The OP reminds me of another natural occurrences that happen in Alaska. In 1958, an earthquake triggered a rockslide, which then triggered a megatsunami. More info here. The eyewitness accounts by fisherman are harrowing.
Not at all. It was one of those towns where nobody locked their doors. They had the usual crime that any town has, of course. Nowadays, the population is bumping up against 300,000, so crime has increased along with population growth. That said, it is quite high compared to the national averages.
That’s a great story! But, I just gotta ask, did any of your Mom’s treasures make it out alive?
With a couple of exceptions, pretty much everything in the china closet was trashed. A couple of very sturdy crystal vases made it okay. One oddity was a large porcelain vase that was sitting on the floor next to the Franklin stove. It fell over and rolled around, but somehow managed to avoid contact with the iron stove or anything else and survived intact. My mother always called it “the Ming vase”, but I had it appraised many years later and it turns out to be a Japanese vase from the Meiji period and, while not rare, is worth a couple thou. It also survived several trips to various parts of the world and now sits in my daughter’s house. My mother’s watch, which had quit working, began ticking again. I’m guessing that the overwound spring unwound with all the shaking.
My mother never got over that event. In the years after, she couldn’t even get up on a stepstool without getting dizzy. My sister always bemoaned the fact that she “missing the biggest thing to ever happen in Alaska” because she was in Montana at the time.
Immediately after the quake subsided, I went out with my camera, which was loaded with B&W film for my HS photography class and I took a lot of really good pics. The album disappeared during one of my many moves in the military; I think it got left behind on a shelf. I still have the “Earthquake Edition” of the Anchorage Times newspaper. It was very fortunate that this happened on a holiday, as most people were off work and the schools were closed. Even though it happened at about 5:30pm, a lot of damaged structures would have still been at least partially occupied, including my school which suffered the collapse of the second story.
Wow! That’s just crazy, and yes it’s lucky it happened during a holiday.
My uncle owned a farm (northern Iowa) and I would help bale hay, this was the late 1980s. We would stop and fill our water jugs at the farm hydrant and the water water was barely drinkable with a bad taste. My uncle said it used to be a good well with great water until the Alaskan earthquake in the 60s and the well immediately got the bad taste after the earthquake. He said it was one of the deepest wells in the area so maybe that had something to do with it.
it was felt across the u.s., and canada.
seiches happened in wells through out the world, even in australia.
Amazingly, life was almost back to semi-normal a week after this happened. I was playing basketball at the local rec center the following Friday when a 6.0 aftershock hit. People poured out into the streets, thinking it was going to be disastrous.
The intervening week was interesting. We had no power and no water. The National Guard had armed soldiers on every corner downtown to discourage any entrepreneurial efforts, and they had brought in water buffaloes and immersion heaters to the local park strip. You could go over and get hot C-rations to eat, and fill up a jerry can with water to take home. The city got the utilities back in operation in what had to be record time, which was especially good for those who had no auxiliary heating source like we did with the Franklin stove.
The only time I felt something close to this was when I was standing outside our office after the Whittier Narrows quake (around a 6?). I felt the ground jumping underfoot during one of the stronger aftershocks.
My dad was around for the Long Beach CA quake in 1933, although his family didn’t live in Long Beach. But he always talked about how lucky they were that the quake hit at about 3:30 pm, and the schools were empty. Every school in the town collapsed. This was when the first of the earthquake building codes were developed. I think it stuck with my dad because he would have been about 10, and he probably imagined it being his school.
She was lucky. I saw a car that had run into the wall created in front of it when the ground fractured and the road dropped about eight feet.
Nope, I don’t have anything that can compare to the story in the OP. Sounds very memorable. I guess i dimly recall the blizzard of '67 and more vividly the Blizzard of '78. The roads were impassable for nearly two weeks and neighbors were making food runs on snowmobiles to the Meijer store across town that somehow miraculously was open. But no, at no time did I experience any memorable fear over the events.
@Chefguy, those are several great stories! Bet there’s some other veteran who has shown people the cool photo album he found in the (I’m assuming) barracks.
Navy housing, but yeah, probably.
As someone raised in Southern California, you grow up with a different sort of zen paranoia that comes with knowing that the ground could open up and swallow you without notice.
I saw orange trees almost touching the ground in Redlands 30ish years ago. I’ve always had a commute, and leave early because I worry about traffic. This means I am always early to work, hence my habit of finding a nice spot out of the way to sit in my car and read and smoke pot before heading to the parking lot. This job had me a few minutes away from a nice quiet orange grove, so that was where I was the morning everything shook.
I was happily buzzed and immersed in my book when suddenly my little sports car started bouncing up and down. I thought it was some of the farm workers I had seen walking through the grove pranking me, but when I looked around the trees were rocking back and forth, throwing oranges around with mad abandon while the poor workers were laying on the ground with their arms over their heads.
That one lasted almost 2 minutes, but I’ll bet they were a very long two minutes for those poor farmers.