Earthquake shreds highways, sows panic
Around 40,000 people left without power amid collapsed buildings in Alaska
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It lasted just 30 seconds. But that was enough on Friday morning for a magnitude-7.2 earthquake to rip open roads, send street lights crashing to the ground and leave Alaska’s quake-hardened residents panicked and reeling.
And it sent Kelsey sprawling to the floor.
At her office in Anchorage, where she works for the Girl Scouts of Alaska, windows shattered and ceiling tiles rained down. When it was over, Green and her co-workers ran outside into a world that had been shaken up like a snow globe. There was now a 15-metre crack in the parking lot.
“I’ve never experienced an earthquake like this,” said Green, 27, a fourth-generation Alaskan.
“It rattled me to my core.” Green
Infrastructure crippled
While there were no reports of deaths or serious injuries, officials said the quake had crippled southern Alaska’s infrastructure and could take weeks or longer to repair.
Highways were partly swallowed up by the snowy earth. Around 40,000 people were left without power and there were widespread reports of collapsed and damaged buildings and bridges, and broken water lines.
Earthquakes are such a fact of life in Anchorage — the most seismically active region in the country — that schools regularly drill students on preparedness and people’s grandparents trade stories about surviving the ■ destructive 1964 earthquake, whose 9.2 magnitude was the second-highest ever recorded.
But many people said Friday’s earthquake, which was centred about 15km north of Anchorage, felt longer and more intense than anything in recent memory.
The chaos began at 8.29am. Nadja Josey, 13, was in her first-period class at Hanshew Middle School when her teacher told the class to hide under their tables. Nadja was hit on her hand and ankle by falling parts of the ceiling before she could take cover. ■
“Everyone was screaming and crying,” Nadja said.
“And the water sprinklers, they activated themselves, so it’s wet and dusty everywhere.”
She went outside with classmates and borrowed a phone to call her mother; her phone was in the rubble upstairs.
“I heard her voice and I just started crying,” Nadja said.
“I was like ‘Mom, I got stuck under there, it hurt really bad. My fingers hurt.’”
At Alaska Regional Hospital, nurses checked on patients as ceiling tiles dropped. In an Anchorage courthouse, a video showed a woman hiding under a desk as the entire room rocked like a ship in a storm.
Officials in Anchorage said they were only just beginning to assess the scale of the damage. Governor Bill Walker declared a disaster, and President Donald Trump said that Alaska had been hit by “a big one” and pledged to spare no expense for rebuilding.
Across Anchorage and its suburbs, people coped with major power outages and tried to get through to friends and family on jammed, downed phone networks.
Just finding food and gasoline was a slog.
Many grocery stores closed after the earthquake flung their goods to the floor.
Earthquakes are a fact of life in Anchorage. But many people said Friday’s earthquake, which was centred about 15km north of Anchorage, felt longer and more intense than anything in recent memory.