San Francisco Marks Quake Centennial

Sirens wailed through the city before dawn Tuesday as residents marked the moment 100 years earlier when the Great Quake shattered the city, killing thousands as it leveled buildings and touched off fires that burned for days.

A handful of centenarians who survived that devastation joined hundreds of residents for a moment of silence and a memorial ceremony to remember one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

"What an extraordinary example, the pioneering spirit that defines our past, I would argue defines our present, and gives me optimism of the future," said Mayor Gavin Newsom. "San Francisco, a city of dreamers. And San Francisco, a city of doers."

Most of the city's 400,000 residents were still in bed when the magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906.

The foreshock 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, but it was felt as far away as Oregon and Nevada. In 28 seconds, it brought down the 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.

Chrissie Martenstein, 108, is one of the handful of survivors who still recalls the instant everything changed.

"The house shakes. The windows rattling. The doors rattling. And the house kind of creaking, you know. It was scary. Very scary," she told CBS News' The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler.

Herbert Hamrol, 103 years old, also 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.

Many feel the quake gave San Francisco a special badge honor as a city that even the great quake and the fires that took place afterwards could not destroy, Futterman says.

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.

"It doesn't really feel like a party to me," said Bob McMillan, 37, who walked to the memorial event early Tuesday with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. "There is a sense of the tragedy, but there is also that San Francisco optimism. It's kind of like, 'We're still standing.'"

Linda Cain, 52, joined the crowd to honor her late grandmother, Loretta O'Connor, who lived through the quake.

"Growing up she would talk about how this devastated her life," Cain said. "She loved San Francisco very much and she passed that on to me."

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.

A a study released Monday determined that a repeat of that 1906 temblor today 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.

"We're certainly much more prepared than we were in 1906. But the reality is there are still huge gaps," Mayor Newsom said on The Early Show.

"The great quake of 1906 laid devastation throughout northern California, and the fact is, we're going to be working across those jurisdictions, across those borders for mutual aid and support. We have more much to do, and we recognize that," Newsom said.

But Jerry Dodson of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society says, "I don't think we're living in denial. We know it's here. But we know, if we build things properly, we'll be able to survive another earthquake, just as we survived the quake of '89."

And many San Francisco residents agree there's no reason to live in fear.

"It's a crap shoot. It's like walking the streets of Manhattan. You know at any moment you can get mugged, but it's not going to stop you from walking the streets," one resident tells Syler.

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."