"The Wooden Buildings Stood"

Bg Jacft Dionne

This is NOT a knock for anv building material.

It is simply a truth-telling boost for that grand old building material-WoOD.

A few days since, the worst earthquake the Pacific Coast has known since San Francisco was shaken to its foundations years ago, struck the beautiful city of Santa Barbara.

Only those who have been there to see can imagine the tremendous damage done that city. The downtown section was wrecked. The big buildings were smashed and shaken asunder and many lives were lost beneath flying bricks and falling walls.

But every message of eye-witnesses from Santa Barbara, during the quake time and since, has told the same story:

"TrrE wooDEN BUTLDINGS STOOD THE QUAKE SPLENDTDLY. MANY PEOPLE LIVING IN WOODEN HOMES SLEPT RIGHT THROUGH THE DIS. ASTER WITHOUT WAKING. THE ONLY DAMAGE TO WOODEN HOMES WAS CRUMBLING AND FALLING CHIMNEYS.''

It was the "permanent" type of buildings that were smashed, and cracked, and crumbled at Santa Barbara. The wooden homes, even those lightly and simply constructed, were little, if any, damaged by the quake.

The San Francisco Bulletin, in an editorial of July lst, remarks that builders seem to learn very little about construction from experience with earthquakes, and that "they continue putting one brick on another to convenient height and laying floor joists across them exactly as their predecessors did in Sodom and Gomorrah, and Nineveh and Tyre, and Memphis and Thebes and Li'sbon."

And when the quake comes along they fall down. The remains of scores of brick buildings in Santa Barbara proves one thing conclusively; that the builders were certainly not thinking of earthquakes when they built them. Walls that fall off clean, leaving the rest of the building standing would hardly come under the head of good building.

Yet there are hundreds of cheaply constructed light frame houses in Santa Barbara that were damaged not at all by the quake that tore down these big buildings-for such is the nature of wood. It will bend without breaking, and released from stress and strain, will go back to its exact former shape and usefulness.

The writer has seen-during a tropical hurricane from the Gulf-a beautiful home cut and scarred in a thousand places by heavy, sharp edged sldte shingles blown from the roof of the home next door, every one being a cannon-ball missle, while adjacent houses with wooden shingle roofs were damaged not a penny, either to themselves or their neighbors. A well nailed shingle roof will suffer little or no damage from a hurricane, while heavy slate and tile will be ripped off.

Here is an excellent opportunity for the lumber merchants of California to give their trade good building advice, based on the experiences of the Santa Barbara disaster. Remind your trade of the fact that the wooden buildings stood the test in that stricken city, and that wooden homes are mighty good places to be when the subterranean forces that dwell beneath the surface of the earth begin "cutting up."

Elsewhere in this issue will be found a reprint in full of the editorial in the San Francisco Bulletin, previously referred to. It is filled with good sense, and some very excellent practical building advice, and will stand close reading. JC#€:l-r€:rC==::r€#€#C:r€:t*9€=::=#C::9C: