Charleston’s 1886 Earthquake

At 9:50 P.M. on August 31, 1886

The city of Charleston, South Carolina, was shaken by one of the largest historic seismic disturbances in eastern North America.

 The quake, estimated to have had a moment magnitude (M_w) of 7.3, caused an estimated $5 to $6 million in damage in 1886 dollars. It damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, and killed approximately 120 people.

The temblor caused structural damage as far away as central Ohio, and was felt in Boston, Chicago, Cuba, and Bermuda. Some 300 aftershocks were reported over the next 35 years; four of them were of magnitude 5.0 or greater.

Small to moderate earthquakes had been felt in Summerville in the five days preceding the 1886 catastrophe, but few people outside of the village paid any attention to them.

The Great Charleston Earthquake roared out of the night on August 31, 1886, at 9:51 p.m. Another strong shock followed eight minutes later, and six more were felt within the following twenty-four hours. The 1886 earthquake would have registered as a magnitude 7.3 earthquake on the Richter Scale (which did not exist at that time). T

The catastrophic Charleston-Summerville earthquake was felt over an astounding 2.5-million-square-mile area: north to Toronto, south to Cuba, west to Omaha, and east to Maine and Bermuda. It was experienced by two-thirds of all people living in the United States at the time. The destruction of life and property was staggering:

• At least one hundred and twenty-four people died in South Carolina and Georgia as a result of the 1886 earthquake. About forty were killed by falling chimneys, cornices, and walls in Charleston during the first two shocks at 9:51 and 9:58 p.m.
• One hundred forty severely injured people have been identified; the actual number was probably at least three times larger.
• Three fatal train wrecks occured at the same instant in three different locations in South Carolina. Dam failures leading to large-scale flooding near Langley, Aiken County, South Carolina, caused the fatal derailment of two railroad trains and the drowning of an unknown number of people in that area. A northbound train headed for Summerville was derailed and its fireman was killed. A southbound train from Columbia with over one hundred passengers was thrown into the air but escaped disaster.
• All three of Charleston’s main medical facilities—the City Hospital, Roper Hospital, and the Medical College of South Carolina—were instantly destroyed.
• Half of the city’s fire stations and their fire engines were put at least temporarily out of service.
• The city’s water system was disabled for hours until emergency repairs could be made. As a result, the entire city block of buildings on King Street between Broad and Queen streets burned to the ground because there was no water to pump to fight the flames.
• The main police station and the city jail were both destroyed, and most of the prisoners escaped.
• Sixty-seven percent of Charleston’s brick structures were badly damaged or totally destroyed.
• Every building in the city and in nearby Summerville was damaged.
• Of fourteen thousand chimneys in Charleston, scarcely one hundred escaped damage. The estimated damage to Charleston’s structures alone (not including contents) was $5 to $6 million in gold dollars—the equivalent of $100.5 to $121.2 million in 2006 dollars.
• All electricity, telephone, and telegraph services were cut off.
• The day after the earthquake, forty thousand of the sixty thousand residents of Charleston were living on the streets, and thousands of people from the South Carolina Lowcountry started their flight inland, seeking shelter and escape from the numerous aftershocks.

To give some comparison to other catastrophic events, consider the following facts about the level of damage caused by the 1886 earthquake:

• It was more destructive than the 200-cannon artillery bombardment by the British navy when they attacked and occupied Charleston in 1780.
• It was more destructive than the castrophic fire in the Market Street area in 1835 and the 1838 Ansonboro fire, which burnt over 1,000 structures.
• It was more destructive than the immense 1861 Chareston fire, which burned every building to the ground within a quarter-mile wide path all the way from the Cooper River to the Ashley River.
• It was more destructive than the 531-day artillery bombardment by the Union navy and army in 1865 after which the the Union forces defeated the Confederates and took control of Charleston at the end of the Civil War.
• It was more destructive than Hurricane Hugo, a devastating Category IV hurricane which struck the coast near Charleston in 1989, killing approximately twelve people in South Carolina, causing month-long power outages in many areas, and catastrophic damage throughout a thirty-mile-wide corridor through the state.
• It was more destructive than the 1989 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake (magnitude 7.1), which killed 67 people, pancaked elevated sections of interstate highways, snapped the upper span of San Francisco’s Oakland Bay Bridge, and devastated the San Francisco marina district.

