12/29/2023 0 Comments Next big alaska quake![]() ![]() local tsunami, killing more than 30 people as they tried to flee. The massive amount of water displaced came rushing back as a 40-ft. Twenty seconds after the initial tremors, 98 million cubic yards of the silty delta slumped away. freighter SS Chena was in port when the quake hit. only one house left standing." The Sedge was in "Charlie status," with its engines disassembled, and the crew scrambled to get her underway.įorty-five miles north of Cordova, in Valdez, the 400-ft. Soon, reports began to crackle over the ship's radio: "The village of Chenega is completely wiped out by a tidal wave. We had to wait until the gap closed before jumping across it to get to the Sedge." Corson brought his wife and three young sons with him as he boarded the cutter. ![]() I ran down to the dock and it had split in half and was heaving back and forth. "Our house came almost completely off the foundation. Coast Guard lieutenant assigned to the cutter Sedge. "I was in my house in Cordova eating dinner when the quake struck," recalls Pete Corson, then a U.S. The great volume of water that was forced out to sea returned just as quickly, in the form of giant waves that geologists call local tsunamis. The quake had caused several underwater landslides that, in turn, displaced vast amounts of water. It was the tsunami waves that screamed across Prince William Sound and down the Pacific Ocean. "We were left on a wildly bucking slab suddenly it tilted sharply, and we had to hang on to keep from slipping into a yawning chasm."īut what claimed 115 of the 131 lives that day wasn't the earthquake itself. "Our whole lawn broke up into chunks of dirt, rock, snow and ice," Turnagain resident Tay Pryor Thomas wrote in National Geographic shortly after the quake. The ground in the Turnagain Heights subdivision simultaneously sank and surged up. At the airport, the control tower toppled over and killed an air traffic controller. Penney crashed into the sidewalk, killing a crouching pedestrian and a passing driver. One block over, the concrete facade of the new J.C. Parts of the city dropped as much as 30 ft., bringing the Denali Theater marquee on Fourth Avenue to sidewalk level. In downtown Anchorage, the quake caused the streets to become asphalt waves, bouncing cars into the air. Under intense pressure from the friction, the crust bends and strains until it eventually snaps back into place, as it did that March evening. into, and under, the North American plate near southern Alaska. Though the epicenter of the Great Alaskan Earthquake was deep beneath Prince William Sound - 75 miles east of Anchorage and 56 miles west of Valdez - the magnitude 9.2 temblor rippled water as far away as Louisiana and even made parts of Florida and Texas jump a couple of inches.Įvery year the Pacific tectonic plate barges roughly 2 in. At 5:36 pm on March 27, 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America, and the second largest in history, rattled coastal Alaska for close to 4 minutes.
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