"It was sort of a shallower version of the Nisqually earthquake in 2001," said the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
What we know about the quake:
- A 7.0-magnitude earthquake rocked buildings in Anchorage on Friday morning.
- Officials issued, and later canceled, a tsunami warning for southern Alaska coastal areas of Cook’s Inlet and part of the Kenai peninsula.
4:20 p.m.
Jennifer Bolding, 26, was driving away from the Anchorage airport Friday morning with her mother, Lora Bolding, who was visiting from Des Moines, Washington, when her steering wheel began to shake. It felt like someone had grabbed it and started shaking it from side-to-side.
“Mom, we’re going to pull over. I think my tire blew out,” she said, navigating her car to an empty parking lot, on a typically busy shopping street. Dawn was still about an hour away.
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“OK,” Lora replied, calmly.
“Mom, my car is still shaking. I think my car’s going to blow up,” Jennifer said.
Lora grabbed her hands, looked her in the eye and said, “Jennifer, it’s an earthquake, you need to remain calm.”
She didn’t.
About a dozen people emptied out of buildings and into the streets. Lights flickered. Light poles swayed back and forth. Power lines shook. The buildings were moving. Jennifer cried.
It was scary — the worst earthquake Jennifer had seen in her nearly nine years in Alaska.
They decided to drive to the building where Jennifer worked as a recruiter, navigating streets where water had begun seeping up through broken pipes.
Inside the office, it was so dark Jennifer had to use her cellphone as a flashlight. A bookcase about 6-feet-tall had toppled over on top of the desk where she sat each day. The earthquake had apparently sent her coffee cups, lamps and pictures flying to the ground. Luckily, her co-workers were OK.
It took about two and a half hours to get to Jennifer’s home, normally just a 20-minute drive. The mother and daughter waited in line for 45 minutes to fill up Jennifer’s Lincoln Navigator. Aftershocks left them feeling uneasy.
Lora, who works for United Airlines and had flown to Anchorage to do some Christmas shopping with her daughter, was scheduled to fly home through Seattle on Saturday.
“I don’t want her to go home now,” Jennifer said.
3:29 p.m.
A wedding postponed — only briefly
Jackson Willard, freshly showered and wearing a crisply ironed shirt and his wedding-day suit, was sitting in his parents’ Anchorage hotel room watching a house-fixing show with his father when the vibrations began.
He’d lived through earthquakes in Peru, but this was different for the 22-year-old from Camano Island. These tremors were new — long, violent shakes — that made him feel as if he were being thrown back and forth.
The coffee maker crashed to the floor. The iron fell from its holder on the wall. The shaking seemed to last for more than 30 seconds.
Willard looked out the window of the high-rise hotel. Car alarms began to bleat into the dark morning. Stoplights were shaking. The lights began to flicker out.
“It seemed like the end,” he would say later. “Like the building was going to fall down and that was going to be it.”
And then it was over.
Conversation flooded the Clarion Suites hallways.
“We were like, what do we do right now? We’re not going to leave,” he said. A housekeeper came by and said they had to evacuate.
It took 30 minutes to drive just 10 miles as people and cars flooded into the Anchorage streets.
Willard arrived at the temple where he was supposed to marry his fiancée about 9:30 a.m., as the sun rose.
“We’re going to have to close the temple. There’s no power,” the Latter-day Saints temple president told him.
If the power came back on, “we’ll have you get married,” he promised.
Willard knew his fiancée, Amber Anderson, was a patient woman. After all, she was the fourth of eight kids in her family, and all her younger siblings were teenagers. She was no stranger to occasional adolescent bickering.
He’d met Anderson in January this year, when a group of friends had gotten together at her apartment near Brigham Young University-Idaho to play board games. The group would meet every Monday to hang out.
Occasionally, when a roommate became upset with the group over its noise, it was Anderson who calmed the situation.
She was so understanding. So patient. “That was big,” he’d say later.
On the drive from the temple to Anderson’s Anchorage family home Friday, Willard felt nervous — scared. The couple had planned a flight back to Washington for their honeymoon on Saturday. If they couldn’t marry, it would probably take nearly a week to make new plans.
He walked into the door of the home, took off his shoes, and approached the bride-to-be in the living room.
It’s going to be OK, she told him. We’re going to figure things out.
Not a minute later, the phone rang. Power had been restored.
The two hugged, and he was relieved.
“It’s going to happen now,” he told her. “We’re actually getting married.”
2:01 p.m.
Alaska Airlines reports that a temporary suspension of flights to Anchorage due to the earthquake has been lifted. In the early afternoon, flights started to arrive and department from Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. The airline says that travelers may experience delays.
— Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton
12:25 p.m.
“My girlfriend is doing good,” said Franklin Hunsucker, 76, who was on the phone in Seattle with his girlfriend, Emma Jean Alex, when shaking began Friday morning and picture frames fell from her walls in Anchorage.
“Everything that fell off in her house is all cleaned up,” he said. “Her granddaughters cleaned up her house.”
Hunsucker said Alex had felt multiple aftershocks.
“You’ve got to be nervous. I’m nervous,” he said, when asked how she was feeling about things.
Hunsucker said all the earthquake conversation got him thinking about our vulnerability in Seattle.
“We’re on the same turf. It happens up there. It comes all the way down this way,” he said, referring to the geography of seismic hazard. “When will we get ours? Will it come before they tear away the Alaskan Way Viaduct? Is the tunnel still safe, will it be safe?”
