The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964

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Damage to Kodiak Island Immense
When my family finally returned home to the base to assess the damage, we were very lucky to find no flooding. We were some of the luckier ones. The only thing that broke in our house was the candy jar my mother had broken when she tried to push me under the coffee table.

The overall damage on Kodiak, however, was immense. The island sunk two feet which meant that all the roadways along the water would be underwater at high tide for months to come. We discovered that the bowling alley on the base, which was along one of those roads, was gutted. Bowling balls and pins could be found strewn for miles along the shore. One of the hangers on the base sunk into the ground approximately a foot and although the structure itself did not get damaged, it was impossible to store planes without moving major equipment. Every item on the commissary shelves had tumbled into a big heap – further aggravating the need for food and all other supplies.

The fishing village of Kodiak, a little hamlet nestled right on the harbor about seven miles from the base, suffered severe damage from the huge tidal wave that followed the earthquake. When the wave came in, it dumped large fishing boats as far as a mile inland. When it went out, it took the waterside half of the main street with it — leaving the buildings on the backside to become the new waterfront.

More Damage on the Mainland and More Aftershocks
As time passed, the stories of other peoples’ experiences and the consequences in other places in Alaska started to circulate. The town of Seward, a waterfront port on the mainland, was completely destroyed by a fire caused when the quake hit and ignited the oil tanks. A very prosperous housing development in Anchorage, called Turnagin, which was situated high on a cliff crashed into a valley, destroying every house in the development.

The main street of Anchorage sustained a major crack that took months to repair. An aftershock of 7.4 magnitude followed a couple of weeks after the original 9.2 earthquake — causing even more damage to the infrastructure. Anecdotally, a classmate of mine had been in Anchorage for the first quake and had caught her foot in the large crack on the main street as she was running for shelter. When the aftershock hit, we were in typing class. As the classroom and the overhead lights started to shake, she had a flashback to her earlier terror and was so hysterical that she had to be removed from the room.

Some of the military wives on the base hung plumb lines from their ceiling lights. When tremors occurred, and the plumb lines moved, many of them returned home to their families to wait for their husbands’ tours of duty to end, refusing to go through another experience like that again.

Earthquakes Have No Season — They Can Happen Anytime Eventually, life returned to some semblance of normalcy. Alternate routes were found for roads that would never be rebuilt. Buildings were repaired or replaced. But the feeling of always waiting for the other shoe to drop took a very long time to alleviate.

When you live on the coast anywhere, you always deal with a fear of hurricane season, but “season” is the operative word. There are more months than not out of the year when you can breathe a sigh of relief. Earthquakes have no season. They can happen anytime.

By the way, in case you were wondering, my father never forgot that he had grounded me just before all hell broke loose. It lasted for exactly the two weeks he had intended. I can’t say that I’m good about going to church on Good Friday even now. But if I don’t, and there’s a major earthquake somewhere on that day, I’ll know whose fault it is.
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