The 150th anniversary of the Great Portland Fire is coming up. This was the fourth major fire in our city’s history. Our town motto is “Resurgam”, latin for “I will rise again”, refering to the many times the city was destroyed and recovered. Many of the stories about this fire mention not just the devastation, but the recovery.
What are some other towns that suffered massive damage, but recovered well from it?
Lisbon (quake, tsunami and fire, 1755). The same quake caused damage in a lot of Portugal, Spain and Morocco, with the worst damage in coastal areas due to tsunamis.
Santander (fire, 1941)
Chicago (fire, 1871). But searching for it brings me a TV series about firemen.
San Francisco, of course. Tokyo, and a lot of other places on fault lines.
Actually, now that I think of it, innumerable European and Japanese cities were bombed to rubble or completely wiped out by rampaging armies in World War II, and today many are so exquisitely rebuilt you’d never know it happened. Dresden looks great for a city that was effectively incinerated.
The Great Fire of London.
Boston had The Great Molasses Flood. It actually only affected a small portion of the city, but I’m sure the event and the aftermath were both spectacular.
Galveston, TX, after the hurricane of 1900.
Texas City exploded in 1947, in what was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in U.S. history. It’s well remembered, but the city has recovered.
Here are the other Portland fires
1676- The Abenaki tribe destroyed the city in a war.
1690- Portland was destroyed in the French and Indian War
1775- Bombarded with hot-shot cannons that started a massive fire.
How about New Orleans since Katrina?
That whole Chicago Fire thing.
St. Louis has had multiple tornado strikes, including several that went right through the heart of the city. Ditto for Louisville.
Anchorage, Alaska was hit by the most powerful earthquake ever to strike North America.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Warsaw.
Warsaw saw the usual bombing and destruction of war, but then - as a result of its inhabitants uprising against the Nazis - the historic center of Warsaw was deliberately destroyed pretty well to the bare rubble, brick by brick, by the Nazis as a purposeful measure of vengeance and desecration.
The historic center of Warsaw was later completely rebuilt in a massive recreation effort - from records, paintings, etc.
The rebuilt city center became a UNESCO world heritage site.
Napier, New Zealand - 1931 earthquake
It’s now considered one of the best preserved Art Deco towns in the world.
It is even more unusual for a city to NOT recover from a disaster. They alost always do. One notable exception is Varosha, Cyprus, from which 40,000 people fled with dinner on the table one morning in 1974, never to return. It stands today as an unpopulated ghost town, still completely intact.
I’ve been in at least two other towns that had a thriving population then, and not a single buiklding is left standing now: Valsetz, Oregon, and La Guera, Sahrawi. All the above were abandoned for economic or political reasons, not a natural disster.
That’s fascinating. “Completely intact” is not accurate; the place is slowly falling apart. It’s the real-world answer to the question occasionally asked: “how fast would a city fall apart if it were not continuously maintained?”
One other example that comes to mind is Centralia, Pennsylvania, where an unstoppable underground coal fire has released persistent toxic gases and caused ground subsidence over the past 50+ years. The town is now almost completely abandoned.
Another example is the former capital of Guatemala, partly destroyed by a volcanic mudflow. The whole city was moved and the site abandoned.
That capital city was then moved again - after it was partly destroyed by an earthquake.
I don’t think Chernobyl will be rebuilding any time soon.
I was in Anchorage when that happened. Downtown was devastated, as was an outlying residential area, most schools and other structures along the fault line. It was remarkable how quickly the city recovered; luckily there was no major fire. Prince William Sound took the brunt of the tsunamis. The town of Valdez ended up being relocated in its entirety to higher ground after it was all over.