12:18 p.m.
The Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport made it through the earthquake without significant damage to three runways or terminals, according to Trudy Wassel, division-operations manager for the airport.
The airport was evacuated for a short period as the earthquake unfolded but “structurally, we’re OK. We have had everything checked out,” Wassel said.
As of 11:40 Pacific Time, cargo planes were taking off. Some passenger loading was on hold but expected to resume in about an hour, according to Wassel.
Wassel said there were reports of some overpass and road damage in town, but that there are a variety of routes to reach the airport.
— Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton
12:10 p.m.
A KTVA reporter shared dramatic video of shaking inside an Anchorage courthouse.
12 p.m.
Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, learned of the earthquake from a text message.
“My sister works in a downtown office building” in Anchorage, he said, when he got a text that read “Earthquake” and an update that things were falling off the walls.
“She was under the table doing what we ask people to do, which is drop, cover and hold on,” Tobin said.
Tobin said the Anchorage quake was “not the big one, but it’s a significant earthquake” because it originated so close to Anchorage, “essentially right beneath the city, but 25 to 30 miles down into the earth.”
Tobin said the earthquake resulted from an “intra-slab event,” in which a rupture occurs in a tectonic plate being pushed beneath another plate.
“It was sort of a shallower version of the Nisqually earthquake in 2001,” Tobin said.
The earthquake occurred where the Pacific plate is being pushed, or subducted, under the continental plate. But it was not a subduction zone megathrust quake in which the tectonic plates jerk past each other, like the 1964 Good Friday Alaska quake. At magnitude 9.2, that was the biggest earthquake ever recorded in the U.S., and the second-biggest worldwide.
A similar subduction zone quake is expected some day on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Washington and Oregon, which last ruptured in 1700.
Tobin said the Anchorage quake had caused “significant damage” from what he had seen in early reports and on social media.
“It looks like the shaking was pretty strong and there was significant damage due to liquification or lateral spreading, where the soil gives way and spreads downslope,” he said.
The 1964 quake was likely more damaging, he said.
“There were significant parts of the city with big landslide damage. I think we’re seeing a smaller version of that today,” he said. “In Puget Sound, we have similar hazards, Seattle has areas built on soft sediment near Puget Sound.”
— Seattle Times reporter Sandi Doughton contributed to this report.
11:30 a.m.
Seattle has a special connection with Alaska. More than 1,000 Alaskans moved to King County in 2016, according to a Seattle Times column last year by Gene Balk. “Alaskans move to the Seattle area at the highest rate in the nation,” Balk wrote.
No doubt, many of those newcomers to Seattle are making calls home.
11:25 a.m.
The earthquake apparently damaged the home of Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican candidate for vice president.
She posted on Facebook:
“🙏🏼 for Alaska. Our family is intact – house is not… I imagine that’s the case for many, many others. So thankful to be safe; praying for our state following the earthquake.”
11:22 a.m.
‘About as scary as it gets’
Erik Hill, a photojournalist in Anchorage, said that small earthquakes often are felt in his neighborhood on the west side of town. The strength and duration of this earthquake prompted him to head outside.
“I could hear stuff crashing to the floor,” Hill said. “You just realized right away that this was different.
Once outside, Hill said he saw a light pole swaying and a dog bolting down the street.
“The animals were not happy,” Hill said.
Hill estimated the shaking lasted 20 or 30 seconds. When he returned inside, he found books and other items from shelves strewn over the floor. He did not detect, on an initial inspection, damage to his house.
There were also several aftershocks that caused him to head back outside.
“This is about as scary as it gets,” said Hill, who has lived in Anchorage for more than 30 years. “I did not feel comfortable.”
— Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton
11:10 a.m.
Officials have canceled the tsunami warning issued for Alaska, according to The Associated Press.
11:04 a.m.
Seattleites with connections to Alaska were scrambling Friday to check in with loved ones following the large earthquake.
Franklin Hunsucker, 76, was on the phone with his girlfriend, Emma Jean Alex, of Anchorage, when he heard commotion.
“She said, ‘Oh my god, the house is shaking,’ ” Hunsucker said. “I could hear stuff falling.”
Alex told Hunsucker that she was fine, grabbed her boots, went to check her home for damage, and started her car in case she needed to leave, he said.
At one point during their conversation, he heard the noise of what he thought was a phone alert that he thought might be a tsunami warning. Officials canceled all tsunami warnings about an hour after the earthquake.
Hunsucker said Alex’s granddaughter lives a few blocks away.
“They’re out of power,” he said. “She told her to come over to the house.”
He said it was frightening to have a natural disaster hit so close to home for Alex.
“My eyes were watering up, I didn’t drop no tears, though,” Hunsucker said.
10:37 a.m.
The Anchorage school district told parents that all students were safe following the earthquake, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
10:27 a.m.
People on social media are posting video and photos showing reported damage in the Anchorage area.
10:20 a.m.
The United States Geological Survey is now listing the earthquake as a 7.0-magnitude shaking, according to its website.
10:10 a.m.
A 6.6-magnitude earthquake shook Anchorage on Friday morning. The Associated Press reports the shaking caused lamp posts and trees to sway and prompted people to run from offices and seek shelter under desks.
Officials issued a tsunami warning for southern Alaska coastal areas of Cook’s Inlet and part of the Kenai Peninsula.