1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire

Tom misdates as "1912 or whatever." Triggered modern building codes for earthquake protection in the U.S.

People have designed things for this. I got an email just yesterday or the day before from some guy in Seattle who wanted to know what he should do if an earthquake struck. He's in a high-rise building in Seattle, he wanted to know if it was safe. I said, well in Seattle it probably is. In certain other parts of the world it may not be, because they don't have the same types of building codes. There were earthquakes in Chile — was it Chile? They lost a lot of people with the magnitude nine earthquake. Japan had another big one, and the Japanese didn't lose anywhere near as many people. But they did earlier than that. There was a 1907 earthquake or something in Tokyo, that was a big firestorm. We had one in San Francisco in 1912 or whatever, and it wiped out San Francisco. They had fires afterwards, and that's when we started our building codes for earthquake protection.