Monday’s earthquakes brought back memories of a comparable round of shakers that occurred here 30 years ago.
The first came at 6:48 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14, 1987. It was relatively small on the Richter scale – 5.3 – but also very close, just 10 miles southeast of town. Like Monday’s, it rattled folks awake and out of bed, and was felt as far away as Juneau, Whitehorse, Y.T., and Atlin, B.C.
Two days later, the town was jolted by a stronger but more distant quake (6.9 on Richter centered 90 miles southwest of Yakutat) that triggered a tsumami alert. The second quake came at 11:46 a.m. Monday, so people were awake to see things like the ground rolling in waves in parking lots.
Earthquakes have all the elements of great news stories – uncontrollable danger, a numerically quantifiable size, and absolute unpredictability. Steve Williams was working as KHNS reporter during the 1987 quakes and he and I had a field day talking to people about their experiences.
(For sheer sensationalism, the only natural occurrence in recent memory to exceed quakes was the meteor that exploded over town in January 2000 with the force of at least 1,000 tons of TNT. Some believers thought it was the Second Coming.)
Imagine as we may that we’re experiencing trauma approaching Biblical rapture, the gods have been merciful. We live on a big earthquake fault that hasn’t been a big problem. Leigh Heinmiller tells a great story of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, when someone went down to Portage Cove harbor to see the resulting “tsunami.” It arrived as a single wave about a foot higher than the rest of the surf.
I got a kick listening to the KHNS announcers Monday morning, urging listeners to phone in their accounts of the shaking. CVN reporters were on the same path, but all they could find were some cracks in buildings in Whitehorse and a Haines Highway resident who broke her foot jumping out of bed.
The most severe hazard posed by the 1987 quakes that I could determine was that about 70 bottles of concentrated trap scent – noxious stuff concocted to stink in a way that attracts wild animals at long distances – crashed together at the Alaska Sport Shop. The breaking of a single bottle would have been enough to make the store reek for weeks.
It could have been a disaster.
(Posted May 4, 2017)