[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 49 (Thursday, March 27, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1800-S1803]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOGNIZING THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GREAT ALASKA EARTHQUAKE
Ms. MURKOWSKI. I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the
consideration of S. Res. 400, submitted earlier today.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the resolution by title.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
A resolution (S. Res. 400) recognizing the 50th anniversary
of the Great Alaska Earthquake, which struck the State of
Alaska at 5:36 p.m. on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, honoring
those who lost their lives in the Great Alaska Earthquake and
associated tsunamis, and expressing continued support for
research on earthquake and tsunami prediction and mitigation
strategies.
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the
resolution.
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, over the past several days we have
all watched the news of the massive landslide in Washington State. We
have watched that with sadness, with shock--truly an awful, awful
episode. Our hearts, our prayers are certainly with all of those who
have been affected by this terrible tragedy. We continue to hope for
the best as rescue and recovery efforts continue.
Today I have come to the floor to speak about a different natural
disaster. This is a natural disaster that affected Alaska on Good
Friday exactly 50 years ago today, in 1964. This is the Great Alaska
Earthquake, the Good Friday Earthquake, the epic earthquake of 1964.
At the time that Alaska was struck by this massive earthquake, I was
a young child. I was living in the southeastern community of Wrangell,
AK. I have a map here, a map of the State of Alaska. The epicenter of
the earthquake is here in the south central area. About a year prior to
the quake, my family and I moved down to the small southeastern
community of Wrangell, tucked safely in the inland passage waterways
here.
We were all looking forward to Easter. When the earthquake hit, I
certainly did not know that we had been struck by a massive, massive
9.2 earthquake of the magnitude on the Richter scale that decimated
southcentral Alaska. The earthquake struck at 5:36 in the evening. I
did not know that what had just occurred was the largest earthquake to
strike the United States in recorded history. It is the second largest
earthquake ever recorded on modern instrumentation.
Those of us who lived in Alaska at the time have memories of what
happened on Good Friday 50 years ago. We have stories that will live
with us for generations and passed down from generation to generation.
You can talk to Alaskans about it: Where were you in the quake of 1964?
We had just moved, as I said, from Anchorage to Wrangell, AK. We did
not feel the shake in Wrangell. We waited
[[Page S1801]]
for the big waves to come. We waited for the tsunami. We sat listening
to the radio. But our home was situated directly on the beach. Everyone
was told to move up to higher ground. So we moved everybody in the
family, five kids at the time, up the hill. We went to my first grade
teacher's house, which was really quite exciting for me.
We were allowed to stay up late into the evening. As a small child,
there was a buzz. It was kind of exciting but kind of scary because we
did not know what was happening in other parts of the State. My mom had
basically packed some diapers for the smallest of the children in the
family. She tells me that she brought along her silver tea set. That is
the only thing that she brought from the house, along with the five
kids.
We also tell the story of the home that we lived in just before we
had moved to Wrangell. It was situated in a residential area called
Turnagain. Turnagain was the area that was immediately and massively
hit.
This is the Turnagain neighborhood. Our home that we lived in prior
to moving to Wrangell was situated about two blocks back from the
bluff. After the earthquake, the bluff slid down taking tens and tens
of houses with it. The home that we were in then became bluff property.
It was condemned never to be lived in again.
We all have stories of the earthquake. We saw the news accounts as
they came slowly to us. We saw the photographs of the collapsed
buildings.
I am going to go back to the first picture here. This first one that
was up initially is downtown Anchorage, AK, 1964. This is on Fourth
Avenue. You can see from the picture the ground just sunk, dropped--the
crumpled buildings, the cars cattywumpus.
The destruction and the devastation in the downtown area literally
took your breath away. One very photographed picture was the J.C.
Penney building which had just recently been constructed. The whole
front facade of the J.C. Penney building just crashed down onto the
streets and onto the cars below.
This is a picture here of Government Hill Elementary School. I showed
you the previous picture where my family and I had lived in the
neighborhood at Turnagain when I was a child. When my husband and I
bought our home, where our sons were raised, it was directly across the
street from this property where Government Hill Elementary literally
slid down the hill.
