Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On November 30, 2018, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake shook Anchorage hard and killed no one, because the city had spent 54 years building for it.
On this day in 2018, at 8:29 in the morning, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck seven miles north of Anchorage, Alaska. It was the largest earthquake near a major American population center in more than fifty years, and it shook the city for about thirty seconds. Roads buckled, gas lines broke, schools and businesses closed and thousands of aftershocks followed. Around 400,000 people felt it.
Nobody died. No buildings collapsed. Damage concentrated in older or non engineered structures and in buildings sitting on poorly compacted fill, while code conforming construction came through with minor structural damage. The reason traces back to the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, after which Alaska adopted and kept enforcing strict seismic requirements. Fifty four years of quiet compliance produced a morning that ended with cleanup instead of funerals.
Anchorage is the batch's contrast case, and it belongs here for that reason. Preparedness usually gets discussed through the events where it failed, but the outcomes worth copying are the ones where nothing happened. Codes, retrofits, strapped water heaters and secured shelving are boring, invisible and decisive, and they sit alongside the personal side of how to be prepared for an earthquake. Even a good outcome leaves weeks of broken utilities behind, which is the subject of dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake.
