Alaskans flee from feared tsunami

Undersea quake sent many to shelters for hours.

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — A powerful undersea earthquake sent Alaskans fumbling for suitcases and racing to evacuation centers in the middle of the night after a cellphone alert early Tuesday warned that a tsunami could smash into the state’s southern coast and western Canada.

The killer wave never materialized, but people endured several tense hours in shelters, waiting for a potential catastrophe that they feared could wipe away their communities at any moment.

The magnitude 7.9 quake in the Gulf of Alaska triggered the jarring alert that awoke people shortly after midnight. Fleeing motorists sometimes clogged the only highway out of their towns in the rush to get to higher ground. Many took refuge at schools and other shelters.

For Alaskans accustomed to tsunami threats and regular tsunami drills, the warning still created some fretful moments. The phone message read: “Emergency Alert. Tsunami danger on the coast. Go to high ground or move inland.”

Keith Perkins got the phone alert and later heard sirens going off in his hometown of Sitka. He said people on Facebook were talking about whether the threat was real and what they should do.

Given the magnitude of the earthquake, Perkins said, he thought it best to head to the

high school, a tsunami evacuation point, even though in the past he felt his home was probably high enough.

“I figured I’d probably just better play it safe,” he said.

Hours later, the warning was canceled and people returned home for an hour or two before the workday began. There were no reports of damage, not even on Kodiak Island, the closest land to the epicenter. But people reported on social media that the shaking was felt hundreds of miles away, in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, which was not under a tsunami threat.

Eleanor King in Kodiak was jolted awake by the earthquake, which she said felt similar to Alaska’s 1964 magnitude 9.2 earthquake — the strongest on record in North America. That quake generated tsunamis that claimed about 130 lives as far south as California.

“It started out just like the big one,” King said of Tuesday’s quake.

JAMES POULSON / DAILY SITKA SENTINEL People line a high school hallway in Sitka, Alaska, after residents were alerted of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake in the Gulf of Alaska.

This screenshot shows alerts for a tsunami watch early Tuesday after an earthquake struck.