San Francisco, California 1906
We start our list with one of the most dangerous and devastating earthquake disasters that ever hit our beautiful country: the San Francisco tremor of 1906. The calamitous incident took place on April 18th, 1906, and it measured a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale.
It was so strong that it spread roughly 300 miles along the state’s San Andreas fault, as data from the U.S. Geological Survey says. Even though the temblor only lasted approximately 60 seconds, even the people in Nevada and Los Angeles felt it.
It is believed that there were approximately 700 deaths immediately after the incident, but later studies estimated that the number of total fatalities was actually as high as 3,000.
The earthquake was like a blitzkrieg that brought fires to the city and damaged roughly 80% of it. Experts evaluated the whole disaster, and they said that the entire damage was around $400 billion in today’s currency.
