In Post-Quake San Francisco, Lessons for New Orleans After the Flood

WHEN a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck San Francisco 100 years ago Tuesday and the city — like New Orleans last year — lay in ruins, Theodore Roosevelt was president and cars were just a plaything of the rich.

By the time San Francisco regained its past glory, at least according to some historians here, the automobile had started to reshape America's cities, Roosevelt was dead and, four presidents later, the country was on the precipice of the Great Depression.

"It took San Francisco something like 20 years to fully recover" from the 1906 earthquake, said Mary C. Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

"That might seem a really long time," said Ms. Comerio, author of "Disaster Hits Home," a book examining the post-disaster recovery of cities around the globe, "but social scientists who follow this kind of thing find that's pretty much the norm, whatever era we're talking about."