Earthquake hits Alaska

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaskans, roused by a major earthquake and threatened by the specter of a tsunami, moved in the middle of the night.

They shuffled into schools that had become evacuation centers. They parked their cars on higher ground at Safeway and Wal-Mart stores. They rushed up Pillar Mountain. Then, mercifully, the big waves never came, and within four hours, authorities lifted the tsunami advisories that had once stretched from Alaska to the U.S. border with Mexico.

“Everybody had to evacuate,” Fran Latham, who runs a bedand-breakfast in Yakutat, said of her town between Anchorage and Glacier Bay National Park. “It looked like everybody was at the school and the police department.”

The overnight panic along the Pacific began after a magnitude 7.9 quake was reported at 12:31 a.m. in the Gulf of Alaska, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. There were no immediate reports of damage or fatalities, authorities said, but the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center said a small tsunami, with a wave height of less than 8 inches, had been observed in a handful of Alaska cities, including Kodiak and Seward.

“We’re very grateful that there was no major tsunami,” said Mayor Pat Branson of Kodiak, a city of about 6,200 people on an island of about 13,800, at a news conference around 4:30 a.m.

“We live in a very prone earthquake and tsunami area, and it’s a beautiful place, but that’s what you have when you live in paradise.”

The Alaska Earthquake Center, which is affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, reported a series of aftershocks, the largest of which preliminarily registered as a 5.6.