100 years after the San Francisco earthquake

Some centenarians have been talking about the quake all their lives.

[O]ver the last two weeks, about a dozen survivors of the quake — a magnitude 7.8 or 7.9 on the modern earthquake scales that struck at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906 — have been made into centennial celebrities, shuttled from opening day celebrations at the ballpark, media-frenzy lunches downtown and Tuesday morning's painfully early breakfast with Mayor Gavin Newsom.

All of which is fun, most survivors say, but also taxing for a group of people whose claim to fame is somewhat dampened by the fact that they do not really remember the event in question.

NPR has a lot of interesting stuff on the quake. The story on rebuilding Chinatown is particularly good.

The USGS recreates the ground motions of the quake.

Personal stories and pictures, newspaper clippings and the Wikipedia entry about the quake.