When all was said and done, the 9.2-magnitude quake-which struck around 5:30 in the evening on Good Friday-and its many powerful aftershocks caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage killed more than 130 people (including more than a dozen tsunami-related deaths in Oregon and California) and in ways literal and figurative, forever altered the Alaskan landscape in places such as Anchorage, Seward and Valdez. Some were torn apart, compressed and strong I-beams were.
#Alaska quake of 1964 full#
The event unleashed a colossal 200,000 megatons of energy, destroying buildings and infrastructure in Anchorage and far beyond raising the land as much as 30 feet in some places and sparking a major underwater landslide in Prince William Sound, which killed scores of people when the resulting waves slammed into Port Valdez. Buildings moved off their foundations up, down, left and right. 1964 file photo, Anchorage small business owners were going full tilt clearing salvagable items and equipment from their earthquake-ravaged stores on. When the Great Alaska Earthquake convulsed the south-central region of that vast state on March 27, 1964, the energy released by the upheaval- the largest quake in recorded North American history-was, LIFE magazine reported, “400 times the total of all nuclear bombs ever exploded” until that time.
0 kommentar(er)
