San Francisco Remembers The Big One

Most of the city's residents were still in bed when disaster struck 100 years ago - a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that leveled buildings and sparked fires.

A century later, tens of thousands of spectators were expected to join a handful of centenarians who survived the quake at a solemn wreath-laying ceremony Tuesday to mark the exact moment when the temblor struck.

Among them is Herbert Hamrol, who is 103 years old and still remembers San Francisco's days of terror and destruction.

"I was three years old," Hamrol tells CBS News correspondent Steve Futterman, "I remember my mother carrying me down the stairs."

His family knew that staying in the house immediately after the quake was far too dangerous.

"We slept in the park for a couple of days," Hamrol remembers.

The annual pre-dawn ceremony is held at Lotta's Fountain, the downtown landmark where San Franciscans gathered in the aftermath. Organizers billed this year's as the biggest ever.

The foreshock of the April 18, 1906, quake sent people scrambling, and the main shock arrived with such fury that it flattened crowded rooming houses. The epicenter was a few miles offshore of the city and it was felt as far away as Oregon and Nevada. In 28 seconds, it brought down City Hall.

From cracked chimneys, broken gas lines and toppled chemical tanks, fires broke out and swept across the city, burning for days. Ruptured water pipes left firefighters helpless, while families carrying what they could fled to parks that had become makeshift morgues.

Historians say city officials, eager to bring people and commerce back to the city, radically underestimated the death toll. Researchers are still trying to settle on a number, but reliable estimates put the loss above 3,000, and possibly as high as 6,000. In any case, it ranks as one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history, a benchmark to which later calamities are compared.

According to a study released Monday, a repeat of that 1906 temblor would cause 1,800 to 3,400 deaths, damage more than 90,000 buildings, displace as many as 250,000 households and result in $150 billion in damage.

The study, "When the Big One Strikes Again," was released in connection with what is being billed as the biggest earthquake conference ever.

The three-day 100th Anniversary Earthquake Conference, starting Tuesday in San Francisco, is expected to draw more than 2,500 scientists, engineers, government officials and emergency response professionals. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other politicians were scheduled to speak.

Communities up and down the San Andreas fault planned to commemorate the earthquake Tuesday. In Santa Rosa, where 119 of the 7,500 citizens were killed, 119 volunteers dressed in vintage garb would walk by candlelight behind a horse-drawn hearse to the cemetery where 15 earthquake victims were buried in a mass grave.

San Jose, which was also hard-hit, has staged a geology exhibit called "It's Our Fault, Too." At the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, an artist sculpted a quivering San Francisco neighborhood in Jell-O.

Historians generally agree on one point: that San Francisco will fall again in a future quake. But they disagree over whether people should love the city or leave it.

Philip L. Fradkin, author of "The Great Earthquake And Firestorms Of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself," has chosen to make the Bay Area his home in spite of the threat.

Fradkin lives in Point Reyes Station, north of San Francisco. The San Andreas Fault, source of the magnitude-7.8 temblor, runs close by.

"San Francisco fell, and it will fall again," Fradkin said. "And if we can't deal with the realities of history, we're lost."

Another historian, Kevin Starr, heartily agrees on that point.

"It's not a matter of if [another great quake will come]," says Starr, "it's a question of when."

He views the 1906 quake as a "defining moment in the rise of a great American city" – because of the way that city responded to the crisis.

San Francisco, says Starr, had to recapture its meaning – its myth – and its texture.

A process it will be retapping again this week as it remembers that time of cataclysm and rebirth.