating stations in the Southeast, his many books include The Control of Nature and Basin & Range. Anyone who has driven across northern Utah and Nevada will appreciate his in- depth story of the geology of this “wasteland”. He has a powerful ability to observe and report in colorful detail. This ability is also apparent in the Control of Nature where he describes the Corps of Engineers’ struggle to maintain the Mississippi River in its current channel to New Orleans rather than let it shift to a more natural, short cut across Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico. Closer to home, the book also includes an account of the construction of debris basins at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains by the Corps and Los Angeles County. These were constructed to limit the damage from torrential rainstorms that visit our region from time to time.

Winchester and McPhee are both geologists by education and training. I’m not sure how this influenc es the selection of their subjects or the manner in which they are presented. But the informative and fascinating results will be obvious to anyone who picks up one of their books.

Ed Buch is an architect in the Los Angeles office of Leo A Daly. A Nebraska native, he has worked in Los Angeles since 1988. Prior to that, he worked in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, and 5 years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He has been member since 1981, and is currently an Institute director from the West Region, CSI.