According to Winchester, only a trans-Pacific and two military telegraph lines survived. What telephone service there was was knocked out. In fact, two scientists were on the telephone with each other in California when the earthquake struck. 5:13 a.m. PT, Wednesday, April 18, 1906.
Via the military telegraph lines, Washington was told, and Congress met the next day to appropriate funds to help. The military all around San Francisco was immediately called into action by the local second in command in less than two hours (his boss was out of town) to help find survivors, restore order, and quell the fires that had started near the waterfront and were going to burn half the city down. The fires burned for three days. The military actually blew buildings up to create firebreaks. Indeed, all the military forces were turned over to the city to do what was needed, and they worked hand in hand. Nobody sat there wondering what political benefit could be derived or what friend of the government could benefit from a contract to rebuild.
A train full of supplies came from LA and arrived that night, 18 hours after the earthquake. A train full. Not five days later.
A wire transfer the day before from San Francisco for relief of an Italian natural disaster was creatively recaptured for use of the funds in San Francisco.
Winchester finished this book right after the December 26, 2004 tsunamis because references to that earthquake are added in as footnotes and probable new text. It was clearly either on the shelves or in manufacturing when Katrina struck.
The immediacy and resolve of the government's response in 1906 was striking, and it only comprises two pages of Winchester's book. What is more stiking is that 99 1/2 years before Katrina, the government was more sensitive to responding to a natural disaster for fundamental humanitarian reasons as opposed to the current administration that was always looking for the political angles before it would do a thing. And they didn't have CNN, MSNBC, and Faux News showing the pictures. They had no pictures for weeks.
They had one telegraph report, confirmed by seismographs all over North America, and they immediately got on it.
