(All of the photos in this post were taken by my uncle, Ross Robey,
except as otherwise attributed.)
FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO TODAY
It’s late Friday afternoon, just after 5:30.
I’m on the phone with the Alaska State Police dispatcher, taking notes
about a man who fell to his death from Hurricane Gulch railroad bridge, a fall
of almost 300 feet. I’m a reporter for KFQD radio station, busy getting
local news written and wrapped up for the major 6 o’clock newscast.
Then, breaking news changes everything.
That day was Good Friday, March 27, 1964, at 5:36 in the afternoon when the
largest earthquake ever recorded in North America shook the bejesus out of us
for five and a half minutes, reaching a magnitude of 9.2. Today it
ranks second to a 1960 earthquake of 9.5 magnitude in Chile in a list of worst
earthquakes recorded in the world.
But, we weren’t looking for a Guinness Book of
World Records during those minutes.
We were praying the shaking would stop before
the earth broke apart and all life ceased to exist.
When the earthquake began
with the gentle shaking we were accustomed to in this land that is in the Ring
of Fire, I looked across the office and smiled ruefully at another woman who
was still there. Let’s call her Bonnie,
because I’ve forgotten her real name. I
went back to my telephone call to the state troopers.
The shaking continued, growing
stronger. Much later the geologists and
seismologists would tell us that this was a megathrust incident, that the
suboceanic Pacific tectonic plate fault ruptured where it had been subducting
under the North American plate. Those
esoteric scientific terms meant nothing to us in those moments and, in fact, plate
tectonics was still geologic theory that most of us had never heard of.
 |
| FAA control tower at Anchorage International Airpot |
 |
| Another view of Anchorage International Airport control tower. |
All we knew was that this
was no “normal” earthquake. Another
glance at Bonnie. My typewriter was on a
small stand at a right angle to my desk and its back abutted Bonnie’s
desk. When I faced the typewriter and
Bonnie, a four-drawer steel filing cabinet was immediately at my back. That cabinet was so jammed with paper, it
hurt my fingers to add another page to it.
And then things really
got to rockin’ and rollin’. I heard a
noise in the small hallway outside our office, a low rumbling that I couldn’t
identify but later discovered was produced by a four-foot high safe dislodged
from its place and now blocked the door to the studio where announcer Ron Moore,
also known as The Royal Coachman, was on the air.
 |
| Part of the L St. fault. |
Station engineer Dennis
ran out the front door of the station screaming, “My tower, my tower!!!”
Right behind him was Ron,
who had escaped the studio through another door. He was yelling, “Out! Everybody get out.”
Bonnie and I were no
longer smiling. I reached down, grabbed
my high-heeled shoes, and headed for the front door in as straight a line as I
could given that the floor wouldn’t hold still.
Bonnie was a couple steps behind me.
I heard a crash, but didn’t look back.
 |
| Apartment building on 16th Ave. where some of my friends lived. |
 |
| Another view of same building. |
Outside the building, we
had to get down a dozen snow- and ice-covered concrete steps with no
handrails. Ron and another announcer
were there to assist us. I made it down
to the parking lot all right, a feat I probably couldn’t have accomplished on
my own had I been wearing those shoes.
The shaking increased so much that Bonnie had trouble and relied on the
men’s assistance.
I staggered across the
bucking parking area to my car, where I held onto the door handle to stand
up. Across KFQD road, in the area of
two new subdivisions came loud popping
noises like thousands of lady finger firecrackers exploding.
Incredibly, the shaking
got worse. The station’s antenna tower
was whipping back and forth. I estimated
the distance between it and me and decided I was safe should it come down in my
direction. I looked around. Everything looked normal otherwise. Then I looked at the ground beneath my feet
and saw small cracks and mini-fissures opening and closing in the hard-packed
snow.
This USGS photo shows a portion of the 4th Avenue fault. This is where I walked down the slabs of broken asphalt and into several of the sunken businesses. The businesses beyond this sunken area have also fallen a full story.
 |
| A potion of 4th Ave. downtown, where the street split in half and the northern side slumped a full level. |
Half a lifetime later,
during which I was positive the world was coming to an end, the shaking
slo-o-o-w-ly diminished. I’m not sure
when it stopped because by then my internal gyroscope was so unbalanced I
sensed the earth shivering and vibrating continually for days. I wasn’t mistaken. In the first day alone there were eleven
major aftershocks measuring more than 6.2, followed by nine more in the first
three weeks. But there were thousands of
aftershocks of less than that magnitude as the plates adjusted to their new
positions. Eighteen months later, more
than ten thousand aftershocks had been recorded.