As you can see from the picture there, the devastation to the school
was extraordinary. Fortunately, it was 5:36 in the evening on Good
Friday, and there were no children at the school. But the devastation,
the visual impact that still remains as we look back 50 years now at
what happened--the stories of loss of property, of damage to property,
the stories of loss of life and truly miraculous survival--slowly
started to reveal the extent of the destruction from an earthquake that
Federal scientists would tell us years later was roughly equivalent to
100 million tons of TNT exploding--massive.
The Good Friday Earthquake reshaped the Alaska landscape. Land was
lifted 33 feet in some places, and then in other places it sank in the
ground--sank as much as 6 feet in places. Cliffs and buildings
crumbled, forests and towns were flooded. Huge waves approximately 200
feet high were measured near the community of Valdez. A 200-foot wall
of water was coming into the community of Valdez. Communities were
literally washed off the map in Anchorage.
This is a picture here of Seward, which again is in Resurrection Bay
along the coast, but the waves literally came in and swept everything
out with it. But it was not just one wave. It was a series of waves.
Anchorage, which is our State's most populous city and really the
center of infrastructure in the State, was just 74 miles from the
epicenter of the quake.
That is where we see so many pictures of the tremendous damage there.
There has been a series of articles in our local newspaper, the
Anchorage Daily News, leading up to this historic 50th anniversary. It
is a series written by Mike Dunham. I ask unanimous consent that a
portion of these series be printed in the Record.
But in the series discussing the tsunamis that hit Alaska, I would
like to share with my colleagues some of the information that Mike
outlined. He said NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center puts the
total number of deaths resulting from the Great Alaska Earthquake of
1964 at 139. Fifteen of those deaths are attributed to falling
buildings or crumbling ground during the quake itself. The rest were
killed by the water. Thirty-two people died when a wave 30-feet high
built up in Valdez. Similar-sized waves took 12 lives in Seward, and 15
in Kodiak and its surrounding villages. Another dozen perished when a
wall of water 40-feet high smashed into Whittier in the Prince William
Sound village of Chenega. One-third of the population, 23 people, were
swept away by a 90-foot wave.
One thing that I found very fascinating in understanding some of the
attributes of this earthquake and the tsunamis that came is that in
many places the ground was still shaking when the water hit. Keep in
mind, this earthquake lasted 4\1/2\ minutes--4\1/2\ minutes where the
earth is lurching and shuddering and shaking. That is a horribly long
time.
The first tsunami that hit Valdez, I am told, hit just 2 minutes
after the quake had begun. So imagine the terror. You have got the
ground moving all around you, up and down, lurching back and forth, and
2 minutes into it, you have a tsunami at your doorstep.
The loss of life from the tsunamis did not stop at the Alaska border,
though. Four children died in Beverly Beach State Park in Oregon; 12
people died in California, mostly in the waves that destroyed Crescent
City's harbor.
But we know that it could have been much worse. The death toll was
low for an earthquake of this magnitude. As I mentioned, it was after
work. It was on a holiday.
It occurred in an area with a small population that constructed
buildings from wood, not bricks or other heavier materials. But the
Good Friday Earthquake and the subsequent tsunamis that followed caused
some $3.75 billion in damage and that is in today's dollars. This is 50
years ago, so $3.75 billion is amazing.
Also, consider this was largely done to a State that was barely 5
years old, but the impacts reached far beyond Alaska. Tsunamis also
caused damage to many of our Pacific neighbors, including Canada,
Washington, Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii.
Those tsunamis destroyed everything in their path. They destroyed
houses, cars, boats, and fishing gear all along the Pacific coast. In
Ocean City, WA, a bridge over the Copalis River collapsed. In Crescent
City, CA, a dockside tavern was destroyed. In Hilo, HI, 12.5 foot waves
overran the waterfront. Seiches, which are seismically induced water
waves in rivers, lakes, bayous, and harbors, caused minor damage. It
wasn't extensive damage, but it caused damage along the gulf coasts of
Louisiana and Texas. Think about how this massive earthquake
reverberated around the world.
