Today is the 59th anniversary of the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964, which took place on Good Friday of that year. We had just sat down to dinner when we heard a rumble. My mother said “Earthquake!” My stepfather said “Oh, bullshit.” The rumble grew to a roar and some great hand reached down from the heavens, picked our house up, slammed it to the ground, and began shaking it like a terrier with a rat.
As my parents for some reason tried to hold the kitchen cabinet doors closed, I bolted for the front door, somehow managing to keep my feet. As I ran through the living room, my mother’s china cabinet door opened and all of her crystal heirlooms and china were vomited into the room. I got to the front door, but by now it was nearly impossible to stay on my feet, so I was battered repeatedly by the door jambs as I tried to get out of the house.
Much like the china, I was vomited from the house onto the front walk, where I sat in open-mouthed shock as trees whipped back and forth, slapping the ground, and all the parked cars’ tires shrieked in unison as the vehicles were thrown violently forward and backward. I heard a loud crash, much like one would expect a train wreck to sound and large plume of snow appeared above the corner grocery from what turned out to be the collapse of a newly framed four-story apartment building two blocks away.
After what seemed like an eternity, the shaking subsided, the trees returned to their normal activities and cars became less demented. The silence was as eerie as you might imagine after a 9.2 earthquake. I went back into the house to find my mother sitting on the floor in shock and my father sitting on a chair, his hair and face smeared with yams and what looked like mustard.
This was a seminal event in my life at age 16, as you might imagine. These sorts of things are permanently etched into your brain. I’m sure that many of you have the same sorts of memories, calamitous or not, that you can share.
Wow! That’s an amazing story. My two earthquake experiences are:
Sleeping through one.
Not noticing it. I was in California at a factory bent over a piece of electronic equipment trying to debug something. I thought a truck went by. I looked up and everyone on the Engineering team was underneath their desks. I stood their stupidly wondering why everyone was underneath their desk instead of wondering if I too should be underneath something.
Incredible. I was in a tall building in Denver when a… 2 earthquake hit. You could tell, but that was about it.
Lightning struck our house chimney right outside my bedroom window when I was about 6. Fire Department came the entire thing. Chimney bricks blown into the yard. I slept through the entire thing.
I remember this earthquake well, as I also live in earthquake territory, although I was 12 for this one. But it was the drained harbor that really stuck in my memory from the news reports. Great story, @Chefguy … it’s something to say you survived a 9.2. The highest one I’ve been in was 7.2. It’s hard for my brain to comprehend 9.2.
The fact that it lasted four and a half minutes was what caused the most severe damage. The then-suburb of Turnagain was built on a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet. Unfortunately, either the geologic survey was ignored or not done at all. The lengthy quake turned the substrate of what is known as “quickclay” into liquid and homes simply slid down the bluff. The same thing happened in downtown Anchorage where the businesses on one side of the main street met the same fate.
I’ve ridden through several quakes growing up in So Cal and then living in Nevada. Though none to compare to the OP’s surreal experience. This one was the most memorable of mine:
I was age 12 and living ~60 miles from the epicenter down in Newport Beach in a two story typical wood frame + stucco suburban house. With a swimming pool in the back. My upstairs bedroom window overlooked the pool.
About 6am, so shortly after dawn, the house started creaking and groaning and swaying to and fro. I jumped out of bed & went to the window to see a 12-18" tall wave sloshing end to end in the ~40 foot long pool. Great gouts of water flowed out of the pool at each end as the wave turned around and headed back the other way. The aggressive shaking ended within just a few seconds after I got to the window, but the wave kept sloshing for what seemed like a couple minutes. Pretty darn impressive.
We had no damage or broken crockery at home. I had a bunch of plastic scale models of planes & ships that fell off a narrow bookshelf I’d made for them. Lost a few antenna or landing gear when they hit the floor, but that was it.
Lots of other people and infrastructure closer to the epicenter had a lot of damage as shown in that wiki article. This quake was a big impetus for a comprehensive upgrade of California’s building codes for better resilience.
The parents of an ex-bf of mine lived in the Sylmar area for that quake. He said they had a neighbor with a collection of miniature oil lamps that completely filled a bookcase, floor to ceiling. On the other side of the wall was the kitchen refrigerator…which proceeded to rhythmically slam against that wall for the duration of the quake. Not a single oil lamp fell. Without eq putty! But the kitchen cabinet doors opened and all the dishes ended up in pieces on the floor.
I’ve been through a few much weaker quakes. During the first one, I had just accidentally called a co-worker by the wrong name and wished “the ground would open up”. WHUMP.
(Okay, I didn’t think Nature actually worked that way. My theory was that a delivery truck had collided with our loading dock.) Most co-workers thought the gas station across the street had exploded. (No flames or smoke, though.) A manager sprinted through the building, thinking a storage unit had collapsed. We were all wrong, and learned the truth after a TV station we advertised with called.
The second time, I was in a rocking chair and it rocked. A friend was in the bathroom when it hit, and yelled at her kids, “What did you do?!”
“Nothing, Mom.”
I read this a couple years ago; it’s the biography of a woman reporter who calmly got the story out. The thing that really got to me was that she was driving her son to an activity when it hit, and the road literally rippled beneath them. (And that there were only TWO fatalities in Anchorage proper!)
When I bought a house in the North Beach neighborhood of Port Townsend, WA (2000 miles south of the epicenter) I was proudly informed by the realtor that my house was the only one on the block not touched by the tsunami.
Yeah, I remember Jeanie Chance. She was fine right up until she started telling people that a tidal wave was coming and that everybody should evacuate their houses in our part of town. It created panic in our neighborhood, except for my stepfather who calmly told my anxious mother “We ain’t goin’ anywhere.” The people from the downtown area who were camped in our living room piled kids and baggage into their car and took off, which was actually a relief to my parents, as our tiny house was not big enough to accommodate eight people.
It was pretty much like life anywhere else, with some exceptions. We had a couple of TV stations, which meant that we didn’t get some programming (I never heard of Howdy Doody until I was an adult). There were no fast-food restaurants until the late 60s. Anchorage had two movie theaters and a drive-in, two high schools and a couple of middle schools. The military bases helped support the local economy. I think the population in Anchorage when we moved there from Juneau in 1957 was about 45,000.