Title: Digging for survivors. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060103.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: Here we see men trying to rescue survivors from the wreckage of a building. Some rescue attempts had to be abandoned when the flames began to sweep over the ruins, leaving trapped victims to a more grisly fate.

Title: The Call Building burns furiously. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060129.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: The Call Building burns furiously. The flag in the foreground flies above the roof the Palace Hotel. Soon the Palace, once the largest and most magnificent hotel in the world, will be ablaze as well.

Title: Towering inferno. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060130.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: Towering inferno. The Call Building’s elevator shaft served as a heat conduit that brought the flames quickly up to its domed roof, allowing the fires to burn slowly down from the top as well as more rapidly from the bottom.

Title: City Hall, after fire and earthquake -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060141.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: The most photographed ruin in San Francisco: its City Hall. This terribly constructed building was devastated in the tremor, while all the major buildings nearby, both of masonry and wood, sustained little damage.

Title: Demolition explosion. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060142.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: During the three and a half days that the fire raged, the city rocked to sounds of dynamite blasts (explosives were used in a mostly futile attempt to form firebreaks against the inferno). After the inferno had been put out, there was but a brief pause before the dynamiting began again—this time to knock down dangerous, free-standing walls.

Title: Evacuation -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060143.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: Patients are quickly loaded aboard buggies in the evacuation of the Mechanics Pavilion, a major exhibition hall that was converted into a provisional hospital on the morning of the quake. Accounts differ as to whether all the patients were evacuated before the fire consumed the building a few minutes later (as this scene took place, the roof was already ablaze).

Title: Patients brought to Mechanics Pavilion -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060143.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: Patients were quickly loaded aboard buggies and taken to the Mechanics Pavilion, a major exhibition hall that was converted into a provisional hospital on the morning of the quake. Accounts differ as to whether all the patients were evacuated before the fire consumed the building a few hours later.

Title: San Francisco Fire Chief, Dennis Sullivan. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060144.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: An extraordinarily competent fire official, Chief Sullivan was mortally injured on the morning of the earthquake when the top portion of a large chimney of the neighboring California Hotel crashed through the roof of the firehouse where he lived with his wife. Sullivan’s wife was also seriously injured, but survived.

Title: Helpless spectators. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060148.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: A few citizens of San Francisco watch as their city burns. One man has turned away from sight, and his hunched back suggests a melancholic world-weariness.

Title: Keeping the crowds back. -- The Hansen Collection -- 19060149.jpg

Owning Institution: The Museum of the City of San Francisco

Description: Soldiers on horseback keep crowds away from the conflagration while the last people prepare to leave.