If we look again to the map that has the epicenter, we would think
the extent would only be where the epicenter lines, the falt limits go,
but in fact when we account for the tsunami effect, it truly was an
amazing instance where Mother Nature came together in a massive and a
violent way.
As we think about the devastation, the loss of life, the lost
property, we have to ask the question whether anything good can come
from a tragedy such as the Good Friday Earthquake, but I think the
answer is ultimately yes. We came together, Alaskans came together in
the aftermath of the quake and the tsunamis to help rebuild the worst
hit communities. We rebuilt them to withstand earthquakes and in
locations that are hopefully protected from the ravages of future
tsunamis. We set aside parks to remember the historic earthquake and to
prevent future building on landslide-prone cliffs. Out of the
devastation we did gain a better understanding of what is happening
below the surface in Alaska and other earthquake-prone areas.
In the 1960s we had very little information about what caused the
massive shifts in the Good Friday Earthquake. There was very little
understanding of the giant tectonic plates that make up the surface of
the Earth and how their movement causes earthquakes. The 1964
earthquake resulted in greater seismic monitoring across the country
[[Page S1802]]
and has led scientists to have a far better understanding of how
earthquakes occur and where they occur. We can now better protect our
citizens by implementing better building codes and preparing for
earthquake disaster response in earthquake-prone regions, thereby
reducing the chance that another earthquake would result in so many
deaths.
The tsunamis that were spawned by the Good Friday Earthquake provided
scientists with a unique and important set of tsunami arrival times and
heights that have been used to validate new models of tsunami
propagation. These models have allowed our scientists and emergency
authorities to warn coastal populations of potential tsunamis,
protecting life and property.
We see these exercises and drills conducted certainly in my State, I
know in Hawaii, and in our coastal communities.
The science has come a long way in the past 50 years and Alaska has
too. As we mark this historic anniversary, we remember those who
perished in the Good Friday Earthquake.
We salute the men and women who help protect our safety by monitoring
and researching earthquakes and tsunamis, both in our State and in
others. We thank the first responders who helped Alaskans in 1964, just
as we thank those who are helping with the recovery in Washington
today. Let us also use this occasion to consider whether we ourselves
are prepared for the worst should we ever face a similar day of
reckoning in the future.
To recognize this historic event, I have submitted a Senate
resolution that commemorates the Great Alaska Earthquake. My colleague
from Alaska, Senator Begich, and my colleagues from Oregon, California,
and Hawaii have joined me.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Anchorage Daily News, Mar. 24, 2014]
Tsunamis: Warning Systems Improved Since Great Alaska Earthquake but
Unlikely To Help
(By Mike Dunham)
NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center puts the total
number of deaths resulting from the Great Alaska Earthquake
of 1964 at 139. Fifteen of those deaths are attributed to
falling buildings or crumbling ground during the quake
itself.
The rest were killed by water.
Thirty-two people died when a wave 30 feet high boiled up
in Port Valdez. Similar sized waves took 12 lives in Seward
and 15 in Kodiak and its surrounding villages. Another dozen
perished when a wall of water 40 feet high smashed into
Whittier. In the Prince William Sound village of Chenega, a
third of the population--23 people--was swept away by a 90-
foot wave.
Smaller numbers of casualties were reported in scattered
settlements across the region, from Cape St. Elias to Port
Nellie Juan. One death took place at Shoup Bay on Valdez Arm,
where the wave may have splashed 220 feet up the Chugach
mountains.
In many places, the ground was still shaking as the water
hit.
``We have this picture in our heads that first an
earthquake happens, then the tsunami comes,'' said Mike West,
State Seismologist at the Alaska Earthquake Information
Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. ``But in
Alaska's fiords, something else happens.''
In the second biggest earthquake ever recorded, that
``something else'' was massive.
``The entire floor of Prince William Sound failed,'' said
Cindi Preller, Tsunami Program Manager for NOAA Alaska
Region. ``It was chaos.''
WAVE TRAINS
There are different kinds of tsunamis and the 1964
earthquake set off a variety of them.
One was a general global splashing generated by the
magnitude of the quake. The 1964 event was so strong that it
made the whole world ``ring like a bell,'' reads a U.S.
Geological Survey pamphlet. Vibrations shook the planet for
weeks and caused measurable sloshing as far away as Florida.
Shifts in water levels were recorded in 47 states, including
land-locked ones. Even in South Africa--about as far from
Alaska as one can get--fluctuations in well water were noted.
One type of tsunami produced by the earthquake, seiche
waves, caused no casualties, but they were violent enough to
sink boats in Louisiana. Seiche action refers to standing
waves in enclosed or confined water. They can be caused in
different ways. Those caused by seismic disruptions can occur
in places with no direct connection to bodies of water near
the source of an earthquake.
Tectonic tsunamis are created directly by the shock of a
fracture. They tend to come in a series of waves rather than
a single surge, like the ripples formed when you plunk a rock
into a calm pool and the displaced water spreads out in
rings.
In the case of an undersea fracture, the displacement of
the water comes from below. University of Alaska Anchorage
geology professor Kristine Crossen said the sudden upthrust
at one spot of Prince William Sound was so large that it took
two minutes for the water to run off it.
``When the ocean bottom is moved, it sets up a wave
train,'' said Peter Haeussler, U.S. Geological Survey
research geologist.
These trains can travel thousands of miles at speeds of 500
miles an hour. In the deep water of the open ocean they seem
small. But as they enter shallow water near shore, they grow
slower and taller.
Current thinking is that, in 1964, tectonic waves were
generated from two areas in the massive rupture, said
Preller. One was near the epicenter, where the quake began,
in northern Prince William Sound. The other was near Kodiak,
hundreds of miles away. These waves took lives and leveled
buildings from Alaska to California, often in concert with
the most lethal kind of wave to emanate from the 1964 quake,
landslide tsunamis.
These happen when the earthquake causes an avalanche.
That's what happened in Lituya Bay in Glacier Bay National
Park on July 9, 1958. Tumbling rock and ice sent up a
megatsunami 1,720 feet high, the largest wave recorded in
modern times.
The steep, mile-high mountains we see above ground
throughout the southern coast of Alaska are mirrored by a
similar submarine geography, where slopes can be further
encumbered by millions of years of volcanic residue, glacial
silt and other muck. A strong shake can send incalculable
tons of material tumbling underwater, unseen and undetected
until the displaced ocean shoots into the air.
``Those are really devilish,'' West said. ``And they're not
currently predictable.''
SUDDEN DEATH
Valdez was founded during the gold rush on glacial fill and
alluvial deposits surrounded by precipitous mountains. The
ground at the old townsite was flat and easy to build on and
ran right to the edge of a deep water port.
When the earthquake began, the delta deposits liquified. A
mile of waterfront slumped into the bottom of the harbor,
pushing water toward the open sea.
A home movie taken from the deck of the freighter Chena,
tied to the city dock at the time of the quake, shows the
400-foot ship sinking into a giant hole in the water, the
bottom of the harbor exposed. Then, with ferocious frothing,
the ocean crashes back.
Those on the dock--citizens, curious children and workers--
were killed in the first seconds of the quake. Amazingly, the
Chena rode out the surge that carried it into the town and
left it high and dry--temporarily. New waves hit, some after
midnight, and floated it out to sea again.
``We think Valdez had two landslipping events,'' said
Preller--one in Valdez Arm, the other right under the dock.
Most Valdez businesses and half of the homes in town were
destroyed. Fuel tanks split open and their contents caught
fire, a catastrophe that would be repeated in the ports of
Whittier, Seward and Crescent City.
The fiords and coves throughout Prince William Sound, the
area nearest where the quake began, experienced similar
underwater landslides causing waves estimated to have
splashed as much as 220 feet above sea level. Most of these
places had few if any residents.
But there were people in Whittier and Seward. In those
towns, as in Valdez, the narrow harbors confined by steep
slopes channelized the water into a bore, amplifying the wave
action like a giant bathtub.
Arriving immediately after the quake, or even while it was
still rumbling, they gave residents no warning and little
chance to escape. ``The first tsunamis hit two minutes after
the earthquake started,'' said Preller. The quake lasted for
4\1/2\ minutes.
The island of Chenega, southwest of Valdez, is not a dead-
end inlet, like Whittier. But it is surrounded by precipitous
submarine channels. ``Prince William Sound is an environment
where the inlets are extremely deep,'' said Preller. The
underwater valleys had much the same effect as the above-
water fiords.
The first wave rose smoothly but with astonishing speed,
catching people trying to outrun it, trapping others in their
homes. A second wave struck more violently, smashing every
structure in the village except for the school. A third
scattered whatever was left.
Survivors huddled around a fire through the night with no
way to get word of their plight to the outside world.
EVACUATION
Most people in Kodiak figured the big quake was shaking
only their neighborhood. The first inkling that it might be
more serious came when they noticed that long distance phone
service was out.
In the village of Kaguyak on the south end of Kodiak
island, however, residents observed the odd swell on the
ocean. They began moving away from the shore and sent radio
warnings to nearby communities. Warnings picked up elsewhere
on the island, alerting the people of Kodiak city 20 minutes
before the first wave arrived.
The city's fire trucks ran their sirens to warn the
population. Police went door to door urging evacuation and a
line of cars started driving up Pillar Mountain. The town's
taxi fleet used their CB radios to establish an ad hoc
communications network.
[[Page S1803]]
The first surge came into Kodiak harbor at low tide, about
half an hour after the quake. It didn't reach much past the
docks and is thought to have been a landslide tsunami. ``It
came much sooner than we would have expected from a tectonic
tsunami,'' said Preller. Most of the affected towns
experienced both types of wave, she said.
Thirty minutes later a second wave came into the city,
pushing boats into the city streets, floating cars away,
wrenching buildings from their foundations and causing walls
to collapse. It was not the towering breaker that swept up
the Chena in Valdez or wiped out a sawmill and its workers in
Whittier, but more on the lines of a large swell.
``Survivors most often describe tsunamis as a rapidly
rising tide,'' said Haeussler. ``They're like a continuous
rise of the ocean that never stops. Often you cannot outrun
it. It just overwhelms everything in its path.''
At least three more waves ripped through the town in the
next few hours. It's presumed that the highest reached 26
feet above mean low tide level. But no one saw it. It came in
pitch dark after midnight when most of the population had
moved up the hill. Kodiak fatalities tended to come not from
people on land, but from those who were in fishing boats
caught in the surge.
LONG-DISTANCE KILLER
Kodiak was luckier than Crescent City, Calif. Residents
there received a warning three hours after the Alaska quake
began. Many evacuated before the tectonic wave came in, just
before midnight. Half an hour later a second wave, lower than
the first, rolled into the harbor.
``People thought that was it,'' said Lori Dengler, a
professor of geology at Humboldt State University in Northern
California. ``They came back.''
At 1:20 a.m., a wave swirled into the waterfront that broke
the tide gauge. The fourth wave is estimated to have reached
22 feet, Dengler said. ``It was terribly timed. It came just
at the top of the tide.''
More than 100 homes were destroyed. Eleven people died.
Total damage was estimated at $23 million.
Others died in the rising waters at Newport, Ore. and
Klamath River, Calif. $600,000 in damage was sustained by
boats and harbor facilities in San Raphael, Calif.
In Hawaii, tsunamis from the Alaska earthquake caused about
$70,000 in damage. Waves in several places were as high as
the one that devastated Crescent City.
But no lives were lost. When the tsunami warning sirens
went off, the Hawaiians paid heed. They had learned their
lesson from another Alaska earthquake 18 years before.
