PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Rising from the Rubble
Keri A. Nutter, CPG-11579
knutter@dowl.com
November 30, 2018.
Just a typical Friday morning. I had just arrived at the office, started my computer, and was enjoying my first cup of coffee for the day. Ah, it was Friday and I was looking forward to scratching tasks off my to-do list before the calendar turned to December.
And then it was 8:30am. I felt the vibration in my chair and desk. The pictures on my wall and shelves rattled a little bit. I had the usual conversation with myself: ‘hmmm, that was a good one. I wonder if it will get any bigger?’
Then a jolt! I pushed back from my desk and asked myself again ‘do I need to take action?!’
And then it REALLY jolted and I headed right for the doorframe (I know, the desk was right there…); looking up and down the hall I could see that my co-workers had also done the same. My rock specimens started falling off of shelves they probably shouldn’t have been on, picture frames rattled on their wall hooks, and books launched off their shelves. No one at the office seemed panicked or overly concerned, but my first thought, before the undulations even subsided were of my children and husband. After the shaking stopped we took stock of the situation and were immediately left-hooked with a sizeable aftershock (which we would normally consider to be a pretty good shake on its own!)
Anchorage had been struck with a
7.0 Mw earthquake. The shaking was quite the wake-up call on a chilly Friday morning. After checking on each other at the office and making initial contact with their loved ones, by about 9am my co-workers had filed out of the door one by one to go check on their houses. The shaking felt at my office, even on the sec- ond floor, wasn’t particularly aggressive and no noticeable damage to the office beyond some broken tchotchkes, toppled plants, and minor cracks at sheetrock joints. But that’s where the earthquake I had felt clearly differed from the quake others experienced.
www.aipg.org
My first phone call with the kids was quick and they seemed unfazed – hav- ing been outside waiting for the bus the scariest part was the flash of light from blown transformers. My husband’s text messages were calm but described destruction at his office on the other side of town and full-on emergency pro- cedures were in effect. My family was checking in on us and they all seemed to
“
shocks; so kids could play and we didn’t have to be alone in our houses with rat- tling dishes and our own adrenaline. We even baked a cake to celebrate a birthday that night for one understandably disap- pointed 10-year-old.
While the November 30th Anchorage quake was not the largest moment magnitude quake I had experienced (although the January 2, 2017, Iniskin
For the first time I can recall, there has been public praise for engineers and geoscientists and an outward respect shown for those profes- sionals, not only for their immediate response to the earthquake, but also the work done before the shaking happened. Without quality work by qualified and licensed professionals, our city’s infrastructure would not have performed or pro- tected public safety as well as it did.
be shaken up and their reaction didn’t seem to match my own. Once the alert from the Anchorage School District came through that school was cancelled and I had to pick-up my kids, I finally saw and realized just how my town had fared in the strongest earthquake since 1964.
Fires were burning around town and
traffic was at a standstill. There were reports of collapsed bridges and highway ramps, and rock-fall had closed both highways leading out of Anchorage. I was thankful that I lived only 6 miles from the office because it was a stress- ful 90-minute drive home on a carefully selected route to limit my path across or under bridges. Unfortunately, my husband wasn’t able to leave his office because of traffic and because he is key safety personnel, but we are so incredibly thankful to my neighbor and friend for being able to collect my children from their school and keep them safe until I could check on my own home.
The next 24 hours was quite subdued. We spent the rest of Friday at our friend/ neighbor’s house to ride out the after-
Continued on p. 39
Apr.May.Jun 2019 • TPG 35
quake was a 7.1 Mw, this one was much closer to Anchorage), it was certainly the strongest. But, we are a resilient state and city and after a day of holing up to ride out the worst of the aftershocks, we got back outside and lived our lives. Costco and gas stations were open and the liquor stores and coffee carts were bustling with customers only hours after
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