Where can I find photographs of earthquake damage?
The best collection of damage photographs has been compiled by the UC Berkeley Earthquake Engineering Research Center (EERC). Karl Steinbrugge donated his collection of earthquake slides and photographs to the EERC in 1992. Other slides and photographs from EERC faculty and staff are collected in these archives as well. The EERC library provides copies of the slides and photographs for use in teaching and research for a minimal cost and online access to the digitized slide collection is available. This collection includes specialized sets of slides for the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe earthquakes.
The USGS has a collection of photographs of earthquakes, volcanoes, and other geologic hazards. A description of these data is available on-line.
The National Geophysical Data Center of NOAA maintains a collection of photographs for a variety of geologic hazards, including earthquakes. Most of their collection is available as slide sets, although a sampler of their earthquake photographs is available online and includes images of the 1906 San Francisco and 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes.
The Museum of the City of San Francisco has gathered photographs for a number of Bay Area earthquakes, particularly for the 1906 and 1989 events. These may be found at their WWW site.
The University of California at Berkeley California Heritage Collection includes a number of digital photographs. The Collection has a number of entries for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
The Smithsonian Institution has created a photograph data base. Quite comprehensive in nature, this collection includes a few photographs of damage from the 1972 Nicaragua earthquake.
The Library of Congress is creating a National Digital library, comprised of prints and photos, documents, motion pictures, and sound recordings. This online collection is searchable and contains a number of images from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
The UC Berkeley Geography Department GeoImages project is putting an interesting collection of geography slides on the Web. The Images of the California Environment chapter has some interesting photographs related to earthquakes.