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.
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.
