Recognizing the 50th Anniversary of the Great Alaska Earthquake
Floor Speech
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Madam President, over the past several days we have all watched the news of the massive landslide in Washington State. We have watched that with sadness, with shock--truly an awful, awful episode. Our hearts, our prayers are certainly with all of those who have been affected by this terrible tragedy. We continue to hope for the best as rescue and recovery efforts continue.
Today I have come to the floor to speak about a different natural disaster. This is a natural disaster that affected Alaska on Good Friday exactly 50 years ago today, in 1964. This is the Great Alaska Earthquake, the Good Friday Earthquake, the epic earthquake of 1964.
At the time that Alaska was struck by this massive earthquake, I was a young child. I was living in the southeastern community of Wrangell, AK. I have a map here, a map of the State of Alaska. The epicenter of the earthquake is here in the south central area. About a year prior to the quake, my family and I moved down to the small southeastern community of Wrangell, tucked safely in the inland passage waterways here.
We were all looking forward to Easter. When the earthquake hit, I certainly did not know that we had been struck by a massive, massive 9.2 earthquake of the magnitude on the Richter scale that decimated southcentral Alaska. The earthquake struck at 5:36 in the evening. I did not know that what had just occurred was the largest earthquake to strike the United States in recorded history. It is the second largest earthquake ever recorded on modern instrumentation.
Those of us who lived in Alaska at the time have memories of what happened on Good Friday 50 years ago. We have stories that will live with us for generations and passed down from generation to generation. You can talk to Alaskans about it: Where were you in the quake of 1964?
We had just moved, as I said, from Anchorage to Wrangell, AK. We did not feel the shake in Wrangell. We waited for the big waves to come. We waited for the tsunami. We sat listening to the radio. But our home was situated directly on the beach. Everyone was told to move up to higher ground. So we moved everybody in the family, five kids at the time, up the hill. We went to my first grade teacher's house, which was really quite exciting for me.
We were allowed to stay up late into the evening. As a small child, there was a buzz. It was kind of exciting but kind of scary because we did not know what was happening in other parts of the State. My mom had basically packed some diapers for the smallest of the children in the family. She tells me that she brought along her silver tea set. That is the only thing that she brought from the house, along with the five kids.
We also tell the story of the home that we lived in just before we had moved to Wrangell. It was situated in a residential area called Turnagain. Turnagain was the area that was immediately and massively hit.
This is the Turnagain neighborhood. Our home that we lived in prior to moving to Wrangell was situated about two blocks back from the bluff. After the earthquake, the bluff slid down taking tens and tens of houses with it. The home that we were in then became bluff property. It was condemned never to be lived in again.
We all have stories of the earthquake. We saw the news accounts as they came slowly to us. We saw the photographs of the collapsed buildings.
I am going to go back to the first picture here. This first one that was up initially is downtown Anchorage, AK, 1964. This is on Fourth Avenue. You can see from the picture the ground just sunk, dropped--the crumpled buildings, the cars cattywumpus.
The destruction and the devastation in the downtown area literally took your breath away. One very photographed picture was the J.C. Penney building which had just recently been constructed. The whole front facade of the J.C. Penney building just crashed down onto the streets and onto the cars below.
This is a picture here of Government Hill Elementary School. I showed you the previous picture where my family and I had lived in the neighborhood at Turnagain when I was a child. When my husband and I bought our home, where our sons were raised, it was directly across the street from this property where Government Hill Elementary literally slid down the hill.
As you can see from the picture there, the devastation to the school was extraordinary. Fortunately, it was 5:36 in the evening on Good Friday, and there were no children at the school. But the devastation, the visual impact that still remains as we look back 50 years now at what happened--the stories of loss of property, of damage to property, the stories of loss of life and truly miraculous survival--slowly started to reveal the extent of the destruction from an earthquake that Federal scientists would tell us years later was roughly equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT exploding--massive.
The Good Friday Earthquake reshaped the Alaska landscape. Land was lifted 33 feet in some places, and then in other places it sank in the ground--sank as much as 6 feet in places. Cliffs and buildings crumbled, forests and towns were flooded. Huge waves approximately 200 feet high were measured near the community of Valdez. A 200-foot wall of water was coming into the community of Valdez. Communities were literally washed off the map in Anchorage.
This is a picture here of Seward, which again is in Resurrection Bay along the coast, but the waves literally came in and swept everything out with it. But it was not just one wave. It was a series of waves. Anchorage, which is our State's most populous city and really the center of infrastructure in the State, was just 74 miles from the epicenter of the quake.
That is where we see so many pictures of the tremendous damage there. There has been a series of articles in our local newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, leading up to this historic 50th anniversary. It is a series written by Mike Dunham. I ask unanimous consent that a portion of these series be printed in the Record.
