WI: No 1906 SF Quake

Today is the 102nd anniversity of the 1906 quake in San Fran. After this quake San Fran lost its place as the premier city on the left ocast and LA grew.

What would be the effects on the West Coast and the US if there had been no 1906 quake or even a minor 4.0 one? How would it have effected WWII the US effort against the Japanese with the better harbor and presumably larger city in SF?

ETC ETC
 
A couple of effects: the development of structural engineering to account for seismic effects in design would have been delayed significantly, as would the conversion of several cable car lines to electric traction. (One has to wonder how differently the Golden Gate bridge would have been engineered had there been no quake in '06, and whether such a span could have withstood the '89 quake.)
 
Today is the 102nd anniversity of the 1906 quake in San Fran. After this quake San Fran lost its place as the premier city on the left ocast and LA grew.

What would be the effects on the West Coast and the US if there had been no 1906 quake or even a minor 4.0 one? How would it have effected WWII the US effort against the Japanese with the better harbor and presumably larger city in SF?

ETC ETC


I guess you must be in a very small percentage of people that actually believe that Los Angeles is the premier city on the West Coast. San Francisco rebounded terrifically from the earthquake.

San Francisco had a history of repeated wholesale citywide fires before the Great 1906 Earthquake. So it is very much a phoenix like city. Its one problem is that it is located on a peninsula and there if a finite amount of land for homes. I would guess that in particular Colma, California, would be a regular bustling suburb of San Francisco, rather than its 'city of the dead'.
 
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