The Big One

March 27, 1964. . .

Time in Alaska is divided into Before the Quake and After the Quake.

We lived in Fairbanks at the time. That fateful Friday afternoon, I was sitting in the bathroom (why does all the interesting stuff happen while I'm on the pot?) and felt the floor begin to shake. I thought--Oh, Richard is dancing in the living room--and finished my business. Richard was in the throes of adolescence in 1964 and given to spontaneous outbursts of clumsy dancing. It wasn't the first time the floor had shaken.

The floor was still bouncing when I went out to the living room and no dancing was in progress but the family was gathering there and beginning to figure out that it was an earthquake. By then, the quake had been going on long enough that the lady across the street was loading her kids into the family car. We watched through our big suburban 1960s picture-window while our house quivered and creaked. "Where does she think she's going to take them?" my mother asked.

We all had a laugh at that.

A few sidewalks cracked in Fairbanks. That was about the size of it and we went about our day.

Now, you may not remember--or know--how crappy communications were up here in the early 1960s. Telephone calls went through cables and required operator assistance. Television was a blend of local programming and tape-delayed network programming. We would see video of national events the day afterwards--if that soon--and prime-time programs came one week late to Anchorage and two weeks late to Fairbanks.

Satellite communications were non-existent for Alaska.

So we remained unaware of what had just happened elsewhere in our state until later that evening, when our regularly-scheduled programming was interrupted by bulletins and fragmentary reports--all by radio--no video or pictures. Seward was in flames. Anchorage was in ruins.

We would learn later, as bit and pieces of information came in, what historic force had brushed past us. And like everyone in Alaska ever since, we live beside reminders of that force.

Literally.



This is a photo of the M Street area in Anchorage. The large structure at top center is the old Providence Hospital and Sisters of Providence buildings. The pile of rubble in the upper center is what remains of the Four Seasons apartments. They were just being finished and so were unoccupied when the floors pancaked down. See that horizontally-striped building at upper left, at the crossroads where the big crack begins? That was where we first lived when we moved to Anchorage in 1965. By then the rubble of the Four Seasons had been cleared away and my brother skateboarded on the bare concrete slab.




From there, we moved out to Turnagain Heights--the famously unstable terrain pictured above. Most of that crumpled, broken area would be set aside as Earthquake Park--too dangerous to build on. We lived in the upper left of the photo, two streets over from a road that ended in mid-air.



My brother and I explored Earthquake Park, playing amid the jumbled terrain and oddly-angled trees that remained as testaments to the power of the earthquake even after the debris had been cleared away.


Images from the USGS Photo Library
Click the images for larger views.