And each one of them
rammed my heart into my throat and stopped my breathing.
 |
| More of the 4th Ave. slump/ |
When the shaking stopped
enough that Friday and I could stand without hanging onto my car, Dennis and
the men went back into the building to start the emergency generator and get
the station back on the air, which they did in less than a half hour. The station then went into Civil Defense
mode.
I went back in and
stopped short when I saw what had happened.
That crash I heard when I was two steps out of my chair was that heavy
filing cabinet falling onto my chair with the top drawer smashed into my
typewriter. I shivered to think what
would have happened had I not jumped out of that chair when I did.
 |
| Another view of the 4th Ave. damage |
Bonnie was concerned
about her kids so I gave her a ride to her house. She lived on a cul de sac in a Turnagain
subdivision. I dropped her off and
continued around the circle. Later she
told me the whole circle drive had collapsed right after I’d cleared it. When I had time to think about it, I realized
that I had escaped injury or worse twice—from the filing cabinet and the
collapse of the road.
With some difficulty, due
to the frequent pavement breaks and berms pushed up in the roads, I went to my
parents’ house and switched my Studebaker Lark for the WWII era Willy Jeep they
had. Then I drove into downtown
Anchorage to Fifth Ave and K Street, where I shared an attic apartment with a
girlfriend.
 |
| Only the elevator shaft of the brand new, unoccupied Four Seasons Apartment building remain. |
As I pulled up in front
of the house, my second floor apartment was now at ground level. Incredibly,
a graben—like a wide trench-- had opened through the L St. area and the
house sank about ten feet in the exact middle of it. The house was perfectly intact, except for
the exterior staircase to my apartment.
It had wrenched away from the building and was askew to the wall.
Still in my dress and
high heels, I climbed down into that graben and started up the enclosed
stairway, even though the bottom of it was more than eighteen inches away from
the wall. At the top, I saw the
staircase was hanging on by the tip of the nails that had once fastened it
securely to the wall. I quickly changed
into jeans and warmer clothes and better shoes, grabbed a few things I needed,
and eased my way down those stairs
 |
| Government Hill Elementary school, broken in half by a fault underneath it. School was closed because it was Good Friday. |
I drove around town,
surveying some of the damage, and checking on friends. I saw the portion of Fourth Ave. that had
collapsed, walked down a large slab of asphalt, and picked my way through the
eerie remains of the men’s store there.
I drove out to Turnagain and stood on a newly-created bank above the
ruins of dozens of nice homes, now all jumbled and wracked and ruined.
Late that night I went to
my parents’ house to stay the night. Volunteers
arrived warning us to head for high ground because a tsunami was possible. The whole idea sounded impossible to us
because we were about a mile inland, but because Fish Creek ran through the
back yard, we decided to leave. We went
to a church on Spenard Road, where the Orthodox priest was a friend of my
father’s. The priest’s son was able to
pick up San Francisco on the radio in his Lincoln and we sat in the car
listening to reports of massive traffic jams caused by spectators going down to
the water’s edge to watch the tsunami.
 |
| Another view of Government Hill Elementary School. |
I interviewed a teenaged
boy who had been with three of his friends in the downtown J.C.Penney store on
that Good Friday afternoon, a day off from school. The four boys, boisterous as teenaged boys
can be, clambered into the elevator.
The door slid closed.
Then the lights went out
and the elevator car started slamming against the walls. The boys were terrified and convinced that
their clowning around had caused whatever damage was occurring. They had no way of knowing that giant slabs
of concrete were breaking away from the building’s façade and crashing onto the
street below, smashing cars and killing the unsuspecting.
