The fire-fighters meanwhile kept up their indefatigable work under the direction of the Mayor and the chief of their department. The engines almost from the start had proved useless from lack of water, and were either abandoned or moved to the outlying districts, in the vain hope that the water mains might be repaired in time to permit of a final stand against the whirlwind march of the flames. The cloud of despair grew darker still as the report spread that the city’s supply of dynamite had given out.
“No more dynamite! No more dynamite!” screamed a fireman as he ran up Ellis Street past the doomed Flood building at two o’clock on Friday morning, tears standing in his smoke-smirched eyes.
“No more dynamite! O God! no more dynamite! We are lost!” moaned the throng that heard his despairing words.
A NEW SUPPLY OF EXPLOSIVES.
So, at that hour, the supply of the explosive exhausted, and not a dozen streams of water being thrown in the entire fire zone, the stunned firemen and the stupefied people stood helpless with their eyes fixed in despair upon the swiftly creeping flames.
Had all been like these the entire city would have been doomed, but there were those at the head of affairs who never for a moment gave up their resolution. Dynamite and giant powder were to be had in the Presidio military reservation, and a requisition upon the army authorities was made. The louder reverberations as the day advanced and night came on showed that a fresh supply had been obtained, and that a new and determined campaign against the conflagration had been entered upon. Hitherto much of the work had been ignorantly and carelessly done, and by the hasty and premature use of explosives more harm than good had been occasioned.
As the fire continued to spread in spite of the heroic work of the fighting corps, the Committee of Safety called a meeting at noon on Friday and decided to blow up all the residences on the east side of Van Ness Avenue, between Golden Gate and Pacific Avenues, a distance of one mile. Van Ness Avenue is one of the most fashionable streets of the city and has a width of 125 feet, a fact which led to the idea that a safety line might be made here too broad for the flames to cross.
The firemen, therefore, although exhausted from over twenty-four hours’ work and lack of food, determined to make a desperate stand at this point. They declared that should the fire cross Van Ness Avenue and the wind continue its earlier direction toward the west, the destruction of San Francisco would be virtually complete. The district west of Van Ness Avenue and north of McAllister constitutes the finest part of the metropolis. Here are located all of the finer homes of the well-to-do and wealthier classes, and the resolution to destroy them was the last resort of desperation.
Hundreds of police, regiments of soldiers and scores of volunteers were sent into the doomed district to warn the people to flee. They heroically responded to the demand of law and went bravely on their way, leaving their loved homes and trudging painfully over the pavements with the little they could carry away of their treasured possessions.
The reply of a grizzled fire engineer standing at O’Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue, beside a blackened engine, may not have been as terse as that of Hugo’s guardsman at Waterloo, but the pathos of it must have been as great. In answer to the question of what they proposed to do, he said: