Earthquake shreds highways and sows panic in southern Alaska

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — It lasted just 30 seconds. But that was enough Friday morning for a magnitude-7.2 earthquake to rip open roads, send streetlights crashing to the ground and leave Alaska’s quake-hardened residents panicked and reeling.

And it sent Kelsey Green 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 50-foot 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.”

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 centered about 9 miles north of Anchorage, felt longer and more intense than anything in recent memory.

The chaos began at 8:29 a.m. 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. Adam Cardwell, 55, was still asleep in his cabin outside the community of Willow when pictures and pans flew off the walls and books and dishes crashed to the ground. The shaking was so violent that Cardwell said he could not even get out of bed. So he used his body to shield his pit bull mix, Star, and they waited for the shaking to stop.

“Seemed like forever,” he said.

His cabin survived, but Cardwell said that the day of rolling aftershocks had left him nauseated and dizzy. His phone pinged every time earthquake monitors recorded a new aftershock. He counted 22 in three hours.

Officials in Anchorage said they were only just beginning to assess the scale of the damage. Gov. 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.

Kristin DeSmith, communications director for the Anchorage mayor’s office, said the city had set up an emergency operations headquarters. “We have some reports of structure damage,” she said. But she said communications had been difficult. “We’re just getting information now.”

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.

After Green fled the shattered glass and destruction at her office, she went to check on her grandmother. The 4-mile drive took two hours. By late morning, she was stuffing clothes, water and food into an emergency kit and trying to figure out how she would make it to her home in the Mat-Su Valley, 35 miles away.

“I’m stranded,” she said. “Half of the highway is missing.”

Just finding food and gasoline was a slog. Many grocery stores closed after the earthquake flung their goods to the floor. Some gas stations and still-open businesses were only accepting cash, Green said.

The quake could hamper Alaska’s oil industry, which supplies West Coast refineries. The Alyeska company shut down the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline as a precaution, although there were no immediate reports of leaks or other damage. The company set no timetable for restarting the network.

The pipeline transports more than half a million barrels a day across the state, representing about 4 percent of national oil output.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was centered across the Cook Inlet estuary, at a depth of about 25 miles. A tsunami warning was issued for Cook Inlet, but there were no reports of one.

Much of Alaska lies in what geophysicists call a subduction zone, where one of the Earth’s huge surface plates is slowly sliding beneath another. In Alaska, the Pacific plate is sliding toward the northwest beneath the North American plate at a rate of about 2 inches per year — about the speed at which a fingernail grows.

That sliding, or subduction, leads to friction between the two plates that can build up until it is released in what is called a megathrust earthquake. These can be very large. The last megathrust earthquake in Alaska, the 1964 quake that was centered southeast of Anchorage near Prince William Sound, killed about 130 people.

The quake Thursday was not as powerful because the mechanism was not the same.

Peter Haeussler, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, said it was an “intraslab” quake, which occurs within the Pacific plate where it bends downward as it slides beneath the North American plate. That bending causes stress that can result in a rupture of the earth.

Haeussler likened it to bending a Snickers bar until the top coating breaks apart. He got a close-up view as he drove to work Friday morning. He had been stopped at a gas station, and said his car moved around so much that the transmission was temporarily damaged.

Todd Woody, who works for an environmental organization, had just finished breakfast at his condo on the east side of the city, near the University of Alaska campus.

“It grew pretty quickly,” he said of the shaking. “It was really scary. I’ve lived here 22 years and never felt anything like this before.”