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missroseroseA bit of coverage about the Great Alaska Earthquake - mostly photo slideshows - has been popping up here and there, as it took place a half-century ago this year. It's really mostly of interest to people of a science-y bent, as it remains the largest earthquake (magnitude 9.2) ever recorded in the United States. Obviously I have something of a more personal interest, as I grew up in Anchorage, albeit a very different Anchorage than the frontier town pictured. It's been interesting, looking at the pictures and seeing what parts I do and don't recognize.
I don't believe any of my family members were there; if I recall correctly, my family history in Alaska stretches back to the mid-seventies, when my paternal grandmother moved up there with my (then pre-teenaged) father and uncle. (The records of the Baha'i News archive bear this out, as I find a bunch of mentions of my grandmother's name near "Alaska" from 1976 onward, but none beforehand; if I recall correctly, she converted to the Baha'i faith either just before or shortly after her move. I intend to ask her about this, though.) I vaguely remember her mentioning the quake when I was young, albeit in general terms. My father liked to take my brother and me out to Government Hill (pictured post-quake in the second photo of that slideshow; fortunately it was a holiday and the school was empty) and watch the railroad station and the inlet beyond. I remember him telling me it was one of the big damage centers in the earthquake, and that there was an elementary school there; now it's just a steeply-sloped grassy knoll that we liked to roll down at the time.
I also remember devoting a good chunk of time to earthquake drills and training when I was in school. At the time, I didn't really think much of it; we regularly had minor earthquakes, so it made sense that we'd want to be prepared in case a bigger one hit. (The largest one I experienced was the 2002 Denali Earthquake; it was a 7.9, but the epicenter was some ways away from where I was attending school in Fairbanks, so mostly it was just a good jolt.) In retrospect, however, it strikes me that the time/intensity of the training was probably a little bit out of proportion to the actual likelihood of another big quake actually happening. Memory is often a far greater spur to action than logic, and at the time, most of the adults around me remembered the quake. Given what an emotional event that was, it makes sense that they'd want to make sure their kids knew what to do if it happened again. Especially since this was before the Internet, and knowledge of how subduction zones work (and, thus, the relative unlikelihood of it happening again anytime in the next couple hundred years) was not widespread. Actually, that was probably the scariest part of living through it - I can only imagine how long people were looking distrustfully at the ground beneath their feet, the one thing that was supposed to always be there. Even just watching the little footage we have of it is intense. You want to yell at the cinematographer to stop shaking the camera until you realize that that's not him, that's the ground moving.
Still, the ending was mostly happy. A relatively few people were killed, thanks to the low population density. The rebuilding didn't take long at all - thanks to federal disaster relief funds, the city was almost back to normal within a year. And the USGS was able to make significant strides in studying plate tectonics and fault lines. (They recently produced a fascinating video explaining precisely how revolutionary their efforts were, and how it contributed to understanding megathrust earthquakes; it also has some of the scraps of footage of the actual event.) My favorite anecdote is the one about the businessman who hung a sign outside his (ruined) shop: "I knew making a living in Alaska would be hard but I never thought I'd go this far in the hole!"
I don't believe any of my family members were there; if I recall correctly, my family history in Alaska stretches back to the mid-seventies, when my paternal grandmother moved up there with my (then pre-teenaged) father and uncle. (The records of the Baha'i News archive bear this out, as I find a bunch of mentions of my grandmother's name near "Alaska" from 1976 onward, but none beforehand; if I recall correctly, she converted to the Baha'i faith either just before or shortly after her move. I intend to ask her about this, though.) I vaguely remember her mentioning the quake when I was young, albeit in general terms. My father liked to take my brother and me out to Government Hill (pictured post-quake in the second photo of that slideshow; fortunately it was a holiday and the school was empty) and watch the railroad station and the inlet beyond. I remember him telling me it was one of the big damage centers in the earthquake, and that there was an elementary school there; now it's just a steeply-sloped grassy knoll that we liked to roll down at the time.
I also remember devoting a good chunk of time to earthquake drills and training when I was in school. At the time, I didn't really think much of it; we regularly had minor earthquakes, so it made sense that we'd want to be prepared in case a bigger one hit. (The largest one I experienced was the 2002 Denali Earthquake; it was a 7.9, but the epicenter was some ways away from where I was attending school in Fairbanks, so mostly it was just a good jolt.) In retrospect, however, it strikes me that the time/intensity of the training was probably a little bit out of proportion to the actual likelihood of another big quake actually happening. Memory is often a far greater spur to action than logic, and at the time, most of the adults around me remembered the quake. Given what an emotional event that was, it makes sense that they'd want to make sure their kids knew what to do if it happened again. Especially since this was before the Internet, and knowledge of how subduction zones work (and, thus, the relative unlikelihood of it happening again anytime in the next couple hundred years) was not widespread. Actually, that was probably the scariest part of living through it - I can only imagine how long people were looking distrustfully at the ground beneath their feet, the one thing that was supposed to always be there. Even just watching the little footage we have of it is intense. You want to yell at the cinematographer to stop shaking the camera until you realize that that's not him, that's the ground moving.
Still, the ending was mostly happy. A relatively few people were killed, thanks to the low population density. The rebuilding didn't take long at all - thanks to federal disaster relief funds, the city was almost back to normal within a year. And the USGS was able to make significant strides in studying plate tectonics and fault lines. (They recently produced a fascinating video explaining precisely how revolutionary their efforts were, and how it contributed to understanding megathrust earthquakes; it also has some of the scraps of footage of the actual event.) My favorite anecdote is the one about the businessman who hung a sign outside his (ruined) shop: "I knew making a living in Alaska would be hard but I never thought I'd go this far in the hole!"
