Much of “The Longest Minute,” Matthew J. Davenport’s masterful, granular, ground-level history of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, unfolds like a slow-motion nightmare.

地上随意缺点变成液体tructed “fill land” beneath the streets — sand, dirt, garbage, mud — gurgles upward. Houses and buildings erected on this land collapse instantly, top stories pitching forward to street level, crushing everything and everyone beneath. Too many fires to count spread with seemingly impossible speed — by 1902, with a population of more than 400,000, more of San Francisco was made of wood than any other major American city — as members of a top-notch fire department faced a horrific reality: Few of the city’s fire hydrants yielded water. The 7.9 quake itself was gargantuan. But it was the failure to prepare that proved most deadly.

The results are well known. More than 3,000 people died, and more than 80% of the city was destroyed. As Davenport writes, this was “America’s first truly national disaster,” covered breathlessly by the nation’s press and a fairly new storytelling technology, the motion picture. Davenport, a historian and journalist, punches beyond the familiar numbers and images in two important respects. He painstakingly details what the experience felt like for residents and first responders (who were, of course, mostly residents). And he shows how preventable so much of the catastrophe was — not the part about the tectonic plates, but the boom town’s feeble infrastructure and the deadly negligence of a privately owned water supply.

That would be the Spring Valley Water Co., which cut corners at every turn, despite the urgent warnings of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan before 1906. Sullivan sounded the alarm again and again to Spring Valley and to the city’s Board of Supervisors, arguing to no avail that “as year after year passed, the additions of gas lines and electrical wiring and more densely jammed, wood-frame structures in the crowded city compounded the hazards to follow the next great earthquake with the additional risk of widespread fire.”

Sullivan knew that without a more efficient setup — sturdier, wider pipes; larger water mains; an auxiliary saltwater system — the city was likely to burn to the ground. At a certain point, he also seems to have known he was banging his head against a wall. As he wrote the Board of Supervisors, “as the carrying out of these recommendations depends upon the will of a private corporation, very little has as yet been accomplished.”

The most powerful sections cover the immediate aftermath of the quake, as survivors and firefighters, the true heroes of the story, spring into action as the death toll mounts. As usual in such cases, lower-income areas suffered most. Hotels and boarding houses south of Market Street, hastily and flimsily constructed, collapsed instantly and went up like tinder. The site of perhaps the worst tragedy was the Valencia Hotel, where, as the water from a transmission main poured “like a river,” drowning some while others were incinerated. Meanwhile, firefighters scrambled from hydrant to hydrant, only to discover that the ill-equipped Spring Valley system made water lethally scarce. The cries went up all over the city: “No water!”

This is heroic writing that balances the big picture with minute details. Davenport has written an essential piece of San Francisco history, damning and necessary, that shines important light on a disaster known mostly in general terms.

Chris Vognar is a freelance writer.