San Francisco, on the second day

By the time the sun rose on April 19th, most of the city east of Van Ness was already gone or going. Fires had converged into a single conflagration, fed by ruptured gas mains and broken water cisterns. Dynamite teams blew whole blocks to make firebreaks; many of the explosions lit fresh fires instead. By late afternoon the line of destruction had pushed west to Nob Hill and north toward Russian Hill. An estimated 3,000 people died across the three-day disaster; roughly 225,000 were left homeless, out of a city of 410,000.