But in the series discussing the tsunamis that hit Alaska, I would like to share with my colleagues some of the information that Mike outlined. He said NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center puts the total number of deaths resulting from the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 at 139. Fifteen of those deaths are attributed to falling buildings or crumbling ground during the quake itself. The rest were killed by the water. Thirty-two people died when a wave 30-feet high built up in Valdez. Similar-sized waves took 12 lives in Seward, and 15 in Kodiak and its surrounding villages. Another dozen perished when a wall of water 40-feet high smashed into Whittier in the Prince William Sound village of Chenega. One-third of the population, 23 people, were swept away by a 90-foot wave.
One thing that I found very fascinating in understanding some of the attributes of this earthquake and the tsunamis that came is that in many places the ground was still shaking when the water hit. Keep in mind, this earthquake lasted 4 1/2 minutes--4 1/2 minutes where the earth is lurching and shuddering and shaking. That is a horribly long time.
The first tsunami that hit Valdez, I am told, hit just 2 minutes after the quake had begun. So imagine the terror. You have got the ground moving all around you, up and down, lurching back and forth, and 2 minutes into it, you have a tsunami at your doorstep.
The loss of life from the tsunamis did not stop at the Alaska border, though. Four children died in Beverly Beach State Park in Oregon; 12 people died in California, mostly in the waves that destroyed Crescent City's harbor.
But we know that it could have been much worse. The death toll was low for an earthquake of this magnitude. As I mentioned, it was after work. It was on a holiday.
It occurred in an area with a small population that constructed buildings from wood, not bricks or other heavier materials. But the Good Friday Earthquake and the subsequent tsunamis that followed caused some $3.75 billion in damage and that is in today's dollars. This is 50 years ago, so $3.75 billion is amazing.
Also, consider this was largely done to a State that was barely 5 years old, but the impacts reached far beyond Alaska. Tsunamis also caused damage to many of our Pacific neighbors, including Canada, Washington, Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii.
Those tsunamis destroyed everything in their path. They destroyed houses, cars, boats, and fishing gear all along the Pacific coast. In Ocean City, WA, a bridge over the Copalis River collapsed. In Crescent City, CA, a dockside tavern was destroyed. In Hilo, HI, 12.5 foot waves overran the waterfront. Seiches, which are seismically induced water waves in rivers, lakes, bayous, and harbors, caused minor damage. It wasn't extensive damage, but it caused damage along the gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas. Think about how this massive earthquake reverberated around the world.
If we look again to the map that has the epicenter, we would think the extent would only be where the epicenter lines, the falt limits go, but in fact when we account for the tsunami effect, it truly was an amazing instance where Mother Nature came together in a massive and a violent way.
As we think about the devastation, the loss of life, the lost property, we have to ask the question whether anything good can come from a tragedy such as the Good Friday Earthquake, but I think the answer is ultimately yes. We came together, Alaskans came together in the aftermath of the quake and the tsunamis to help rebuild the worst hit communities. We rebuilt them to withstand earthquakes and in locations that are hopefully protected from the ravages of future tsunamis. We set aside parks to remember the historic earthquake and to prevent future building on landslide-prone cliffs. Out of the devastation we did gain a better understanding of what is happening below the surface in Alaska and other earthquake-prone areas.
In the 1960s we had very little information about what caused the massive shifts in the Good Friday Earthquake. There was very little understanding of the giant tectonic plates that make up the surface of the Earth and how their movement causes earthquakes. The 1964 earthquake resulted in greater seismic monitoring across the country and has led scientists to have a far better understanding of how earthquakes occur and where they occur. We can now better protect our citizens by implementing better building codes and preparing for earthquake disaster response in earthquake-prone regions, thereby reducing the chance that another earthquake would result in so many deaths.
The tsunamis that were spawned by the Good Friday Earthquake provided scientists with a unique and important set of tsunami arrival times and heights that have been used to validate new models of tsunami propagation. These models have allowed our scientists and emergency authorities to warn coastal populations of potential tsunamis, protecting life and property.
We see these exercises and drills conducted certainly in my State, I know in Hawaii, and in our coastal communities.
The science has come a long way in the past 50 years and Alaska has too. As we mark this historic anniversary, we remember those who perished in the Good Friday Earthquake.
We salute the men and women who help protect our safety by monitoring and researching earthquakes and tsunamis, both in our State and in others. We thank the first responders who helped Alaskans in 1964, just as we thank those who are helping with the recovery in Washington today. Let us also use this occasion to consider whether we ourselves are prepared for the worst should we ever face a similar day of reckoning in the future.
To recognize this historic event, I have submitted a Senate resolution that commemorates the Great Alaska Earthquake. My colleague from Alaska, Senator Begich, and my colleagues from Oregon, California, and Hawaii have joined me.
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