This Wide World photo shows men escaping from J.C. Penney store DURING the earthquake.
 |
| Front side of the J.C. Penney store. Alaska National Guardsmen keep spectators out of the area. There was NO looting after the quake. None. |
 |
| Another view of the J.C. Penney building. |
 |
Another view of the J.C. Penney store, after the debris and wrecked cars were cleaned up.
|
I spent nights at the
Anchorage Police Department building at Sixth and C St., relaying civil defense
emergency notices and personal messages to frantic relatives via KFQD. One morning when I was going off shift at the
police station, I noticed the Salvation Army was passing out sandwiches and
coffee to any and all who were hungry.
That definitely included me, and the raisin bread and salami sandwich a
volunteer gave me remains a fond memory.
During the day, I slept
on the living room couch at my parents’ house because it was only feet from the
front door. By Friday, a week after the
quake, I had enough courage to sleep in my old bedroom. That’s where I was when a major aftershock
of more than 8 slammed the house.
 |
| This used to be a nice home in a well-tended subdivision with paved streets. |
 |
| More homes damaged in Turnagain subdivision |
I intended to move back
into a small house at 15th and E St. that I had rented previously,
and was waiting for the electricity to come back on so I would have heat and
water. During that first week after the
quake, I managed to pack up all my belongings at the apartment and move them
down that dangerous staircase, carry them up the sidewall of the graben, and
stuff them into the Jeep. That included
dozens of boxes of heavy books.
Thursday noonish, six
days after the quake, I was at that house moving in more stuff when I heard a
loud explosion. I ran outside and saw
smoke a few blocks away. When I arrived
at the scene I saw a house completely engulfed in fire. Some of the occupants had escaped, but one
did not. The cause was attributed to a
gas line damaged during the quake.
I did an on-air report,
of which I remember little, but friends who heard it said it was “gripping.”
 |
| Damaged homes in Turnagain subdivision. |
Eventually things settled
down, and life returned to the new normal.
Months later, I was in the Carr’s Grocery store on Gambell when a woman approached
and asked if I remembered what I was
doing when the The Quake hit.
I did not and she
reminded me. She was the dispatcher at
the trooper’s station who had been telling me about the unfortunate man who had
fallen off the Hurricane Gulch railroad bridge.
Remember those loud
popping noises I heard during the quake, the ones that sounded like inch-long
Lady Finger firecrackers exploding?
They
were the sounds of homes breaking apart in the subdivisions across KFQD Road
when the land beneath them liquefied.
Today that damaged area is called Earthquake Park.
***
One hundred and thirty-one people died as a result of the quake, most;y due to resulting tsunamis. Incredibly, the death toll in Anchorage was only nine and all were a direct result of the quake. Four died at a beach park in Oregon and 12 in Crescent City, California, in tsunamis.
Several fishing boats sank in Louisiana, and water in wells sloshed in South Africa. The entire globe vibrated as a result of this massive earthquake, according to scientists.
 |
| This home used to be far inland on the high cliff overlooking Cook Inlet. Many homes disappeared into the cold murky waters. Visible is a small potion of a debris field in the water after the quake. |
 |
Second floor damage to West Anchorage High School. The upper floor was subsequently removed and the school operates today. Photo below, from Alaska Digital Archives, shows back side of the high school.
Damage in the railroad yards of Anchorage Cold Storage building.
L St. fault
L St. fault
McKinley building on 4th Ave. showing exterior damage.
Store fronts on 4th Ave.
Four Seasons apartment bldg. and the elevator shaft.
L St. fault
L St. fault. Note the suspended sidewalk.
4th. Avenue damage.
L St. fault
4th Ave. danage
Four Season apartment bldg. and elevator shaft.
4th Avenue
4th Avenue. Tall building is Anchorage-Westward Hotel, now a Hilton Hotel.
L St. fault with Four Seasons elevator shaft upper right.
Unidentified. I think this is a new car dealership building on E. 5th Ave.
Unidentified
4th Avenue
L St. fault
L St. fault
4th Avenue.
The marquee of the Denali Theater is now at street level on 4th Avenue.
More L St. fault
This United Press International (UPI) photo shows how 4th Avenue broke in half and the northern side sank. I walked down that asphalt slab and into the sunken businesses.
This Steve McCutcheon photo is of the ruined and intact parst of the Turnagain subdivision. Also visible is the wreckage of homes that went into Cook Inlet. This area used to be as neatly laid out as the portion above it. This photo was taken after access trails were bulldozed into the debris field. |
