Alaska’s Good Friday Earthquake

One of the most significant events in my life was the Good Friday Earthquake, and I have a bunch of stories about it. To start, I’ll just describe what happened that day from my point of view. Later on I’ll do some blogs about other stories and facts about the earthquake. 

On March 27, 1964, a 9.3 earthquake hit Alaska at about 5:35 in the evening. If you’re not familiar with what that 9.3 means, it was the largest earthquake ever to hit North America. If you remember the earthquake that brought the World Series to a halt in San Francisco in 1989, that one lasted 15 seconds and was magnitude 6.9. The Alaska quake lasted FIVE MINUTES, and at 9.3 was 250 times stronger. It was so strong that it caused a measurable surge in the ocean in Australia!

For us, the earthquake started slow. I was a high school senior, at home in an Anchorage suburb, and in the process of giving a home permanent to a young girl who was staying with us at the time. We were at the kitchen table and I saw the hanging lamp over the table start to sway. As always, I said “We’re having an earthquake” and as always, my mother said “Nah.” Earthquakes were no big deal in Alaska and we had experienced many. They really weren’t much more than conversation fodder. I was just pointing out the light swaying when everything went WHAM! 

I moved to the kitchen counter, trying to hold the cabinets closed so I could save my mother’s china. I looked through the pass-through into the living room and saw our little dog narrowly miss getting crushed by our big console TV. She ended up cowering under the coffee table. At the same time everything was flying off the counters. There was sugar, butter, coffee, and everything else hitting the floor. When the coffee pot fell on my foot my mother shouted to me to let it all go and get out of the house. As soon as I stopped holding the cabinet doors every piece of china hit the floor.

At some point my mother said she thought it was the end of the world, because it was dusk on Good Friday. This from a woman who hadn’t been to church in thirty years.

About that time my old boyfriend stumbled through the door-what rotten timing! He had a shocked look on his face, and even more so when my mother ran to him (she never liked him). We all just held on until the shaking stopped, and then I started moving through the house trying to put things to right. It was clear that the movement had been mostly in one direction, because items on the North and South walls were thrown to the floor while the other walls were fairly stable. 

My first order of business was to take the water out of the toilet tank to rinse the permanent solution out of our young guest’s hair. Even that was a challenge, because the stacked washer and dryer in the bathroom had walked out from the wall to block the door. I ended up going outside and crawling in the bathroom window so I could push them back to the wall. Then I turned on our radio that received short wave broadcasts. When we heard calls for assistance in the Turnagain subdivision, my friend and I decided to drive out to see if we could help.  As we drove out we saw a lot of damage like broken windows in some businesses, but I don’t think the full impact of the disaster had really hit us yet. We knew it was big, but didn’t yet appreciate how big.

When we got to Turnagain my friend said he said he was lost and stopped near a group of people standing on the cliff overlooking the inlet. We walked over to talk to them and realized the reason he was lost was because most of the neighborhood was gone.  To my young eyes it looked like utter devastation. As far as I could see there were broken houses, and all I could think of was how many people might be trapped there, where we couldn’t get to them.

My friend was an announcer at a local radio station, so we decided to go help them get back on the air. When we arrived at the station, we had to help dig the announcer out, because there was a long hallway leading to the broadcast booth and it was blocked with tapes and records that had been on shelves lining the hall. The announcer was fine but he couldn’t get the door open!

We returned to my house, driving past my high school, and that was the first time I realized that the second floor had collapsed.  I was only two months from graduation and my school was gone! We got warm clothing and blankets for everyone. We had no electricity or water, but the radio station gave instructions on how to make snow safe to drink. We treated a little snow to get us through the night.  We tucked our young guest into bed, and my mom retreated to her bedroom with extra blankets and bottle of Dewars. To the end of her life she claimed that was the best antidote for cold. My friend and I spent the night listening to the radio. I wanted to sleep, but the occasional aftershock had me stressed out and I couldn’t really relax enough to sleep.  We listened to the lists of missing and the tsunami warnings. In time most of the names I recognized on the missing list were found…except for one. He was found under the collapsed front wall of the Penney’s department store.

It was the next day before we fully appreciated the extent of the damage. While Anchorage was hit hard, there were towns and villages that were completely destroyed, and a good part of the map of Alaska was changed. I’ll post more of the story, along with some photos, in the coming days.