Tag: Earthquake

Good Friday Earthquake, Part 3

Random Tales from the Earthquake

The woman who led our volunteer organization for servicemen was driving in downtown Anchorage. When the shaking started she pulled to the curb and stayed in the car. There was a man on the sidewalk next to her holding on to a pole with a sign stating “No Stopping or Standing”. After it was over they all just stared in shock, looking at each other. Then he looked up at the sign and said, “Well, I wasn’t really standing, you know.”

A local Anchorage store put a sign on their door that said, “Closed due to a shakeup in management.”

My mother had a friend who was a bartender in one of the bars that was part of the area downtown that sank 20 feet or so. He said there was a patron sitting at the bar who never moved from his barstool through the whole quake. After it was over, he proudly held up his glass and said, “I didn’t spill a drop!”

I was senior at West Anchorage High School, and the second floor of the school collapsed during the quake. We finished the year doing split shifts at East High. However, our graduation announcements, ordered months before, still held a drawing of the school. I sent them out to family and friends with a note telling everyone it was just the latest “Earthquake Joke.” West High is still there, but it’s only one story now. Although the main stairway still exists; it just doesn’t go anywhere.

Our senior prom was delayed, and we ended up having it at Ft. Richardson a week or two later than planned. And graduation, instead of taking place in the West High auditorium, was held in an airplane hanger on Elmendorf Air Force Base. It was an experience to remember!

While greatly damaged, Anchorage was by no means the hardest hit. Valdez was completely destroyed, with a large part of the town sinking into the sea. The town was relocated four miles away, where today it is the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. Seward was also hard hit, first by a tsunami, and then fires from damaged fuel storage tanks near the docks. It was cut off for several days, since the Seward Highway and the railroad were impassible. Seward is situated on Resurrection Bay, wedged between the sea and the mountains, with only the one way in and out.

I got a first-hand report from a schoolmate, who had gone to Seward for the Easter break to stay with her mother, who worked there. She told me that after the shaking stopped she started to run to where her mother worked, but she was stopped by a man who told her they needed to go up the mountain. He pointed to the sea, which had emptied out a good portion of the bay. He knew what she didn’t: that a tidal wave was coming. Seward got not just one wave, but several. They ended up spending the night on the side of the mountain, along with many others. It was cold, so he gave her his jacket. When she told me her story, she said she never found out who the man was, but she still had his jacket. Oh, and her Mom was OK. She was also on the mountain, but in a different area.

Good Friday Earthquake Part 2

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the people of Alaska started taking stock and figuring out what to do next. A house blew up due to a gas leak, so we were told to move out until the utility could get to each home to check for leaks. I couch surfed for the next couple of weeks at a friend’s house, while my mother decamped to another friend. I headed to the YMCA to volunteer and was immediately put to work as a gofer.

The day after the earthquake, the military came to our neighborhood with a water truck and we all lined up for fresh water. My mother owned a restaurant so we weren’t short of food, but I did end up standing in line at the grocery store the following Friday (I think it was Piggly Wiggly) for canned goods. They were letting a few people at a time go in to buy limited amounts. I could peek through the doorway and see that shoppers were navigating through aisles with groceries still scattered here and there. They were selecting goods from the floor as well as the shelves. My interest in canned goods ended when we had a strong aftershock and I decided there was no way I was going into that building.

Also during that week I stood in line for hours waiting to call my grandparents to assure them that we were OK. Again, the military had set up a telephone bank so we could contact our families. One call per family.

For weeks after, I would wake in the middle of the night, knowing another shock was on the way. I would hear it coming, like a train approaching, and then the closet doors would start to shake. Everything would rumble, then I would hear it receding. Years later I told my geology professor the story of my experiences, and he was thrilled that I was the first person he had heard first hand describe the first set of waves (alpha waves move faster but are smoother) that precede an earthquake. That was why so many of us would wake in the night just BEFORE an aftershock started. Also why animals and birds seemed to anticipate an earthquake and start barking or take flight.

Fourth Avenue in Anchorage was hard hit, as one side of the street sank about 20 feet. The grade school on Government Hill was completely destroyed, and we were all glad school was not in session. On the right, the entire front of JC Penney collapsed into the street.

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.