On April 1, 1946, an Aleutian quake with a magnitude
perhaps as high as 8.1 set off a wave that wiped out the
concrete, five-story high Scotch Cap Lighthouse on Unimak
Island. Hours later, Hawaiians flocked to the shores to
observe the peculiar super-low tide. Curious crowds gathered
on the beach at Hilo. Children ran to explore the exposed sea
bottom. By the time they saw the wave coming it was too late
to get away; 165 people died, including six in Alaska.
As a result, a system of ocean-based alarms was established
to detect tsunami activity in areas particularly prone to
seismic shifts. A line of detectors follows the Alaska coast
where earthquake activity is particularly high.
EARLY WARNING
The detectors do a good job of alerting populations far
from where the earthquakes take place, Dengler said. She
noted a tsunami that hit Crescent City following the 2011
Japan quake was within inches of what the data predicted.
``But near the source area, they're not helpful,'' she
said.
That's because a landslide tsunami will get to shore before
the warning does, if there's any warning at all.
``We cannot detect when a landslide has happened,'' said
Preller. ``If you're near the ocean when there's an
earthquake, get to high ground and stay there. Don't wait for
a warning. The earthquake is your warning.''
Nonetheless, Dengler said, the progress in long-distance
tsunami warning has come a long way since 1964. ``Back then
it took three hours after the quake for Crescent City to get
the warning. Today it would be two or three minutes.''
Preller called the Japanese tsunami warning system ``the
best on the planet.'' That country has made some intriguing
progress in providing early warnings for earthquakes.
``From the moment an earthquake initiates, you usually have
some period of time before the shaking reaches you,'' said
West. ``If you can nail down that earthquake immediately when
it happens, there's the potential of providing several tens
of seconds of warning. That's enough time to shut down
transit systems or have a surgeon put down his scalpel.''
West is impressed by Japan's combination of good
instrumentation and a warning notification system. ``It was
quite successful in the 2011 earthquake,'' he said. He sent a
link to a Youtube video that shows a computer screen just
before the massive earthquake and tsunami of March 11 that
year. An automated voice is counting down from 29 seconds. At
the moment the countdown reaches zero, the rattling begins.
``California, Oregon and Washington are in the process of
developing such systems,'' West said. ``Gov. Jerry Brown has
mandated that California will do this.
``There's a legitimate discussion to be held as to whether
or not such an investment would be worth it here. But nothing
like it is currently in development for Alaska.''
Wednesday: Witness to destruction
Shortly after tsunamis destroyed much of Seward, school
students recorded their experiences with pictures.
Tidal wave vs. tsunami
In 1964 the phrase ``tidal wave'' was universally used by
both average Alaskans and experts quoted in the media to
describe the giant waves that wrought so much death and
damage. Today the preferred term for a wave generated by a
solid physical force such as an earthquake, landslide or
volcano is tsunami. Tidal waves refer to waves caused by
extreme tidal action or wind, including tidal bores or storm
surges.
Casualties
There are various numbers given for the number of deaths
caused by the Great Alaska Earthquake. The most recent
estimate is given by the National Geophysical Data Center as
139, 124 of which were due to tsunamis; however that database
does not break down the fatalities by location. ``The
casualties are still under discussion,'' said Cindi Preller,
Tsunami Program Manager, NOAA Alaska Region.
Is Anchorage in danger?
In theory, a tsunami is possible at any oceanside location.
But it's considered improbable in upper Cook Inlet.
``Generally speaking, tsunamis travel better through deep
water,'' said Kristine Crossen, head of UAA's geology
department. ``Cook Inlet is fairly shallow. It creates a lot
of friction on the base of the wave.''
Ms. MURKOWSKI. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed
to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid
upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The resolution (S. Res. 400) was agreed to.
The preamble was agreed to.
(The resolution, with its preamble, is printed in today's Record
under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
Ms. MURKOWSKI. I thank you for the opportunity to speak again on this
historic event to recognize those who lost lives, lost family, and
those who helped to not only ensure that Alaska was able to regroup and
regain but knowing we have used these lessons learned 50 years ago to
help us going forward.
____________________