

It was up to 220 feet high near the epicenter. However, the tsunami that the earthquake launched was quite the story.

Army)Īs for the quake itself, only nine people were killed. Damage to Fourth Avenue, Anchorage, Alaska, caused by the Good Friday Earthquake. You can hit the link here to see more of the devastating photos from the earthquake in Alaska. Anchorage, as well as Southeast Alaska, was shook for almost five minutes as a result of the quake. At 9.2 on the Richter Scale, the quake was the strongest ever recorded in the United States, and the second strongest ever worldwide (the strongest was in Chile in 1960). Water perhaps two feet deep had surged over Highway 101 north of Seaside at the junction of City Center route and the through route south.”Īs a result of a huge earthquake that occurred off Valdez, Alaska, in 1964, the tsunami was launched. I noticed hundreds of tiny fish still alive and wriggling frantically in their efforts to get back into the tiny creek, now within its banks and more than 50 feet away from them. A tsunami caused by the 1964 Alaskan earthquake caused logs to jam at the mouth of the D River near Lincoln City. It tumbled autos like matchsticks, leaving them pinned against houses when the water receded. “Several houses had been wrecked completely by the more than four feet of water that swept through them. “Venice Park, a residential area just north of us and right on Neawanna Creek, had been hardest hit,” she wrote. Her neighborhood was high enough to stay out of the waves. She didn’t realize how fortunate she’d been until the next morning. “I learned later that I had crossed over the 12th Avenue bridge at the very height of the tsunami.” “When I got as far as the 12th Avenue bridge over the Necanicum River, the water was right under the decking, black and ominous, and covered with great chunks of white foam floating on the surface like huge ice cakes,” she wrote. It was a tsunami – and it was almost upon her. Gammon quickly learned that it wasn’t a fire. I thought it must be a tremendous fire, so I figured I’d get dressed and go watch it.” “In just a few seconds the cars started zipping up our street toward the highway like the devil himself was on their tail. “I lay in bed thinking to myself, ‘Why doesn’t that fellow at the fire station get his big thumb off the siren button so we can all go back to sleep, and let the firemen take care of the fire?’” she recalled later in an Oregon Historical Quarterly article. Join for Free! Charlie Jacksonâs car trapped against Creal residence at 25th and Neawanna Creek in Seaside by several large driftwood logs that were rolled by the 1964 tsunami currents.