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MSNBC Interview “Are you prepared for the next Big One?” with Richard Cote:

Charleston, S.C.

Over on the Eastern seaboard, there’s another city that you might not think of at risk.   

But on the warm sultry night of August 31^st, 1886, Charleston, South Carolina was devastated by an earthquake that might have been as strong as a magnitude seven.

An estimated 90 percent of all the brick buildings in the city were destroyed and the shock waves were felt as far away as Milwaukee and Boston.

City residents were panic-stricken, and at least 60 people died.

Richard Cote, historian: Some people described the sounds as 1,000 freight trains from hell all arriving at the same station.

Cote: The electricity, the telegraph lines and the gas lights were all snuffed out within seconds leaving Charleston completely dark, terrorized and a huge cloud of dust and people yelling, running and screaming in pain and agony everyplace.

Little is known about the fault that caused the great Charleston quake, and some residents think this was just a freak occurrence that cannot happen again. 

Schweig: It could be a very dangerous assumption.  And the likelihood of an earthquake in Charleston is probably somewhere between two and ten percent in the next 50 years, quite significant.

Historian Richard Cote wrote a book about the disaster:City of Heroes: The Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886

 

Is Charleston Do for another Earthquake soon?

          New York Times Story on the Earthquake

          Milwaukee Sentinal article on the Earthquake and feeling the shocks

 

“St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, from N.W.” St. Michael’s Episcopal church, the oldest existing church edifice in Charleston, viewed several weeks after the great earthquake as efforts were under way to repair and refurbish it. A discerning person today can still detect the earthquake fractures in the building’s walls despite the wonderful cosmetic “surgery” of recent years. (South Caroliniana Library Archives)

“Medical college of South Carolina.” (South Caroliniana Library Archives

Tectonics
The 1886 earthquake is notable for being one of more significant intraplate earthquakes-quakes occurring away from tectonic plate boundaries-to occur in the United States. Other such quakes were recorded at Cape Ann, MA, in 1755 (M_w 6.0) and New Madrid, MO, in 1811-12 (M_w 7.8-8.1). The tectonics of intraplate earthquakes are not as well understood as those occurring along plate boundaries.

South Carolina has long been recognized as seismically active, even before the 1886 quake; between 1698 and 1879, 16 earthquakes were reported in the region’s newspapers. Paleoseismological surveys of the southeastern US coast have identified prehistoric liquefaction sites from Wilmington, NC, in the north to the mouth of the Savannah River in the south-a region stretching some 200 miles.

 Several light tremors occurred throughout the summer before the 1886 quake, including several still small but stronger shocks over the course of August 27-30. The zone of major damage in 1886 fell into a roughly 35 by 50 kilometer ellipse centered on Middleton Place, SC.

Charleston sits upon the Coastal Plains sediments, a region of sedimentary rocks reaching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic coast. Reaching thicknesses upwards of 1 km, these sediments were deposited over the course of millions of years and are highly prone to liquefaction.

No surface faulting was observed after the 1886 quake, though several fissures were reported parallel to streams and canals in the epicentral area. There was widespread ground liquefaction and formation of sand craterlets, some more than 6.4 meters wide. Sand ejection and water spouts were also widely reported.

Scientists believe that the 1886 quake originated not in these sediments but in faults in the underlying basement rock. These faults do not extend to the surface, hampering efforts to characterize them via standard surface observations.

 

 

 

“Craterlet, Ten Mile Hill.” (South Caroliniana Library Archives)

 

“Fissures or Long, deep trenches that occured after the earthquake”                                                                ( South Caroliniana Library Archives)

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